Representatives of big browser makers Microsoft, Mozilla and Google talk about the future of browsers, as developers decry browser incompatibility and ask what browser makers plan to do about it. The panel of experts talked about HTML 5, Canvas, Silverlight, IE 8, Google Chrome and Firefox at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Company managers also contrasted IE8 Beta 2’s “Suggested Sites” feature with the “Suggest” feature used by rival Google Inc. in its Chrome browser, saying that Microsoft’s browser requires the user’s explicit permission before it’s used. They did, however, acknowledge a bug that prevents the request from reappearing during reinstalls.

A comparison of the past two weeks of traffic on Tectonic.co.za - a period that covers the launch of Google’s Chrome browser - shows that in the week of September 1 to 8 Chrome jumped from 0 percent of browsers used to an above-average 2.98 percent, largely at the expense of Mozilla Firefox.

They’re back! Just when you thought the “browser wars” were over, with the two camps – Microsoft and Mozilla.org – settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly, Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own.

Users who downloaded the search giant’s Chrome browser yesterday were asked to give Google a “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly, perform, publicly display and distribute” any information they typed into a website.

In a sense, Chrome is not a browser, it’s an anti-browser. It’s mission is to destroy the concept of the browser, and become a frame for other applications – or, more pointedly, a kind of “chrome” window. In other words, Chrome is the long-awaited Google OS, a way of running Web-based applications like Gmail, Google Docs and the rest. That Chrome’s default function is as a browser is almost a historical accident.

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Google Chrome relies on Apple’s WebKit software for rendering web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla.