But should they be?

From ZDNet:

Mozilla CEO John Lilly said he has no worries about Google jumping into the open source browser market.

In a blog posted on September 1 before the beta release of Google’s Chrome yesterday, Lilly noted that Mozilla’s Firefox has plenty of competition and reminded the public that the foundation’s primary motive is to keep the web open.

“As much as anything else, it’ll mean there’s another interesting browser that users can choose. With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — there’s been competition for a while now, and this increases that. So it means that more than ever, we need to build software that people care about and love. Firefox is good now, and will keep on getting better,” Lilly wrote. “Competition often results in innovation of one sort or another — in the browser you can see that this is true in spades this year, with huge Javascript performance increases, security process advances, and user interface breakthroughs. I’d expect that to continue now that Google has thrown their hat in the ring.”

Lilly also said the two organizations will continue to cooperate and hinted that Mozilla will remain independent.

“It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they’ve got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves,” he wrote.

Google announced the beta release of Chrome as Mozilla prepares to freeze the beta 1 code for Firefox 3.1 on September 30 and as Microsoft IE8 beta slips into the marketplace.

From InformationWeek:

The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg has been testing Google’s Chrome browser for a week next to Firefox and the latest version of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Internet Explorer. His verdict? “Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier, and less frustrating.”

What can I say, I am jealous. Mr. Mossberg gets to play with everything before anyone else does. First there was the iPhone. Then the 3G iPhone. Now Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s freshly available Chrome browser.

I downloaded the browser myself a few moments ago and am still developing my first impressions. Upon set up, Chrome automatically imported all of my Firefox bookmarks and settings. On my crusty, old Panasonic WinXP machine, it is running a bit slow. I blame the PC more then I do the browser in this case. Mr. Mossberg, who was running faster gear than I, blamed the browser. He said, “Despite Google’s claims that Chrome is fast, it was notably slower in my tests at the common task of launching Web pages than either Firefox or Safari.”

In my first few moments of use, I was tooling around the Chrome-specific Web pages to learn more about it when one of the Chrome pages crashed. I saw an amusing error message that read, “Aw, snap! The web page you were attempting to load is unresponsive.” This tickled my funny bone a bit.

Using Chrome will definitely take some getting used to. With Firefox, the tabs are all placed below the address bar. In Chrome, they are all above it. This means extra travel time with your mouse. Mossberg writes, “Chrome does away with most menus and toolbar icons to give maximum screen space for the Web pages themselves. Also, Google has merged the address bar, where you type in Web addresses, with the search box, where you type in search terms. This unified feature is called the Omnibox. One striking difference in Chrome is how it handles tabs, which display a single Web page. In Chrome, each tab behaves as a separate browser. The bookmarks bar, Omnibox, menus and toolbar icons are located inside the tab, rather than atop the entire browser. The tabs appear at the top of the computer screen. Chrome also groups related tabs.”

Google has a big month planned for September with Chrome and Android on the horizon. It will be interesting to see the publics reaction to each of these products. Will they be positive or negative? Thoughts?