As I’ve used Chrome over the past few weeks, I’ve begun to suspect that the target Google has in it’s sights is not IE and Firefox, but rather MS Office. The “application shortcuts” that Chrome provides make not only desktop shortcuts to the page you are on (Google Docs, Maps, or Picasa, for example), but the launch in a browser completely stripped of all it’s browser functionality. What you really get is instead, your word processor, or spreadsheet. It’s not a webpage anymore, it’s an application. that the browser itself is so stripped down could further suggest that the competition is not the leading browsers.