Interview: what's next for Google Chrome

"There are many aspects of Chrome that are interesting. Personally I like the very taut UI which means that if you run it on an old laptop very little of the screen is used for the UI.

"And also Chrome has been designed with the notion of not getting in your way so you don't get pop-up boxes or distractions, so you're really on the webpage all the time and that's great.

"Then there are some of the more interesting features like multiple tabs with each one running as a separate process. That adds security and independence so you'll probably notice that if you take Chrome, compared to many browsers, that each tab will work independently.

"You'll not crash, that's one thing, but performance-wise with other browsers each tab still uses the same JavaScript engine and then everything starts to get slower and slower the more tabs you have, because the working set of that one engine gets bigger and bigger."

TR: Obviously there has been a lot of talk about the lack of third-party extension support, is that coming soon?

LB: "We're working on that. As we said in the blog this is coming this year and it's certainly something that you want.

"But when you are working on a new project it's important to focus on the basics, like our UI for instance, and I think other things come later and that's what we're doing.

"I'm pretty sure there will be a healthy market for people building these extensions for Chrome."

TR: Some of the recent browser releases seem to have taken some of their style cues from Chrome – is this a good thing?

LB: "I don't know if it's imitation, but the main reason we started this project was to encourage innovation.

"We've always been open about the source code and it's available to everybody, so if someone is using things like the tabs at the top of the page then we are all for it.

"Encouraging innovation is already the cornerstone of the whole Chrome project when we started, so this is great – it may be annoying for some people but not for us.

"Competition is great, especially if the way in which it is done is shared. In the end it benefits the users.

"I think it's great that people have options; they can try different browsers out.

"At Google we try a lot of different browsers and different designs and people should try them out and use the one that they like the best.

"Choice is important and the healthy competition that is going on right now will benefit the user and it will ultimately make people feel more comfortable with using the web."