In what can only be described as a harsh reality check for Microsoft, Sony today made public its plans to ship all of its Vaio laptops with the Google Chrome web browser pre-installed instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  Internet Explorer has enjoyed unrivaled ubiquity since the demise of Netscape Navigator years ago and it being the default browser of initial Windows installations, having only to deal with a few other players, most recently and notably Mozilla’s Firefox, in the web browser game.

In what is surely shaping up to be the corporate battle of the decade, Google and Microsoft continue to stray into each other’s core technologies, most notably in Microsoft’s release of its Bing search engine and Google’s development of its open source Chrome operating system.  Coupled with the vast resources and talent available to each, this is going to be a very interesting and undoubtedly entertaining match to follow.

Admittedly, I’ve been primarily using Google’s Chrome web browser on all my computers since its inception.  It’s less resource intensive than Internet Explorer and seems very secure.  If the browser has any bearing on what we can expect from Google’s software gurus, I think Microsoft should be very concerned.

[Via:  Ubergizmo]