Google's Chrome browser is more than just a poke in the eye at Microsoft. It's a strategic move that should have both Microsoft and Adobe worried about the future of their applications.

As Nick Kolakowski reported on eWEEK, Google introduced the newest beta of its spectacularly fast browser this week.

Now, Google is launching Chrome Experiments to demonstrate the browser's strengths.

Google wants consumers and advertisers to see the sophistication and reliability of Chrome's technology. These toys are built using the ubiquitous development language JavaScript, which has caused browser performance problems in the past. Given that many of Google's own Web programs, such as Gmail, rely heavily on JavaScript, Google is signaling that it's serious about building a strong, sturdy platform for cloud applications.

Google is showing it knows how to play on both sides of the ball--in other words, offline as well as on. Developers love Chrome, especially because it uses WebKit HTML as a rendering engine.

As recent outages continue to suggest, we're a long way from ubiquitous connectivity and availability. (This isn't a knock on Google, by the way, as Microsoft's Azure also suffered an outage this weekend, putting the lie to Microsoft's claim that its cloud is more enterprise-ready than Google's).

The powerful combination of Chrome, the only browser with native Gears integration, allows Google to create a reassuring on- and offline experience for users while mustering an army of developers to its side.

The more share Chrome gains, the more more momentum it will have in the developer community; the more developers it recruits, the more applications will be built using Chrome. Better applications leads to better online experiences, which lead to more browsing and, you guessed it, more searching.

People wonder how Google is going to keep growing its share of search--and eventually the overall search pie. This is how.