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So the browser wars are back.

Well, sort of. While the browser wars of the 1990s were waged over features, the new wars are all about platforms.

The launch of the beta version of Google Chrome last week changed everything. Its list of features is minimal, but its intention isn't: It's designed to be a simple, fast engine to run Javascript, which is the platform of choice for online applications.

So far, web applications — like those office suites that you use “in the cloud,” which reside on their maker's systems and are often referred to as Software as a Service — have resided in a curious niche in the tech world. To developers, web apps are the next big thing. But most non-tech people have little conscious understanding of web apps and what they mean to everybody, and have so far been largely ignoring them.

What it might mean for end users, however, is nice: With another Google browser plug-in called Gears, users can create an icon on their desks that will seamlessly launch a web-based application in exactly the same way that clicking on any other icon will start an application already loaded on your computer.

By launching a browser whose main purpose is to run Javascript easily and quickly, Google is hinting that the future of the Internet lies in computing “in the cloud” — at least as Google sees it. Then again, it can be argued that Chrome is being offered as the self-serving browser of choice for Google's own web applications, such as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Sites and so on.

For its part, Microsoft launched Silverlight in the spring of 2007, a kind of rich-media platform that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback, features also regarded as the future of the Internet — as Microsoft sees it. In releasing Silverlight, the software giant startled a lot of people by making it a plug-in for several browsers, including Firefox and Apple's Safari, as well as Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, a rare move for the company.

The real dark horse in this race, however, is another giant: Adobe. When Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, it focused on one main product: Flash. Not only was it a good system of playing online audio and video (without it YouTube wouldn't exist), but it was being developed by Adobe as a platform for constantly refreshed data. Using it, you would be assured that every page programmed in Flash, such as flight reservations, stock quotes and so on, would be updated automatically in the background without you having to refresh the web page. The Flash player is, after all, the most widely used application in the world, and is a familiar and reliable basis on which to revolutionize the Web.

I haven't heard much about the success of this new way of using Flash on websites, but it is, after all, mainly a tool for putting databases online, something that isn't really very sexy.

But you can see the gambling going on here. Each browser is betting that its platform will be the one that every developer wants to use for future products. And each one is right — at the time it is released, anyway.

Netscape, now dead, was the first browser to promote itself largely on its features, but it eventually fell victim to “software bloat” or “feature creep,” the tendency for manufacturers to cram as many features as they can into a product. So in 2003, a project within the Mozilla Foundation, which was then producing Netscape, created a new browser eventually named Firefox, a leaner, faster browser with fewer features. That was released in 2004, just in time to challenge Microsoft's awesome dominance.

When Microsoft, in 1995, started to offer its Internet Explorer “for free, for ever,” as Bill Gates put it, IE became the browser of choice, and it went on to corner about 95 per cent of the market through 2003.

Like the free IE, Firefox also enjoyed good timing — just as IE was itself falling victim to feature creep and users were getting annoyed with its security problems.

But over the past four years Firefox has aged. It too has suffered its share of security problems, and it became slower and less exciting despite having gnawed away a considerable chunk of the browser market from Microsoft — about 20 per cent. So a couple of months ago the Mozilla brains trust rewrote the Firefox engine, called Gekko, which would make the browser faster, though the online jury is still out on just how fast it really is.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft is frantically reworking Internet Explorer, now in version 8 and available in its beta 2 incarnation. From everything I can see, IE 8 continues the Microsoft tradition of building more into the browser, even though the company has had to work hard to speed up its rendering engine while ridding it of its long-standing reputation as the Swiss cheese of browser security.

Which brings us back to Google Chrome. Much of the excitement about this browser seems to be about its ... leanness. It's fast with the kind of applications browser reviewers love to use as benchmarks of performance. It also has a few new features, most notably one that sees each browser window as a separate process; if the browser runs into a troublesome website, the user does not need to crash the entire browser, just that window.

Why didn't anyone think of that earlier? It's so delicious a feature that Microsoft is planning on putting it into IE 8.

But any veteran of the browser wars has seen new, lean-and-mean browsers arrive only to succumb eventually to some kind of bloat or sink into a security morass. So how will Google behave with Chrome? What was released last week was a beta version, its first, so we can't really guess yet. But the demanding online critics are already compiling wish lists of features they want it to have. And one day after it was released, a researcher had already found a security hole in it.

Most likely, Google doesn't want to turn Chrome into the world's No. 1 browser, which is likely to mean it doesn't want to pack it with new features. That's a sensible approach, but that's also not the point. Chrome's purpose is to give developers a platform to display their web-based applications, and if Chrome can set a standard that will be copied by IE and Firefox, then it will have served to promote the real things that Google does.

It's a diabolically clever strategy.