Search giant's browser gets automatically updated, yet there's a hint that it might be shifting towards the territory that made Internet Explorer so divisive

We have decisively moved from a world of one browser provided by your operating system to a world where people install the browser of their choice. The increasing growth of Firefox usage has risen to the point where 31% of users on the Guardian website use Firefox and only 37% use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (split into 22% IE8, 9% IE7 and approx 3% each for IE6 and IE9).

Google's entry into the market has increased usage over time: one year ago at the previous Google IO, there were 70m Chrome users worldwide; today we were told there are over 160m. Unusually for a browser, Google has committed to a forced upgrade process and releases updates every six weeks.

Why? To combat the problem that more than 50% of Windows computers around the world are still running Windows XP – an operating system that is approaching 10 years old - and a browser that's often the same age.

Google has been trumpeting its Chrome browser achievements at Google IO, showing off what a wonderful platform it is for the web. Over the last year, the team has improved the performance of the browser when running complex web applications by improving the performance of the underlying Javascript engine that web developers use to add logic to a simple web page. Additional improvements in security have made the "Google web" a safer place to be - which can only be good for the web, and for users.

The biggest announcements they have made is massive improvements to the graphics functionality in your browser. Implementations of the HTML5 Canvas technology that powers many of the graphical bits of the web are 10 times faster than they were in previous versions, and those improvements don't require the developers to upgrade their application.

This is good news for game developers such as Rovio, who are able to build Angry Birds for the web, and on new builds of the Chrome browser it will run faster.

If developers want much, much faster graphics, the Chrome browser team has spent time vastly improving the WebGL graphics library available in Chrome. This is a subsystem of the browser, often called part of the HTML5 specification, but actually a separate specification in its own right, that allows developers to build 3D applications and utilise the high performance graphics hardware available in your machine.

Google's improvements in Chrome means that WebGL applications can run up to 10 times faster than the equivalent Canvas implementation.

The dark side of all of these improvements is that we are likely to start seeing "Optimized for Google Chrome" badges on the web, as many of these features won't work across all browsers. That wasn't good with Internet Explorer in the bad old days of the Netscape wars, and wouldn't be good today. Some things such as Canvas work in most browsers (but not in the most common versions of Internet Explorer), but WebGL's implementation is inconsistent across all the browsers.

Google's advancements are welcome for experimental applications, and developers building applications for the Chrome App Store, but their impact on the wider web will probably be negligible, since cross-browser implementation is considered so important by many organisations.