Sounds like Google is seeing the IE 7 as a possible threat, or perhaps they see a potential market that has been under-served.

Google Chrome is designed to make it easier and faster to browse the Web, by offering enhanced address-bar features and other elements that are very different from those on other browsers. The product will be open-sourced, meaning others can modify the code, according to the report.

I wonder how much of “search” preference is impacted and influenced by browser choice. With browsers having pre-set search tools, more and more people probably just type in their search queries into the browser search fields — which in turn drives the search ad results.

Google has been working on the product for about two years, but work became more serious when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7, the Journal said.

Google release a comic book as part of their launch of the new browser, which is scheduled to go out in over 100 countries tomorrow. There is more on the official Google Blog.

As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.