Even after reading all of the releases and analyst commentary on Google's (GOOG: sentiment, chart, options) new Chrome Internet browser, I fail to see the relevance. This morning, my colleague Elizabeth Harrow detailed analyst comments from a few brokerage firms, with Stifel Nicolaus going so far as to maintain its "buy" rating and stating that "Chrome will be a viable competitor with Internet Explorer and Firefox."

A viable competitor? Chrome will have little impact on Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer, and may garner some attention from Firefox users, but will have little impact outside of the tech community. Why? Internet Explorer 6 still maintains a 25% market share! For those out of the know, IE 6 was launched in 2001, and Microsoft has since upgraded to IE 7 and has IE 8 in beta. Furthermore, IE 6 is still shipped on XP install disks, with the upgrades taking place after the user enables automatic updates.

The lesson for Google: if it's not preinstalled, only the techies are going to use it. This is the main reason that Mozilla's Firefox isn't more popular; users can't be bothered to download and install it. Unless Google can sign a few deals with suppliers like Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), or Apple (AAPL), Chrome may never get past the same demographic that currently uses Firefox - making the software an also-ran at best. So much for Google's latest offering being a viable competitor.