With the launch of its browser yesterday, Google staked claim to one of the few areas of the Internet where it didn’t already have a foothold and ratcheted up its ongoing competition with the behemoth Microsoft.

The 10-year-old company released Chrome, a new browser that some analysts said would allow Google to be the go-to resource for everything a Web surfer wants.

The search engine giant pushed its new Web-navigating software as being fast, secure and easy to use compared with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which holds about 80 percent of the browser market.

“There have been a lot of advances in the browser space,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, in a news conference yesterday. “[But] we believe that browsers should evolve a lot more to keep pace with how the Web is evolving.”