will google build a browser?

speculations run high in the industry since the new york post article “google picks gates’ brains: “based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, google appears to be planning to launch its own web browser and other software products to challenge microsoft.”

will the match google search vs. msn search, gmail vs. hotmail, google toolbar vs. msn toolbar, froogle vs. msn shopping, google local vs. msn city search, picasa vs. digital image suite, google news vs. msnbc, blogger vs. msn blogs, etc. be extended by another battlefield?