Google Drive Comes Pre-Installed in Chrome 23 Joining Gmail, Search and YouTube

For the longest time, Google Chrome came with a very small list of pre-installed apps, Gmail, Search and YouTube. There were temporary promotions, for example Angry Birds, but those three were always there.

Now, Google is adding a fourth and you can probably guess which one it is, it's an app that's already being burrowed deeply into Chrome OS, Google Drive.

Already, fresh installs of the dev channel Google Chrome 23, come with Drive pre-installed along with Gmail, Search and YouTube. As Chrome 23 makes its way through the release channels, first in beta and then stable, the Drive app will come with it.

It may not seem like a huge change, but Chrome is used by hundreds of millions of people so getting it in front of all of them is sure to have an impact on usage.

That said, the app will be added only if you do a fresh install of Chrome, if you just update the browser it shouldn't be added to your list, unless Google makes the decision to push it to existing users, a much bigger deal than having it come pre-installed.

Google Drive has been getting a big push from Google recently and for good reason. While the name change may be a bit confusing for those that just use the office apps, the Docs suite, it does mean that Google's consumer cloud solution is going to get a big exposure, bigger than it would have had organically.

Dropbox has tens of millions of users and a lot of people use Drive, SkyDrive and the myriad of other solutions, yet there are hundreds of millions more people that can benefit from cloud storage and whatever apps and services will be bolted on top of that in the future. The fight is far from over.