A Chrome Finish - Playing In the Sandbox
It was perhaps inevitable that Google, a Web 2.0 company with a massive user base for its famous search engine and web applications, would join the competitive web browsing scene that's currently dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer while the remainder of the market is split among by Mozilla's Firefox (whose market share is steadily increasing), Apple's Safari and the Opera browser.
But that's not surprising of Google, given its history of offering users innovative free and open source products and alternatives. Take for example, their take on email with their record bursting (at that time) Gmail with its 1GB of storage space, or Google Docs, which would allow you to both store and edit documents online for easy access anywhere. Given such a pedigree of products, it was definitely logical to assume that it was just a matter of time before Google would start on their own browser to access both the World Wide Web and for better and smoother access and integration to their products/services.
Of course, to be fair, as much as we would like to act nonchalant about new products from Google, the announcement about their new browser did catch us by surprise, seeing as how we were waiting for them to debut an Android-based mobile phone . Instead, we decided to head down to their offices to catch a live demonstration by Google and found that compared to the current crop of web browsers however, Google's new Google Chrome, was an altogether different slice of the cake (and no, this cake isn't a lie).
Linus Upson, Engineering Director spoke to us via video conferencing on Google's new web toy: the Google Chrome browser.
The press kit from Google with the comic book in paper! (This is ours, so you'll just have to make do with the one available online. Sorry!)
What's most interesting about the new Google Chrome is its take on the web browsing experience. The whole product is written from ground up, and designed to work with the today's applications instead of the other way around. Stability here is an important issue for Chrome, and Google's placing an emphasis on Chrome's ability to run multiple tabs without the problems found in today's browsers. We're talking of course, about the issue where if one tab encounters a problem, your only recourse would be to shut down the entire browser and all its tabs, and lose whatever information that you may have been working on.
Of course, some browsers like Firefox allow you to recover your previous session in the event that it crashes, but this isn't as reliable as most would like it and if you've been a victim of a crash before, we can sympathize. To counter this problem, Google Chrome's multi-tab browsing works differently by isolating each single tab in its own sandbox environment.
While this does take up more memory overhead initially, it protects your browser from crashing by preventing a "rogue" tab from crashing the entire browser and also allows you to kill the individual process/tab. Memory fragmentation issues are also minimized as a result. Web page compatibility issues too will be something of a moot point with Chrome, as Google aggressively tests each new build via its own internal servers on over tens of thousands of pages sorted by their page rank system.
Rendered all fine and dandy on Chrome is our main page.
Another cool feature that the Chrome browser has is that when you open a tab, it doesn't just open a blank tab, it opens a tab that shows you 9 of your favourite / last visited pages for quick and easy access.
Speed Freaks
Speed freaks will probably love Chrome as Google has taken a speed orientated approach to the browser. In order to get a speed that will make a F1 car blush, Google used both the open-source WebKit and its own V8 Java platform (referencing the V8 engines used in sport cars) which introduces new features like "hidden class transitions, dynamic code generation and precise garbage collection (which isn't as smelly as it sounds).
Hidden class transitions - As we understand it, V8 gets around the fact that JavaScript is classless by making objects with the same properties share the same hidden class and will further dynamically optimize as such.
Dynamic code generation - Other JavaScript engines normally look at the source code and then interpret it internally, which can be inefficient as they would have to constantly keep referring back to their internal representation. What Google's V8 engine does instead is to look at the source code and directly translate it to machine code, which also means that the script only needs to be interpreted once and doesn't need to be referred back to again and takes off from there.
Precise garbage collection - One flaw of current JavaScript engines is that they are pretty much conservative when it comes to memory reclamation (aka garbage collection), which is rather inefficient compared to the V8, which works on the basic premise that the engine knows exactly what to move and re-use, so all garbage collection runs take only milliseconds as compared to processing a larger chunk which will take much longer.
The Others
Chrome also has a few other features that may or may not appeal to you, so here's a quick breakdown for your reading pleasure. If you like what you see, why not start downloading (link here) the program and give it a spin ?
*Note: The download servers were as smooth as butter when we tested and in any case we're sure Google will rise to the occasion and you'll have no problems downloading it.
Omnibar
Google's Omnibar is an all-in-one URL cum search cum autofill bar for all your needs. It also learns as you use it, so it will adapt to both your search patterns and the way you navigate to websites (meaning you can get to a website that you frequently visit with just two key strokes).
Blacklisting
Chrome will automatically download a list of malware infested and phishing sites that will alert you when you visit them, and will also alert the owners of the site. That means there's really no excuse to accidentally download unsafe files when surfing the Interwebs (which some users may have fallen prey to).
Incognito
Incognito is Chrome's version of what's currently available on Safari (Private Browsing) and what the upcoming IE8's InPrivate will do, which is to allow the user to surf the Internet while leaving no trace i.e. history logs, cookies on the computer. Good for computers used as public internet terminals and other nefarious purposes (we'll leave it up to your imagination).
Incognito in action.
Task Manager
Like your familiar Windows "go to program in times of trouble or need", Chrome's Task Manager is exactly what it says it is, and allows you to basically stalk what each tab is using, down to the point where you can view the CPU usage, memory usage, and the amount of data downloaded. Of course, the Task Manager also allows you to kill processes which you don't like, which makes you really in control of what you do with your browser.
A really precise Task Manager for all your Internet tasks and tabs.
The four mentioned above aren't just the only features, but they're really the more important ones that we feel will appeal to most users out there. Currently, some plugins may not work on Chrome browser and you'll have to wait for the authors to rewrite their code as the plugins need to be modifed to fit within the new software architecture of Chrome using the the principle of least privilege and to also keep plugins to function only within a single tab as opposed to operating across multiple tabs (which of course goes against the concept of Chrome).
When we tested it this morning, Adobe's Flash player worked fine on the Chrome browser, so that's one plugin that's working fine.
One last thing before we sign off, do note that Google Chrome is currently only for Windows XP and Vista only, but they will be making it available for the other operating systems soon enough. Also the browser currently isn't capable of live bookmarks so those used to grabbing their RSS feeds from the bookmark toolbar (ala Firefox) will have to wait for them to either make this available in a new build, a plugin or just use the Google Reader (which should have been integrated with the browser in the first place. Extensions are also not available yet, so you'll either have to wait for the open source community to develop one or for Google to do it. That being said, now excuse us while we go play with our new shiny toy (Incognito, of course).
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