Here it comes, the much awaited Google Browser. They call it Chrome. Google announced it in its official blog.

Interestingly, they have described the entire technology behind Chrome in a comic. Here it is.

Google Chrome, from what I have seen till now, is not just another regular browser, build on top of an existing base. The features they have introduced are well thought out. All of them are intended to make life easier for the users and also for the developers.

So what’s new in Google Chrome?

The Chrome is build from scratch, ground up, based on Apple’s Webkit rendering engine. Webkit is the same engine that fires the Apple Mac OS X’s Safari browser. And Its also used in the android system for mobile phones. Though originally developed by the Konqueror team, the engine is now jointly developed by Apple, Google and Nokia. To give you a sense of the ubiquity of the platform, let me tell you that Webkit is now used by Adobe AIR, Nokia’s Series 60 phones, iPhone, and even Google Android. So, under the hood, there’s a pretty robust engine.

What does it looks like?

Well looks like common browsers. Tabs, address bar. Search box etc.. One important difference here is that the Tabs contain the Address bar. Or, the address bar is placed, below the tab. And that has a lot to do with how they have designed the system. Tabs are far more important, from a design point of view, in Google Chrome.

Tabs Are Important, yes. But How Are They Far More Important In Google Chrome?

Well, a common problem with today’s browser was crashing. We now have multiple tabs. And we like to open up as many tabs as possible. This loads up the memory with all the stuff that we are using. Now, the modern browsers are all designed so that the browser program takes up one thread for all the browser activities. So, one thread for all the tabs. Think of this as a thread which passes through, and therefore links, all the different tabs. The problem with this process is that when one of them goes kaput, it affects all the tabs. Thus, the complete browser crashes.

So, what Google Chrome does is, make a different process for every tab. SO, each tab has its own process, which means it has its own memory and its own global data structures. If something goes wrong in that tab, nothing happens to the other tabs. You close that one tab, and you are done. The entire browser doesn’t crashes.

Ohh, that’s a wonderful approach. But also a new one. Have they tested it?

Google claims that they have tested the Chrome browser on millions of webpages. More correctly, millions of most trafficked websites. Google already has an index of almost the entire web. Not only this, it also has information about the usages and traffic of each website. It can thus know very well about the traffic of different websites. Google says it’s system can test Chrome on millions of websites, within 20-30 mins of a new release.

V8 - The new Javascript Virtual Machine

Because Javascript is such a prominent part of the web today Google went ahead and developed a completely new Javascript Virtual Machine (VM) for Chrome. The V8 will be made freely available to others. Anyone can incorporate the V8 engine and build a browser on top of it.

The Address Bar - The Omnibox

Omnibox - that’s what they are calling their address bar. We have already tasted what can be done with this space in Firefox’s Awesome bar and Internet Explorer’s enhanced address bar. It can be used for search. And when you type a letter, it gives you only the result that you have typed. So, when you type “w” it gives you watblog.com as an option and not http://www.watblog.com/2008/08/14/microsoft-live-search-will-it-steal-the-show/ . This is what we really want, isn’t it?

Also, when you reach a website with a search box, like Google.com, Wikipedia.com or Amazon.com, the search boxes on those pages get captured on your local system. SO, next time you want to search Amazon.com for “The Alchemist” all you do is type this in Address Bar -

Search Amazon: The Alchemist,

and press enter ! You are done! Pretty neat, I must say.

The default page is a home page like opera. With nine screenshots/links to the most visited websites. Besides this, there are also links to the websites that are recently bookmarked, plus the links that were recently closed tabs.

Security

Apart from the tabs being put in different processes, Google Chrome uses something called Sandbox. So, a sandbox is virtual container in which a computer program may run. So a plugin , always runs in combination with Javascript and HTML. Google Chrome takes this plugin, and keeps runs it in a sandbox. What this means, is, if the plugin crashes, it doesn’t results in the crash of the entire browser.

Apart from this, the Google Chrome program constantly downloads two lists - one of phishing websites and the other for malware websites, and constantly checks the pages that we request against this list. Anytime it encounters a malicious page, it notifies the user about it. Also, the owner of the malware website is also informed of their website being blacklisted. This prevents False positives.

Compatibility and Scalability

It’s a common knowledge that as a developer, there are different things that you can do with different browsers. Google Chrome is based on something called Gears, which provides a platform for creating APIs for the browser. Released under the BSD license, Grears can be used to add functionality to a web browser. Google will make the code of Chrome public, so that public participation can take the project further. Moreover, Gears can ensure that other browsers are not far behind and can deploy many capabilities in them, too. Compatibility won’t that much of a problem, then.

Conclusion

I was pretty much impressed by what I saw. The different standards that Google has brought to the browser are all open standards, and keeping it in the open domain means further apps/plugins can be built on top of it. How the Chrome actually fares, will be known only once its out in the open. Which will be later, today. Till then, let’s just wonder on how will the other two giants react to this.

What are your thoughts on Google Chrome? Can it tip Firefox and more importantly, Microsoft Internet Explorer? Do we actually need a newer browser? Let us know.

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