Like many other people, I've also learned about Google Chrome, the browser Google is planning to launch. To me and probably to many others, this came as a surprise. The collaboration between Google and Firefox is a long and fruitful one. So why did Google start to develop it's own browser, instead of investing more in Firefox?
One possible answer comes from their announcement made on the official Google blog: "Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web". Everyone likes to say that. But can they really deliver?
I took a look at the comic book they made to introduce the features of Google Chrome. What can I say? Looks awesome. The fact that each tab is a separate process with it's own memory allocation and it's own CPU thread would bring a lot of stability to the browser itself (or we could say "browsers", seeing that this approach actually replicates multiple instances of the browser being opened at the same time). I can't remember how many times I had to kill Firefox because of some crappy designed web pages or pages overloaded with Flash, JAVA applets and JavaScript snippets, taking my CPU to 100%. And keeping it there. And that meant closing even the working tabs. Thankfully there was the Session Restore, but it's still not a pleasant thing. So regarding the multi-threading part, I can hardly wait for it.
Now the JavaScript applications. Well, don't get me started. Yes, they're nice, they're useful. But they're huge and resource consuming, they're sometimes slow and they slow down your entire machine. I sure hope their solution works. You can find a detailed explanation of it in the comic book. But with every solution, comes a whole new set of problems. Making JavaScript driven applications use less resources might mean that people will begin to create even more complex applications, and also begin to disregard optimization. Much like what many programmers did when they got better CPU's and a lot more memory. They got lazy.
As stated by the Google team, the Google Chrome browser is largely based on existing Open Source applications. They took what was working and improved it, in their own vision. And what was not working, they made it work. Or at least tried to make it work. I guess the user will be the judge of that. Things like the quick buttons starting page (Opera had that, from what I remember) and the anti-phishing/malware warning that pops out when you're on a suspected page (I remember seeing that many times in Firefox) just prove that the Google team took really into consideration the user.
Since it's still in Beta (and on top of that I haven't had a chance to try it out) I still can't say for sure what I like and how I feel it behaves under "stress". But I'll consider making a new post after I give it a spin. By then I'll be able to say what I like and what I don't particularly like about it. But being a Google fan, I'll try of course to see all the benefits.
Until then, you can find more information on TechCrunch.com here and here.
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