Earlier today Google released it’s new product, Google Chrome. Google Chrome has a new new JavaScript engine, V8,which not only speeds up today’s web applications. Chrome was created with the goal of dealing with today’s Internet which is very much utilised to stream videos, play games and run applications - not serve plain html web pages as was done in the “old days”.

The Google team also done a very good job of explaining the features and new technology in Chrome by creating the ‘Chrome Comic Book‘. This is the first time browsers have been explained to the public in this way.

There are two advances in particular that make Chrome interesting:
  

  • Multi-process browsing.

    • Most browsers up to now have run as one process containing multiple threads, but Chrome is a bunch of cooperating processes. Think of threads as people and processes as houses the people can live in. If you put a bunch of people in one house, and one of them gets sick then everybody else in the house might catch it too. But if everybody gets their own house, that’s much less likely to happen. One thing operating systems are really good at is keeping processes separated. So the hope is that tabs and windows in Chrome will be unable to affect each other negatively.

  • First class tabs

    • Unlike Firefox or IE7, Chrome puts the tabs on top of the browser window above the address bar that shows the page URL. In fact some apps may not need an address bar. Tim Burners Lee always envisioned the URL as something that would be hidden from the user, so I think we’ll see more of that. As part of this behavior, you’ll be able to drag a tab out of one window and into another. I’ve been looking forward to that feature for a long time, as I tend to open up so many tabs I can’t read their titles any more.

What’s even more significant is that Chrome has been released as an open source project. This will most certainly prove to be a tough competitor alongside Firefox for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It’s also not cheers for web-developers who now have to resolve web page compatability with Chrome (if Firefox and IE wasn’t enough already!)