Monday 1 September 2008 — This is 16 years old. Be careful.
The rumors of Google building their own browser are true: Google Chrome is the project, and includes a number of interesting features, introduced in a comic by Scott McCloud. At the top of the list is running every tab in its own process, and also running each plug-in in its own process. That will definitely help with limiting the bleeding when web pages misbehave, as well as with diagnosing the bad component.
Interestingly, one of the lead developers is Ben Goodger, who was a big part of Firefox, but Chrome is based on Webkit rather than Gecko. Chrome claims a number of UI innovations, but they seem fairly simple things to me: where the tabs are, how the auto-complete works, and so on.
For web developers, there’s a downside: it’s one more browser to worry about. Yes, it’s based on Webkit, so in theory it will behave like Safari in all the important ways.
The difference between theory and practice: in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is.
Another downside: this will likely only take market share from Firefox, and not help with the Internet Explorer problem at all...
Comments
Why do you think this?
In practice of course this won't happen unless the addons API is better than Firefox's, and addon developers immediately start putting extensions on top of Chrome. ("Better" because if it's only "as good as", there is very little incentive for addon writers to target it.)
In addition to making life difficult for developers by adding "one more browser to worry about", Chrome raises some interesting questions: Why is Google doing their own browser rather than just contributing people to Mozilla to make Firefox better? Will Google services work better with Chrome than with other browsers? Will Google use its dominant position in search to heavily promote Chrome?
That would make sense.
However this isn't a bad thing because if there are two different competitors to IE that are used by the cognoscenti, then the most popular web sites will be forced to produce HTML sites that are compliant with all major browsers rather than one off hacks that target one browser or another.
The other thing is that for GMail, the thing is fast! It's significantly faster than desktop Outlook. I'll be trying out some other web apps, but so far, so good.
Posted using Google Chrome!
http://www.google.com/chrome
see review here
http://megawallpapers.info/?p=23
I wrote more about this idea here:
Google Chrome: Disruptive Technology
http://faseidl.com/public/blog/212172
Unpolished (Google) Chrome May Yet Sparkle
http://faseidl.com/public/item/212515
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