The Future is here! And it’s sporting Chrome!
The big news of the week is that Google has released it’s new browser.
….and it did so in spectacular fasion, using a comic by famous comic animator, Scott McCloud.My initial thoughts were that it was an even better way to gather data on what webistes people are visiting, but Matt Cutts has pre-emplted the paranoia with a detailed list of communications between Chrome and Google.com.They talk about browsers being born into a different world than the one we are currently in and suggesting that perhaps they are unsuitable for the tasks of the average web browser today.One example of this is highlighting the fact that Chrome is multi-threaded, that is to say has many processes with their own memory allocation etc. So that if there’s a problem, such as a javascript looping it would only be necessary to kill one process or tab.This is open source so all the good bits are going to be spread around and even Matt Cutts (who love firefox) thinks that a bit of competition is a good thing. This will especially allow for more comlex applications to run in the browser pushing us just a little faster towards a centralised computing.Google apps such as google reader and google docs are running super quick in Chrome. And with a more robust design of the browser, it’s another reason not to use google aps gone extinct. Another feature of Google Chrome is a javascript virtual machine, called V8.What’s behind V8s speed?
- hidden class transitions - dynamically creating a class for objects with common properties to share
- dynamic code generation - it generates machine code from the source code
- precise management of pointers
The address bar features a fancy autocomplete and you can search from the address bar itself. Not only that if you have searched on Amazon before you can do so from the address bar.Privacy mode that doesn’t record your history.An additional layer of protection has been created for Malware, so that it cannot write to the harddrive and it’s scope is limited to the tab that it is launched in. Chrome achieves this by using a new permissions model whereby the “sandbox” can only see data that the User has allowed to show to it.Lastly the browser is open source so that features that are usefull can be ported to other browsers such as Firefox. This will allow for a common experience across different browsers. Google are calling this gears.Over at search engine land you can see Danny’s experiences test driving search and the omnibox.The Paciello group have been talking about Google Chrome and accessibility. I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to do some testing.So far I love it! Once things for sure: it is undoubtedly very exciting!
Tags: browsers, google, Google Chrome