Google Chrome announced
Yesterday Google announced Chrome, their open-source web browser. At first I was a little nonplussed. It's tough to imagine even Google going up against Firefox - I'm sure they could produce a popular browser, but Firefox is just too customisable. I'm currently running 24 extensions (yeah, startup is slow), all of which are genuinely useful. How could Google compete with that? Then I read their introductory comic1 and though 'oooooh'. Highlights:
- every tab runs in its own process. A broken process kills the tab, not the browser...
- ...and each process runs in the lower permission levels, so malware can't get into anything important
- its javascript engine was written - from scratch - to be fast, with modern applications in mind
- the rendering engine is automatically(!) tested against google's index, with more popular pages given priority
- its plugin architecture tries to keep plugins from breaking the world, although they acknowledge this isn't always possible
- there's a firefox-like 'awesomebar'...
- ...and a revamped UI, with tabs at the top. Each can be dragged into its own window, and the address bar removed so it's a stand-alone application (ie. gmail).
- it will automatically download Google's (open) phishing database
- it's fully open-source.
It all sounds pretty impressive, anyway. The beta will be released today, and should be available from here. Should stir things up...
- drawn by Scott McCloud, no less [↩]
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September 2nd, 2008 - 17:32
Sounds interesting. I’ll definitely be checking it out.
The real question is… can it handle the Acid 3 test? (unfortunately, at this rate, a bajillion people will still be using IE6 thirty years from now… so really, developers are stuck coding for the stone age… no matter what Google does…)
September 2nd, 2008 - 23:53
Would Google need to go up against Firefox though? Such is MS’s domination that they would only need to take a small percentage of IE users to overtake Firefox anyway.
As long as they don’t “do evil” and end up developing bits of their portfolio with features that only work with Chrome.
September 3rd, 2008 - 14:34
Afaik it’s the same engine as Safari, which doesn’t quite pass Acid3 yet. Probably won’t be long though.
Not sure – I’d think that majority of people to try Chrome will be Firefox users. Still, it’s all open-source, so Firefox can steal the best bits without having to worry.
September 3rd, 2008 - 17:10
Hmm, I doubt this will amount to anything, but it’s worth mentioning:
http://gizmodo.com/5044871/google-chrome-eula-claims-ownership-of-everything-you-create-using-chrome-from-blog-posts-to-emails
Little bit scary, honestly. o.O
September 3rd, 2008 - 22:24
Hmmm, I think one of the commenters probably hits the nail on the head – of course Google need permission to do things with data you submit, or they couldn’t send any information to websites. The wording is a bit unclear, though – it’ll be interesting to see whether they change it.
September 3rd, 2008 - 22:38
i’m currently “test-driving” Chrome to see if it’s really that much faster than either Firefox or IE… in any case it will most likely be FireFox that is hardest hit by Chrome’s release
September 4th, 2008 - 10:48
They’ve apparently altered the EULA.
September 4th, 2008 - 16:04
Awesome! Good to know. I wasn’t particularly worried about it, but it struck me as kind of odd. I was thinking maybe Google was trying to prevent future legal issues with their Google cache (which has happened before)… Theoretically, with the old EULA, if you created your site via their browser, they’d have the right to cache it no matter what.