Google Chrome announced

September 2nd, 2008 - 10:59 | 9 comments

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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9 Responses to “Google Chrome announced”

1 Lauren Sep 2nd, 2008 at 5:32 pm

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…)
2 Skuds Sep 2nd, 2008 at 11:53 pm

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.
3 Andrew Sep 3rd, 2008 at 2:34 pm

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.
4 Lauren Sep 3rd, 2008 at 5:10 pm

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
5 Andrew Sep 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 pm

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.
6 patrick Sep 3rd, 2008 at 10:38 pm

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
7 Andrew Sep 4th, 2008 at 10:48 am

They’ve apparently altered the EULA.
8 Lauren Sep 4th, 2008 at 4:04 pm

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.

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