Once and Still a Techie Weblog

New Browser on the Block – Google Chrome

Google known for its search engine’s dominant market share has just released it’s own take on the browser. Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer meet your new playmate, Google Chrome.

Chrome is a browser designed from the ground up as a platform that is optimized to handle not just regular web pages with simple images and text hyperlinks but web applications like Youtube’s video player app, meebo’s IM app, and thousands of online java-based games. This type of functionality was nonexistent when the first browsers roamed the earth. Browsers like Firefox 3 and IE 7 are still designed based on the legacy concepts of their earlier iterations.

User Interface

When you first start Google Chrome you are presented with a “clean, simple, efficient user interface”. The thinking behind this is the interface isn’t that all important. It is the webpages, sites and web applications that you are interested in the most. So the focus is on your interaction with the content being more seemless and convenient overall.

Design Concepts and Features

One of the design concepts implemented in Google Chrome is that each tab in the browser is it’s own process. Meaning each tab has it’s own address in memory separate from the other tabs. So if a tab hangs, it doesn’t affect the other tabs and ultimately the browser as a whole. To get rid of the offending tab you just need to close it and be done with it. Unlike traditional browsers where a problem with one webpage may force you to restart the whole browser. This type of design also eliminates the problem of memory bloat, where the longer you use a browser or the more tabs you open causes the browser to use more and more memory turning it into a hog that just slows your whole system down. This is because the multi-process design makes it easier to reclaim memory. When you open a new tab it creates a new process. Closing a tab destroys that process at the same time freeing up memory.

Ever used Window’s Task Manager to find out what’s using up all your memory or straining your CPU? Well you can do the same with Chrome which has its own task manager where you can see which sites are using up the most memory and kill the process if you don’t appreciate its greediness.

Google Chrome also has a new javascript engine called V8, designed to provide better performance of web applications through compiling the application’s source code once and running it instead of having to interpret source code every time it needs to run the application.

Then we have what the Google developers call the Omnibox. Which is an address bar on steriods sort of like Firefox 3′s AwesomeBar. It works like a search box with a type ahead feature that provides suggestions based on your search history, top visited web pages, or web pages more popular than the ones you’ve visited. For example type “laptop” into the address bar and you’re given a list of previously visited webpages containing information about laptops. The word laptop doesn’t even have to be in the URL itself. A time saver to say the least and it can almost do away with the need for bookmarks.

Another feature is the New Tab page which gets populated with your nine most visited web pages and search history information. This means you don’t even have to type into the address bar anymore. Your most frequently visited web sites are just a click away.

Google’s browser will also be extensible through Gears similar to Firefox Addons. This will help add to or improve Chrome’s base functionality and features.

Security

When it comes to security, Google’s developers designed Chrome with a glass half empty attitude which assumes that you will inevitably come into contact with malicious sites or other web-based malware. So each tab you open on the browser aside from living in it’s own address space is virtually “sandboxed” preventing malware from installing itself onto your computer or reading information off of your computer (something spyware is supposed to do.) The browser is also constantly updated with lists of known phishing and malicious websites ready to warn you if you happen to visit a website on one of the lists.

There is however a potential security hole and that is the support for third party plugins which you will need to see flash-based animations, video and the like. Google’s developers admit they will need the cooperation of third party plugin developers to write plugins that use lower priveleges to run, therefore closing the door on the posibility of your system getting compromised.

Summary

So there you have it. Google is designing a browser that promises to be faster, more stable and secure than the current offerings. It is an open source project, which means it’s source code is readily available to any developer who would like to improve upon the solid foundation that Google presents as its contribution to a more powerful, and interactive world wide web.

You can download Google Chrome currently in Beta here.

Watch videos of its features here.

P.S. – My personal experience with this browser hasn’t been stellar. I keep getting an Application error whenever I launch the browser or open a website on my Vista SP1 laptop. It is a Beta so I’m giving it more time. I’ve uninstalled it from my system for the moment. You might have better luck with it though.