Burning Chrome: Google's new browser sets a new bar, even if it's still a little buggy
Google announces their own browser, complete with a comic book explaining how cool it is!
Earlier this week, Google announced their new Chrome browser. It definitely raises the bar for the rest of the browser world, elevating the status of tabs in the browser to separate individual running processes, and employing a JavaScript virtual machine to dramatically (they say) improve the speed of Web 2.0 applications (like Gmail) that depend on JavaScript. The V8 JavaScript virtual machine (JSVM?) compiles and supposedly optimizes JavaScript in a number of ways. The breaking out of tabs into separate processes means that bottlenecks, errors, or other problems within an individual tab should not slow down or crash your entire browser session. Tab death (and any other side effects that are a consequence of bad behavior in a tab) should not affect processing in other active tabs.
Chrome makes use of WebKit, the rendering engine behind Apple's Safari browser, and also owes a debt to Mozilla technology as well. This release really does qualify as a beta, as a significant number of problems (particularly using HTTPS over authenticated proxies) have been reported. But this browser does a lot of things in a very next-generation way that will surely influence the development of browsers moving forward, whether or not Google succeeds in their dream of Chrome ubiquity.
Google's announcement of Chrome was accompanied by the release of an online comic book with its own developers as the featured "superheroes". The comic, inked by Scott McCloud, tells the story of why and how Google developed Chrome, and what it offers that this generation of browsers does not. I'm just curious, though: as one of Firefox's most glaring abusers of tab functionality (stop by my desk and witness how many rows of tabs my browser windows sport), I have to wonder how McCloud managed to accurately depict Celia and me in our living room as my frustration with my own self-induced tab bloat bogs down my browsing experience...
This snippet from a corporate email that filtered down to me at my current job makes me a tad wary of Google Chrome personally. I think I'll avoid it for the time being.
Note that in this email, the PC administration group also stated that they will delete any copies of Chrome that they find on anyone's machine without warning. So, I guess this company is taking the licensing seriously.
I don't know how much value any of us see in our own blogs. My own probably has no monetary value. However, at the same time, I'm not willing to hand over rights to its content to google.
I wonder how they can even have such a statement in their license when most of us do not have the rights to the pages we view in the first place, so cannot possibly give away the rights of others.
Comment by Misanthropic Scott — September 6, 2008 @ 8:00 am
I'm sure you know by now that the "we own whatever you do using our browser" rule arose from Google's dumbass cutting-and-pasting from their Terms of Service for other services they provide. They issued a "correction" but still people (and organizations) are now wary. "Do no evil," my ass. Its beta status doesn't help matters. Still, architecturally it is at least interesting and a pointer to the future of Web browsing as we know it. People are still focusing on "how to do some of the cool things Chrome can do using Firefox", and with good reason.
Ironically, I had to de-install Chrome from my work computer (only hours after I installed it) for similar BigBrother-ish reasons, and when I did a dialog box popped up asking:
Comment by Rich Rosen — September 6, 2008 @ 1:09 pm