Google Chrome : The Google Browser
A cartoon appeared on blogoscoped yesterday which provided details of longly awaited Open source browser Chrome by Google. It contained the details of how Chrome works and its features. It is written by the famous cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud. You can see the official comic book on google books.
Also there were some screenshots at http://gears.google.com/chrome/ which have now been removed.
Later google announced on their official blog that they accidentally launched this comic. In the same post they have said that beta version of Chrome will be launched on Tuesday in more than 100 countries. Currently it will be available only for windows.
From the details provided in the comic book, Chrome appears to be an interesting project. Google built it upon Webkit and gears. Here are some of the main features that google promises in Chrome.
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Multiple processes not Multiple threads
In currently available browsers a single thread runs which takes care of all the operations in all tabs. That means html, javascript and plugins of all tabs. As modern day browsers rely heavily on javascript, if javascript hungs up in any of the tabs it crashes the whole browser and no one likes that. Google guys have made a multi process design, which means each tab is a separate process. Each has its separate threads. A crash on a page will only affect that tab. Others will be running smoothly.This also makes memory management efficient.
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Webkit and V8
Webkit has been chosen as the engine for Chrome and V8 for javascript engine. V8 was written from scratch for chrome. It has an intelligent garbage collection system that will result in faster interaction to pages and prevention of memory leaks.
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New tabs
Unlike current browsers which share a common Address bar and controls, Chrome has tabs on the top. That means having individual address bar and controls for each tab.
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Omnibox
The address bar is called omnibox in Chrome. However it is more than just address bar. It works as a suggest box which offers suggestions like google suggest. Moreover it includes your search history too. So you dont have to look into search history.Just type in omnibox and Chrome will fetch it from your history.
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The private mode – Incognito
Its like the Porn Mode introduced in IE8.0. When you open an incognito tab and visit a site nothing gets logged to your browser history. After closing the tab the cookies of that session are also cleaned.
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Speed dial like feature
We know that Opera provides a speed-dial feature which shows a grid showing thumbnails of 9 sites on opening a new tabs. These sites can be selected by the user. Chrome has enhanced it and added more features to it. Besides 9 sites thumbnails view, on the right there will be links to users previous searches, recently closed tabs and recently boorkmarked items etc.
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Safe browsing
Processes are not allowed to write to the file system. Each process has its boundary and it will not be allowed to operate outside it.
Moreover Chrome continuously downloads list of harmful sites for Phishing and malware. If users encounters a site that Chrome thinks harmful, she will be warned. This services will be freely available in the form of API.
These and many more features are yet to be discovered when we will have Chrome in action. So wait for the release all open source lovers and Microsoft… Take a long breath.
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Wow! nice info.. eagarly waiting for Chrome……. i m fed up with IE & firefox…
Will it work fine with standard javascript and html…. just asking being an overeager one..
ditto kaka !
And I really want to study the multi process architecture making memory management efficient !
Concept of multi threading was introduced to save memory in terms of stack space, process header etc. Having multiple processes would mean having separate stack and header for each of them.
But I am very much happy with the convenience of not losing other tabs because of one.
Hey vijay,
Thanks for shareing this wonderful info,just downloaded chrome after reading this nice article.I really appreciate you efforts.
Hi vjay,
Its really nice post about google chrome.The browser is good with all its functionality and hope will compete with IE and Mozilla in the future .