Yesterday I awoke to news about Google Chrome … EVERYWHERE.
And being the non-conformist I like to think I am (like everybody else in the universe), I wasn’t even going to give it a look until I stumbled onto this brilliant marketing tool that they had put together. Its a 40 page comic book walking you through the thought process behind why Google Chrome came about, and how it is different from everything on the market already.
What makes this puppy different?
The main philosophical difference between this browser and others is that fact that, instead of running the browser in one memory space, each tab in the browser has its own process.
Why is this important?
It means that when a piece of javascript goes nuts, in your browser, all you have to do is close the tab.
In traditional browsers, you’d have to restart the entire browser. It also means that ripping out a tab and making it its own window is a piece of cake
Protecting against Plugins and Malware
They’ve taken this philosophy and used it to protect Chrome from malware, by putting them in a ‘sandbox’ where they can’t read or write to sensitive areas of your computer (this is why IE was so terrible at protecting against malware).
This was harder to do with plugins like quicktime or Adobe Acrobat because they , so they worked on putting those in separate processes, so that, again, the browser and tabs could be protected from misbehaving plugins . This is remarkable because of the way that plugins, javascript and html interact so closely.
Javascript
The other brilliant piece of game-changing innovation that Chrome brings to the table is a Javascript virtual machine (also called V8). The virtual machine allows you run javascript much faster by implementing (in theory anyway) better garbage collection, compiling javascript to native machine code that the cpu can run directly. This is as opposed to translating some mid level code into machine code to run (cuts out one extra step).
Speed
The first thing you’ll notice about Google Chrome is the speed and smoothness of the whole thing. Page loads are smooth and quick, and everything just seems swift. I think this is because they used webkit as the rendering engine.
Webkit is the rendering engine for Safari, and if you download and try that, you’ll notice it has the same (but to a lesser degree) smoothness in rendering that Chrome has.
Other cool features, incognito, google gears and task manager
What I really liked about Chrome is the way it simplifies the browser, but still has tons of innovative concepts in it. The ability to open up a task manager and see running process, how much cpu they’re using and terminate bad processes is sexy. The way it unclutters the interface by moving the tabs all the way to the top of the screen, moving the status bar out of the way till you need it, and making page load indicator and browser search use the url bar is sexy.
Google Chrome is sexy