Technology

Google officially threw its hat into the web browser ring this week when it introduced Chrome, a new open-source web browser designed to handle the next generation of web-based content and technology.  Chrome was available for download on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 for the Windows operating system, and Mac and Linux versions are in the works.

According to Google, Chrome was designed from the ground up for use in the Web 2.0 environment.  Prior to Chrome, according to Google, browsers were built primarily to render web pages, whereas Chrome was built primarily to handle applications, interactions, and collaborations—things like watching and uploading video, chatting, and playing web-based games.

What Google’s engineers came up with goes beyond mere window dressing—it goes code deep.  Instead of a single-threaded process paradigm, where the browser interacts with a web page which may contain JavaScript and plug-ins,  Chrome employs not a multi-threaded paradigm, but a multi-process paradigm, in which each process has its own memory and its own copy of the global data structures.  This means not only that one process isn’t reliant on another process to complete before it can begin, but one slow or stuck process doesn’t bring an entire interaction to a screeching halt—or worse, a catastrophic crash.  Additionally, Google’s engineers brought JavaScript to the forefront.  With Chrome, JavaScript now works on its own virtual machine.

Yet Google’s user interface designers didn’t forget entirely about the window dressing.  Chief among the immediately-noticeable differences between Chrome and other browsers, such as Safari or Firefox, is the way Chrome handles tabs.  In Chrome, tabs appear above the traditional browser address bar, not below it, and each comes with its own independent address bar.  You can also “tear” a tab from a Chrome window and place it elsewhere on your desktop as a new Chrome window; the content within that tab never changes.  Open a new tab altogether, and Chrome will display a three-by-three grid of the pages you visit the most, and a stack of the sites you searched the most.

The address bar—also known as a URL bar—also received a make-over.  Google engineers now refer to it as the “omnibox,” and for good measure.  Plainly put, since Chrome remembers the things you’ve searched for and the places you’ve visited, the omnibox is no longer just for URLs—rather, it serves as a search interface, of sorts.  Type a word or a phrase into the omnibox and Chrome serves up a smart search of the searches you’ve performed or the places you’ve been that match that phrase.

For those of you who might think this level of assisted browsing a bit Orwellian, Chrome offers a privacy mode called an “incognito window.”  Nothing that happens in the incognito window is logged on your computer, nor is any history saved.  When the incognito window is closed, the cookies it acquired are wiped out.

By launching Chrome, Google seems to be taking a direct shot at Microsoft, as the Redmond, WA company gets set to launch the latest version of Internet Explorer, its popular web browser.  And the latest version of Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8, seems itself to be a direct shot at Google.  One of IE8’s more intriguing features is what Microsoft calls InPrivate Browsing, a browsing mode that, like Google’s incognito window, does not retain browsing history, temporary internet files, form data, cookies, user names, or passwords.  But InPrivate Browsing takes cloak-and-dagger browsing to the next level:  it also prevents the sites you visit from sharing information about you with other sites  . . . sites like Google and Yahoo, for example, which serve up ad content based on your browsing activity and things other sites share about you.

Is this a direct shot at Google’s highly-successful business model?  Only time will tell which browser comes out on top, but with Internet Explorer currently enjoying 70-75% of the market, and browsers like Safari and Firefox making inroads on that figure every day, Google Chrome certainly has a lot of ground to cover before it can hope to achieve parity.

By Robert Pothier