Chrome, an Innovative browser from Google

I’ve just been reading up on the newly announced Google Chrome browser that will no doubt set a new standard for browsers. Its built on the WebKit engine and includes some really really different train of thoughts on how browsers should act and behave. You can read a very nicely done Comic Strip on the new things we can expect to see, which I think is genius in itself.

Some things that stood out from the usual norm:

• Chrome seperates to a multi-process design system for tabs, this implies that a failure on one tab will not affect the entire browsing experience. This will initially increase the memory usage but over time it should mean leaner footprints thanks to cleaner recycling of resources. (Much like IE8)
• They used WebKit as its leaner and faster than other rendering engines. (Which powers Safari of all things)
• Has its own Javascript VM which is called V8 built from scratch that implements a faster IL for Javascript which provides a far better garbage collection mechanism than what is possible right now. But I wonder what that does for smaller ad-hoc style scripts that devs litter around?
• New tabs will open with a similar style of initial page to Opera – SpeedDial – which they introduced in Opera 9.2, so this will pickout frequently visited sites and display them on a speed browse fashion.
• Privacy mode similar to what IE8 offers in InPrivate ™ mode.
• Popups are confined to their owner tab, this means we have _total_ control over the popups that annoy us.
• Sandboxed tabs, which means any malware you may get are confined or ‘jailed’ not allowing any of your actions to be affected or monitored.
• Plugins themselves are in a seperate process – taken out of the renderer itself – meaning that any flaws or stalls in the plugin wont affect the rest of the session.
• Integration with the Malware API from Google. Which caught the MSY hack leak a few weeks back.

And finally, a slide about the open nature of Google Chrome, notice the little guy with a ball on the top left?

Whilst they are exciting features theres stuff here that have already been done by other companies (Opera and Microsoft) it’ll be interesting to see where Google goes with this. I dont think I’ve been more excited about a browser than today.