Google enters browser war with Chrome.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife It was anticipated and speculated. Now, its here!

A browser from the Google stable. Google Chrome.
Officially public on Sep 1, 2008, Google has posted an awesome comic illustration of this radically different (claimed) browser. The comic strip was pretty interesting explaining the typical problems we are living(forced to live) with even modern browsers such as Firefox. Some of them are very fundamental, but very important. For eg: Current browsers are single threaded, in spite of multiple tabs. So, browsers do one operation at a time; JavaScript execution, Plug ins, HTML rendering. One at a time, while the others wait.

The other interesting problem, they claim to have solved is the sand boxing of tabs, preventing the entire browser crash or hogging. But how? Simple. Each tab is a process and therefore sand boxed from others. H mm.. doesn't it sound like back to history? Prior to multi-tabbing days, a browser window can open one website at a time. To view multiple website, we have to open multiple browser windows. So, the windows were isolated and therefore different processes. Then, the came the buzz of multi-tabbing, avoiding the need to open multiple windows. It was celebrated and accepted.

Now, in Google Chrome, each tab is a separate process, but just glued together by 'Chrome Browser'. Haa.. it sounds like a simple play of words. But, Google seems to be aspiring to a bigger dream of having its own OS or Platform on top of platforms such as Windows, Linux, Mac et al. The Google Chrome has a process manager allowing users to view the processes/tabs running within Google Chrome, giving control to users. This has a huge potential to develop into a full blown platform for web apps. After all, Google is all about web apps.

Having said that, i am curious to get a hands-on with Chrome. One quick thing to note is that, they have used Apple Webkit as the rendering engine instead of Gecko or its-own-from-scratch. Googlers have showered praise on this Webkit engine. I am also curious about the plug-ins support. Having lived with the ActiveX and Firefox add-ons flavors of plug ins, i am scared to hear about another 'X' type of plug in for Chrome. I guess, Google would have done something to support the two plug in standards for time being, at least to draw the crowd initially.

So, what happens to the Google support for Mozilla foundation and all that buzz going on around Firefox. Is Google and Firefox going to lock horns? I am curious and worried equally.

Here are some references worth reading about Chrome.

Updated: Chrome now available for download here. Go grab it. I am on it.

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