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September 03, 2008
Getting Chromed
Internet Explorer 8 beta has been in the news on telly - I didn't catch the full details, I was walking between rooms but I did hear it promised to wipe traces of your surfing or something like that. If it does, it sort of legitimises the behaviour that Browzar and Kejut have been providing to the paranoid or the teens.
More recent and less sung about is the release of Google's Chrome browser yesterday. It's built on the gecko engine from Firefox and Webkit engine used in Apple's Safari. Why another browser?
To generate more paying work for webmasters so that they can again tweak their site CSS? From the horse's mouth:
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.
Their comic strip tells us one important rationale - Google is in the cloud and they need a multi-threaded browser to enable their apps better.
It was easier to convince me to download and install Chrome Beta because I knew that such a beta product would not gum up my machine if things went really bad than to download IE 8 Beta - Microsoft's approach to their browser is to replace the core modules on your Windows machine and nuke the current IE you are using - I haven't re-read whether they still carry out this affirmative action, I'm not bothered to do anything like that on my production desktop.
The download is a two step download - you get a small stub executable and then the executable brings down the main installation - it must have to do with balancing demands on Google's servers but at the expense of being able to simply get one full installer and taking it to any machine.
It's still a beta product so not many in-your-face empowering features yet and it curiously grabs at your IE favourites rather than offer the option of grabbing your Firefox ones....
If you give it a try, tell me us how you go....
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Posted by Anandasim at September 3, 2008 12:12 PM
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Comments
I can’t wait to see the add-ins. This is the closest thing I’ve found so far, http://www.chromeaddins.com
Posted by: anon at September 3, 2008 12:33 PM
It works. The Javascript engine is worth raving about it (which Google are naturally doing) - basically it runs anything with significant amounts of javascript junk at speeds much quicker than I'm used to. Another impressive thing is that they weren't kidding about getting the browser out of the way. When the window is maximised the browser takes the absolute minimum of screen real estate for itself: it's virtually all viewable area.
One issue I'm amazed to have come across is the lack of RSS support. Not only does it not have the cute little RSS icon show up in the address bar when I'm visiting a syndicated site, but viewing an RSS feed results in a page that means nothing to me. That's disappointing to say the least, and it'll keep me on Firefox until it's fixed. But it is an impressive first effort.
Posted by: Geoff at September 3, 2008 02:10 PM
You say "It's built on the gecko engine from Firefox and Webkit", this confuses me, since from what I read in other articles it is built from Webkit and *not* from the gecko engine -- which is a competing rendering/layout engine.
As for the lack of RSS support, I suppose Google wants you to read your feeds in Google reader, I've been reading my feeds today in Chrome at http://www.google.com/reader and haven't had any problems so far.
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at September 3, 2008 09:49 PM
Ah, thanks ajft. That's a good correction. I glanced at the About > Google Chrome and misread - it claims to be "like Gecko". I have struck out that inaccuracy. Also, there's more than meets the eye, after watching the YouTube video on the features posted in the forum discussion. Google wins regardless and the market has been waiting for multi-threaded browser platforms of any brand to support The Cloud for ages.
Posted by: AnandaSim at September 3, 2008 10:35 PM