Google Chrome: exciting innovation in the browser space
Google Chrome has landed. While i understand this is essentially an alpha release, a few things are apparent right away.
- Each tab runs in its own process
- To the user, multiple tabs are experienced as tabs inside a single application
- To the computer, they are each managed as their own application, meaning that memory management, garbage collection, and crashes all happen in their own sandbox, relative to the hosting "chrome"
- ECMAScript is a first-class citizen
- Behind the scenes, ECMAScript/JavaScript will be pre-compiled into an intermediate language much like Java and the .NET platform. This intermediate step allows for several optimizations around speed of execution, reference tracking & garbage collection, and the internal structures used to represent JavaScript objects.
- Firebug-like clone is also a first-class citizen
- Out of the box, Google Chrome provides an asset inspector that looks like it will rival FireBug in providing download statistics, browsable access to page assets organized by type (HTML, CSS, JS, media), and integrated JavaScript debugging; in short, all the tools that you need as a web developer to deconstruct and analyze the front end of your web application.
- Internal Task manager gives you a peek under the hood
- Check out the "Stats for Geeks" report for more than you ever wanted to know about how your browser's memory footprint is distributed
The fact that all these features are baked into the application certainly appears to raise the bar for browser vendors.
In terms of the market, i agree with one technology analyst who claims that Google Chrome is “Shiny and Soon Forgotten”; as a product it probably won’t make a big splash or threaten Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari.
As a technical example of a web browser, however, i expect it to have much longer legs.
Watch for Firefox and Safari to start integrating some of Chrome’s innovations into their next releases.