Google Chrome rethinks the browser

David — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:15:45 +0000

Yesterday (after a comic strip teaser) Google finally took the plunge and released their own web browser named Chrome. For years they have had a defacto relationship with Mozilla Firefox, but now they have decided to go it alone with their own, radically different offering. How this affects the Firefox/Google relationship is anyone's guess, but presumably for Mozilla having your number one revenue stream release a competing product is not a good sign.

So why should I care?

Rather than a simple re-branding of Firefox, Google Chrome is a completely new beast built on top of the WebKit rendering engine (the same engine that drives Apple's Safari). Innovation is a term used pretty lightly in the technology industry, but in this case Google has really tried to break conventions and create something that is genuinely a generation better than the competition.

The Chrome interface with its Task Manager (click to enlarge)

Process isolation comes to tabs

The biggest conceptual leap the developers have made is thinking of each tab as its own distinct process. Traditionally your browser has run as a single process, which means when one tab or window goes haywire the whole thing goes up in a puff of smoke. By running each tab as a distinct, protected process the browser gains a level of robustness never considered possible. In fact in some respects Google Chrome is a lightweight operating system unto itself, it even has its own Task Manager for monitoring and selectively killing errand tabs.

What it looks like when you kill a tab (click to enlarge)

A lightweight, tab-centric interface

Google have also taken the interface concept of tabs to a new level by making it the primary interface element. Whereas conventionally the browser tab has been subservient to the navigation bar, in Chrome this relationship is reversed. Tabs are the high-level interface element which everything else is related to. Also gone is the 90's concept of a 'home page'. When you create a new tab in Chrome you are presented with a very tidy activity overview which displays frequently visited sites, new bookmarks, closed tabs and of course a big search box.

The activity overview tab (click to enlarge)

Chrome is fast... really fast

The decision to use WebKit over Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine helps in the speed stakes. For a while now Apple has been trumpeting how fast their browser is, but now Google have trumped them with this effort. Given that the majority of Google's web properties rely heavily on Javascript it is unsurprising to see that they have used a new and very fast Javascript engine. Thanks to the recent developments in Javascript run-time technology the language can no longer be considered 'dead slow'. Whilst it may not be as fast as compiled C, for most day to day tasks it is now more than adequate.

What does it mean for me the poor old web developer?

With Chrome's WebKit rendering engine you can be fairly confident that if your website displays correctly in Safari 3 it will work fine. In all the tests I did there were no obvious rendering differences between the two browsers. As far a Javascript goes this will be a different story as Chrome uses a custom engine. My guess is as long as you stick to well trodden tracks and make use of popular Javascript libraries such as Prototype, JQuery and Dojo you will not experience too many issues. To help developers out a Firebug-like inspector is included which lets you drill down into your HTML and Javascript for easy troubleshooting. Chrome also ships with Google Gears built in, so if you have been considering whether adding offline support to your applications is worthwhile, now maybe a good time to look into it.

The HTML/Javascript inspector (click to enlarge)

The beta for Windows is available now, OSX and Linux to follow

Like most things, first out of the starting blocks is a Windows beta release. It sounds like OSX and Linux versions will not be too far behind, but releases will not be anytime this month. Installation is very straightforward, simply run the small (475kb) installer and it will go ahead and pull the latest release off the network. When the browser first starts you can import your settings from Firefox. Then to ward off any anti-trust lawsuits a prominent opportunity is provided to change the default search engine to something other than Google (does anyone actually use Live.com?).

The 'don't sue us' change the default search engine pop-up

Final thoughts

Google Chrome is a great beta release of a truly next generation web browser. For anyone like myself who writes web applications for a living the introduction of tab-level process isolation is a very welcome sight. Whether or not the average user accepts Chrome will be another story. Many businesses will hesitate due to the privacy cloud hanging over anything from Google (even though the majority of their desktops, servers and mobile phones are exclusively Microsoft). Even if Google Chrome does not succeed in the market lets hope that some of its innovations at least rub off on its competitors.

Recent email rumblings

David — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:32:01 +0000

Email as a technology is pretty boring but it is hard to tell that this morning with two really interesting announcements coming from Eudora and the Hula-Project.

Eudora are the creators of of the first usable pieces of email software for normal people. Since that time in the early 90's they have fostered a relatively small but loyal user base. Recently however they have announced that the latest version of Eudora email client will be their last based on the traditional code-base. As a replacement Eudora are going to build their unique interface and feature-set on top of the Mozilla Thunderbird code-base which is a win/win for both parties. The move allows Eudora to focus on specialised functionality rather than maintenance of general features whilst for Mozilla it increases their overall user-base and in theory should result in a more stable product overall.

In other email related news Dave Camp has just announced the first development version of Hula-Lite is available for testing. Hula is a standalone email server that provides SMTP, POP3, IMAP, CalDAV and Webmail functionality. Hula-Lite provides just the very cool CalDav and Webmail features and is intended to be integrated into existing SMTP/IMAP services. This is a very smart move as the great thing about Hula is its Webmail and CalDAV functionality. By allowing users to test and adopt these things within existing services is a lot easier than forcing an entire email infrastructure migration plus it allows sysadmins to keep using the services they know and trust.

Hopefully both these developments are beneficial to their respective projects and the open source community as a whole. I am especially hopeful that Hula-Lite will turn out to be an effective replacement for the aging SquirrelMail in the open source community. One of the most frequent requests I've received when doing my Webmin theme is an accompanying theme for SquirrelMail. Unfortunately the SquirrelMail code is not up to the job and it does not sound like its developers are interested in making any significant changes.

stressfree - mozilla