Google announces its new browser, Chrome

Google is getting ready to launch its own browser, called Chrome.

The new software is apparently a reinvention of the browser, starting from a blank slate to consider all of the things the web is used for today but which were never even dreamt of by the developers of the first generation of browsers.  Nowadays, even average users download and upload huge files, watch videos and run complex applications from within their browser.

Assured stability

These new applications have brought with them new problems.  A single JavaScript on one page can slow down or even crash the whole browser, a frustrating phenomenon which is well known to those of us who have several tabs open at a time.

Google has proposed a logical solution to this problem, forcing every tab and every plug-in to run as a separate process, so that if any one page hits the buffers, the others won’t be affected.  Chrome users will be able to ‘kill’ a single tab without losing data on any of the others that are still working.

A brand new open-source JavaScript engine, called V8, should also speed up the execution of the most complex of the new generation of complex web-based applications.

Modern protection

Elsewhere, the browser promises to include a number of fashionable features, including an address bar which can suggest pages based on keywords (like in Firefox 3), a home page that brings together a user’s favorite sites (like in Opera) and a ‘private surfing’ mode which does not accept cookies or record the history of pages visited, not unlike the InPrivate feature promised for Internet Explorer 8 we covered yesterday.

It will also allow online applications to function as if they were independent pieces of software, in their own window and without a navigation bar.
By thinking about everyday problems on the web today, such as phishing and malware attacks, Chrome’s developers claim it will be better protected against such threats than older browsers to which protections have been added after the fact.

Chrome didn’t come out of nowhere though, and its website recognizes that “ we owe a great debt to many open source projects … we’ve used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others.”  Google is an official partner of Mozilla’s, because Firefox uses the company’s search engine by default in exchange for a subsidy which has recently been extended for three years.  WebKit, meanwhile, powers another well-known browser, Apple’s Safari.

Chrome was debuted yesterday in a comic drawn by Scott McCloud, which includes no fewer than 38 panels which present the new browser from both a technical point of view and the perspective of an average user, proving that Google has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about what an ideal browser might look like.

The beta version for Windows should be available at some point today.

> The blog post announcing Chrome