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Google Chrome, the Google Browser
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google announced their very own browser project called Google Chrome — an announcement in the form of a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, no less. Google says Google Chrome will be open source, include a new JavaScript virtual machine, include the Google Gears add-on by default, and put the tabs above the address bar (not below), among other things. I've also uploaded Google's comic book with all the details (details given from Google's perspective, anyway... let's see how this holds up). While Google provided the URL www.google.com/chrome there's nothing up there yet."
Google was more productive when they underpromised and overdelivered. That's what gave us GMail, Google Maps, and the search engine itself.
With Android, municipal wi-fi, and so much else, they seem to have taken a page out of Microsoft's playbook.
I believe what Google is looking to accomplish is to trade on their brand name in an attempt to further dislodge Internet Explorer.
Why not rebrand Mozilla? Or is that what they're doing?
These days, there isn't much to differentiate between browsers as far as end-users are concerned. A "smart homepage" is a very effective way of capturing a user's interest, providing significant convenience, and making it less likely for them to switch away. Opera have started down this road with their speed dial feature, but Google seem to be taking it a big step further. Google have tried this once before, with iGoogle, but building it into the browser means they can incorporate things like surfing history and bookmarks to determine which websites are most important to a user without needing manual configuration in the same way an online homepage would.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Please, at the very least RTFS.
Now they can monitor everything you do easier...
Google is a marketing company, and in the past has used nefarious ad tracking to even Firefox searches reporting information to the Google servers.
Now they want a browser? Why? What reason would they need for a new browser?
So instead of putting full support behind a 'generic' Firefox, they want to enter the market so they can gather even more information from the user.
Nice... Geesh
Sadly they will get some of the Dell and other bundling deals, because they can afford to pay these companies to put this browser on machines, and most users won't know what is going on behind, even if the tech community finds Google doing the most nefarious things possible with the browser.
This type of concern makes the IE8 privacy mode and blocking sites from tracking users the 'non-evil' choice.
What was Google's ad hoc motto again, and was it just words after all?
I know you're being snarky, but if you actually think about it, the address bar really *does* belong under the tab bar.
The address is a property of the current page. Placing it above the tabs puts it into the same space as the persistent elements like the file/edit menus. Those are application-wide. Below the tabs puts it into the same space as the page content, which makes sense as it isn't an application-wide property, but is directly related to the selected tab.
I'd never thought about it before, and can't say I'm bothered with the current setup (address above the tabs) but there is a sense to it.
From the article:
One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it's such an important component on the web today.
This is probably one of the main reasons they've done it. They've been trying to push applications on the web, and the speed hasn't been completely impressive. With faster JavaScript execution, their products are much more viable.
What does this mean for Mozilla, which currently gets most of its financial support from Google? If Google has their own browser which competes against Firefox, will they be inclined to reduce their support of Firefox?
If not, it means Google will be paying for two competitors to Internet Explorer. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft complains about unfair competition.
In any event, if Google's aim is to further drive people away from IE, they'll have to spend some cash on advertising. Their target is people who are already familiar with Google's brand name, but believe the blue "e" is "how you get to Google." Some of these people launch IE and type "www.google.com" into the address bar every time they want to search for something, because their home page is set to MSN and they are unaware that it can be changed (or that other sites can be bookmarked), let alone know how to do so.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
since both are open source, i dont see a problem there?
Why shouldn't Firefox also use this "fast and improved" Javascript engine, if it proves to be superior?
Also Firefox already has an established userbase which google certainly is not going to ignore.
Above that ... i dont see Chrome capturing too many Firefox users no matter how good it is sinice it lacks the supply of addons that make Firefox so great.
That's a clear sign something's broken at Google. Tabs belong on the left or right edge so that once you have a number of them you can still allocate reasonable space to their title bars. Tree Style Tab and Vertigo are your friends. I have 40+ tabs open in the window I'm writing this in, and I can navigate through all of them easily. I wouldn't be able to if my tab bar were on the top of the window.
Translation
"I own Microsoft stock options and I'm unhappy".
the address bar really *does* belong under the tab bar
Not that I care, but maybe the "user" perceives the content of tabs & current page as more related while not being aware of the address of the current page at all.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Reading the comic, it looks like their plan is to use the browser as a thin-client platform for remote desktop applications: that is, what the project Mozilla Prisms tries to achieve with XUL and Microsoft wants to do with XAML. The difference is that Google already has a lot applications to offer (YouTube, Gmail, Google Office suite, etc). Looks like being cross-platform is quite important for these. It will surely be interesting :).
I guess they will make it seamless to the point you can click an icon and get a remote application launched (without having to open the browser at any time). As for having a beta version released soon, I really doubt Google would release the comic and show their plans to its competitors (mainly Microsoft) if they hadn't something to show very soon.
Having a read of the section around multi-threading / multi-processes it looks like this is the Google OS.
In the same way that widgets on the desktop have become common place, google gear widgets would replace these...and eventually larger pieces of software.
I don't think so ;)
In the actual comic, it was sort of mentioned in passing. The real big deal is isolating tabs at the process level.
I'm only 9 pages into the comic but the fact that every tab and plugin will run as a separate process seems significant to me and something more than just a rebranding.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
According to the TFA, it's multi-process, multi-threaded. ... are over. And yes, it happened to me today on eBay while I was opening up a bunch of auctions looking at cars - some worthless POS put a monster flash based gadget in his auction and brought my entire browser to its knees.
That in and of itself is enough to get my interest.
The days of having FireFox clocked / crashed because some flash or javascript went ape-shit on one of the 20 different tabs you have open
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Unless they develop a mostly working implementation of Flash, I don't see any point choosing them over Mozilla or Opera or Konqueror. They can optimize the rest of the browsing components all they want, but Flash is now the weakest link in the components needed to view the web in all its glory. Though a new faster JavaScript engine is nice too.
When I read the comic I seemed to think it looked completely different to Firefox, new process for each tab/plugin/script, new Javascript VM... I suppose they're similar in the fact that they both render web pages, have tabs and extensions, but every browser has those, and that's where the similarities end.
I imagine the first question on everyone's mind will be, "Why do we need a new web browser?" To which I imagine the truthful answer is: "We don't. At least not for technical reasons."
No, sorry, but there's a big honking huge reason :
Multiple process.
This is going to greatly improve stability of browsing.
Currently, all browsers run a 1 single process (well with some exception for some browser plugins in Firefox - mostly the opensource one - which use a thin plugins to call an external processus like gnash or mplayer).
If anything fucks up (and boy that happens often with Flash plugin in Linux) the whole browser is gone.
If there's a bug in the engine (automatic dictionary recognition was broken when switching between tabs from one textarea straight into another), the whole browser is down.
If there's a freeze (old-style virus scanning plugins in Firefox or on-the-fly scan in Windows) the whole browser is inusable.
All this could be averted if each page and each plugin was enforced to run in a separate process.
In worst case you would only lose the current page.
Flash would only crash its very own process, buggy pages will only crash alone without taking down the whole browser. Virus scan won't stop the user browsing in other tabs.
And as a side effect, this kind of organisation will better benefit from the current crop of 4x and 3x cores desktop CPUs.
I've been dreaming for a good multi-process browser for ages.
I'm just astonished that it comes in the form of a new project from google and not as a complete rewrite of the Firefox browser.
But maybe Firefox has slowly reached the point where it is past it's revolutionary golden period and is now simply polishing it's current model but isn't going to switch to something new (just like "Mozilla 1.x" did stagnate until FireFox/FireBird/Phoenix emerge)
Or maybe Chrome will be the slight stimulation that Mozilla needed to stop masturbate over their growing market share and return back to revolutionize the browsing experience.
PS:
According to the comic, Google Chrom won't use a simple address bar, but what they call an "omni-bar".
Cue in all whine boys who where complaining about Mozilla's switch to "awesome bar" in FireFox 3.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Or just open another tab and check if a new process starts...
Believe it or not, that's actually one of the reasons I don't use Firefox. That, and the related problem that it only lets one tab be visible at once. I can't, for example, view two tabs side by side or above/below each other.
Even if they fixed everything else, those two issues would keep me away.
Maybe not
They removed folders... To be replaced by labels, which can do everything folders can and more, and since email clients tend to treat them the same it's the EXACT same for client users, and the same except for the word "Label" instead of "Folder" on the web UI.
Of course you can't have the same email in multiple folders, but you can have the same email in multiple labels
I agree that "don't sort it, search it" can be annoying, but it's obvious that they won't remove folders for bookmarks or randomly order tabs.
That comic is really great. It deals with every question someone interested in the field would have at Google once he hears of this.
"Why a new Brower project?" "Why Webkit?" "Why yet another JavaScript VM?" (OMG, not *again* is what I thought first), etc.
Very informative indeed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
But the space they're taking up is less useful.
Increasingly people these days have wide-aspect displays, while web pages are generally designed to have a single fairly narrow column that scrolls vertically. I have this Slashdot window quite wide and it's still only using slightly over half the width of my screen. I could well afford to have tabs containing a decent-length page title beside it.
Not to mention that with tabs at the side, you can have the tab title take up more than one line of text without making the useful page area smaller.
Before I read your comment and started thinking about it, I would have been dead set against tabs at the side. But now I'm starting to quite like the idea...
Going from shared memory to protected memory was a big step for multitasking on the desktop, and since web applications are more and more complex, the same move needs to be made with browser design
Not really. Javascript doesn't allow arbitrary memory access, so there isn't any concept of an address space to share or separate. Nor is there any requirement that different web pages cannot execute concurrently.
This is a VM/Renderer implementation detail, so that a bug in the browser itself only impacts one tab, but it doesn't do anything to actually improve the current programming model. If you were confident enough in your browser to securely and reliably handle all input, then there is no advantage to using multiple host OS processes.
The V8 Javascript engine sounds like a huge improvement as well. Finally, precise, incremental garbage collection for Javascript! I'm hoping this is the beginning of the end for conservative garbage collection and (ugh!) reference counting. The JIT sounds good as well but there will be stiff competition in this area from Firefox 3.1 with TracingMonkey, and SquirrelFish is nothing to sneeze at either.
Now that Javascript performance is on its way to being solved, and local storage and offline mode are close to becoming standard, the last bastion of non-Web applications is graphics. Browsers still don't provide a graphics API that could seriously challenge native apps for things like image and video editing, 3D graphics and games. VRML and SVG don't work as graphics APIs. Some people have forgotten, but we learned long ago that immediate mode is the only way to do graphics; scene graphs/retained mode are a dead end. We need OpenGL ES in the browser.
Looking even further ahead: if OpenCL was exposed to web applications as well, there's practically nothing that couldn't be done in a web app. At that point, Windows becomes irrelevant, and Microsoft's monopoly is finally broken.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
WebKit is dual licensed under LGPL and BSDL, so Google can use just about any license they wish, probably BSDL, same as their Gears stuff, but because of the additional LGPL, there will be no "problem" with the FSF and FOSS community.
However, since Mozilla is also under the LGPL, if Google chooses to use the LGPL for the project they could incorporate code from Mozilla if they wanted any...
By "figure out" do you mean "decide which app to hand it off to"?
There used to be a standard for that on *nix: mailcap files. Then GNOME and KDE did their own things that differ from that, leaving apps to deal with the resulting mess. Firefox will ask GNOME for handler info, then fall back on mailcap files. I keep hearing that GNOME and KDE will get their acts together and converge on something where if you set up a handler in KDE the GNOME API for getting a handler will see it... but until that happens, apps are stuck either talking to just one of them or having to duplicate a bunch of code. And Firefox does happen to be a GNOME app for the most part. There have been several KDE ports of it, but no one's ever stepped up to maintain them, unlike the GNOME code (lack of interest from the KDE community?), so they withered and died.
In any case, the right solution here is a sane OS-level MIME registry, not every app having to query umpteen bazillion MIME registries du jour.
Sounds like a javascript problem that won't get fixed with Chrome because Google is providing their own javascript engine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Opera_9.5.png
Once again, Opera leads the way.
I haven't read the Unified GC Theory, but here is my take on it:
Read the paper. It explains that the kinds of optimizations that are applied to tracing GC's start to give them the characteristics of reference counting GC's, and the kinds of optimizations that are applied to reference counting GC's start to give them the characteristics of tracing GC's.
More significantly, the page does exist, but there's an access restriction or mod_rewrite style rule to 404 the page.
Compare:
http://www.google.com/chrome
http://www.google.com/thisdontexist
So hopefully we don't have to wait long for the other shoe to drop :-)
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
I'm surprised at comments such as: "do we really need another browser". If you bother to read through that comic, there are some impressive features. I have done enterprise dev and maintained enterprise dev where a bloody site will take so damn long to do something that it would just time out. Features like the memory usage stamp for a website would be able to let you know possibly per page you click what you need to work on. The favorites page on a New Tab is also pretty cool. Also isolating your plugin processes such that if your flash component in a website causes a crash you don't have to reboot the entire PC (especially on a M$ crap box where Ctrl + Alt + delete != sudo kill -9 processId). Follow through the comic strip, as geeks you'll be pleasantly surprised at what Google is about to bring to the table. RTFM (the comic strip in this case).
In Opera this already works, tabs (by default) seem to be at the top, address bar and other stuff below it.
- Raynet --> .