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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."
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."
I believe what Google is looking to accomplish is to trade on their brand name in an attempt to further dislodge Internet Explorer.
Remember when AOL purchased Netscape? AOL didn't care about the browser in the slightest. They wanted Netscape for the brand name. To the vast majority of users, Netscape was the Internet.
Google has since taken that place. Google is the Internet to many people. So much so that Google has felt compelled to to prevent the genericizing of their mark.
In this particular case, however, the strength of their mark works to Google's advantage. They have already convinced millions of users to install their desktop software. If they can further convince millions of users to install and use their browser, they can cause enough of a disruption to finally remove IE's leadership in the browser market. Especially given the solid work already done by FireFox, Opera, and Safari. With only another 10% marketshare loss on the whole, even the most stubborn websites will be forced to support third party browsers. And once they support third party browser, it will be very little time before the technological superiority of the alternative browsers causes them to add special features not available for Internet Explorer users.
It will be Netscape vs. Internet Explorer all over again. Except that instead of two giants fighting it out, it will be Microsoft against everyone else. And when everyone else happens to be giants in their own right, Microsoft's prospects will start looking rather grim.
In effect, this move is a blow aimed squarly at Redmond. Not for the purposes of truth, justice, and the freedom of all mankind; as I'm sure many will imagine. Rather, for the purpose of hitting back at Microsoft for their attempts to leverage their monopoly in promoting MSN Search over Google. The only difference is that Google Search is a good product and it is entrenched. Internet Explorer hasn't been a good product since Microsoft stopped developing it nearly 8 years ago (piss-poor upgrades pretending to be standards-compliant not withstanding), and its entrenchments are slowly falling to competition.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Found the comic link: http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, but it's September fools day, right?
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.
I believe you're confused as to what "404 Not Found" means. It means the page you're looking for isn't there, not that the server is overloaded or can't handle the request. It's not slashdotted.
However, this is not Google's normal 404 page. They've definitely configured www.google.com/chrome differently than the rest of the site, so they're obviously planning to put something there.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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 wonder how this will affect Google's relationship with the Mozilla foundation? IIRC, Google is one of Mozilla's primary sources of funding, as they pay for the rights to be the default search engine on Firefox.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
Can't stay on task long enough to read a Slashdot summary ? Better up your Ritalin dose.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Apple chose KHTML as the foundation of WebKit for the size and quality of the codebase compared with Gecko, despite having Gecko experts working on the project. It makes sense that others would choose WebKit for the same reasons.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Just when you thought Google wasn't going to get any cooler, we try desperately to prove you wrong.
Don't worry, it won't be out of Beta until IE 10.
Now with Omni Bar, the omniscient Awesome Bar
Just when you thought data mining couldn't get any closer to home
OK, in all seriousness I think it's nice to see another Webkit based browser around. I'm personally waiting to see the Epiphany team's Webkit based browser. Hopefully, Google's Chrome project will spur some innovations that the Firefox/Safari/Opera/IE competition has failed to supply. Maybe the JS engine will prove it's worth as well, speedups in this area are always nice.
So uh, what's special about "tabs above the address bar (not below)"? I happen prefer my tabs on the bottom, and Opera provides an option for that. Come to think of it, I believe the default in Opera is for the tab bar to be placed above the address bar. I'm certain Firefox's tab bar placement can be changed, as well (through plugins or not).
It seems like a very odd feature to point out...javascript VM, open source, and TABS ON TOP!! Huh?
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;
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".
I don't think Google has enough of my personal information, so this will be just wonderful.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
For what it's worth, the 404 error page being served on http://www.google.com/chrome is not their standard one - their standard one is to search for the whole url from the looks of things?
would be an *online browser*. Like Google docs. Imagine just how great it would be not to need a browser to go online. History, cookies, bookmarks, all stored on Google servers. Plus it would be incredibly fast since the internet is already on Google servers!
Also that would be very convenient for Google, they could access our private information locally on their servers, no need to "call home". Hell they could even check with our e-bank statements to see how much money we can spend so they could offer really well-targeted ads.
That would be huge. All they need for me to sign up is to throw in some features involving blogs, mashups and Spacebook.
lucm, indeed.
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.
Did anyone else notice the number of current or former Firefox developers name-checked in that comic? Ben Goodger was the Firefox project lead until recently. The most significant part of this news may be that Google is pulling people off Firefox development (assuming they were contributing to Firefox while working there) and getting them to write a new browser. Still, Firefox is working pretty well and their financial future is secure for the next few years - thanks to wads of cash from Google - so we need not be too worried.
Apart from that, my verdict is 'show us the code'. Announcements of future plans and vapourware are not really interesting, even when it's Google.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I've always liked Webkit, but am not as big a fan of Safari since it doesn't have the extensibility and flexibility of Firefox - so I'm going to follow this project closely. There may be some side stories to keep an eye on:
- What will this do to Firefox? If Google Chrome is successful, I suspect it'll be at Firefox's expense rather than IE - at least in the near term.
- What will this mean for Google's add-ons for other browsers? They talk specifically about the "Gears" developers' dissatisfaction with the way current browsers work as a primary motivator for this project. So does this mean Google's tools on browsers other than Chrome are going to become unwanted step-children? That's could hurt the other browsers (if Chrome is popular), but it could also turn around and bite Google.
- What about the Mac (and Linux)? This is important to me, anyway. Google's Mac support is stellar in some areas and poor in others. Will Chrome's development on platforms other than Windows stay apace of its progress on Windows? Maybe the comic answers this, but I haven't managed to get all the way through it yet. I'm on page 10 and *still* there's no mention of any villian.
#DeleteChrome
I don't think so ;)
Based on Page 4, Google is designing the browser as if it were an operating system. This is something that I commented on previously in the discussion of Microsoft's approach to IE8. 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.
If IE8 and "Google Chrome" are moving in this direction, what will we see from Safari and Firefox? Safari 4 betas give no indication of a fundamental re-architecting. Firefox 4 is still at least a year away, and so far no one in that community has been publicly talking about this kind of redesign. And Opera... who knows?
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Actually, the opposite should be true. Memory won't "leak" from tab to tab. When the tab gets closed, it's memory gets returned to the OS pool by hook or by crook. Only the UI itself should leak memory over the lifetime of the browser.
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
Are you kidding?? Did we just Slashdot Google? If not then why does it read "Not Found Error 404" on http://www.google.com/chrome?
Less surprising perhaps, I keep getting the status code 301 for www.microsoft.com/steve-ballmers-chair
She made the willows dance
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.
Yeah, plus rumour has it Gecko's api is baroque in the extreme. Anyway, given Google's deal with Firefox (the default search engine stuff), it's nice to see they've made their decision on what appears to be purely technical terms, rather than political ones.
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 ]
Have you read the comic? Google has some really cool ideas for Chrome, making it quite different from another browsers, so you won't get 'another firefox' but an entire new browser. I hope it won't end up like another google products which never go past beta.
On page 13, they have completed Hitler's dream. Germany seems to occupy Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland,most of Austria, Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary.
Weird because the rest of the chart seems pretty correct.
This must mean all of Google are Nazi's.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
If you think Google's www.google.com address just goes to one server that picks out different content by file name, you're in for a surprise. Try the http://www.google.com/chrome address and the http://www.google.com/chrome1 address with a tool that lets you look at the HTTP headers. Look at the "Server" header. Different server code. Google runs a high performance, massively load balanced, widely geographically distributed, HTTP front end that figures out what server to pass things to based on the URI part of the URL. They don't need to do separate hostnames (although they can still do that, too, such as http://maps.google.com/ and http://mail.google.com/).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I find Firefox a pig, especially on G4 Macs. So I'm glad for the competition. Anyway, the new browser war is about speed and compliance so oddly enough it will lead to fewer incompatibles, not more. Finally, read the comic - there are some useful technical motivations to the browser which I think are compelling: Sandboxing, process pre-page, plugins in separate process, javascript compiled to native machine-code, fast garbage collection, etc...
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Scott McCloud is a comic book artist who authored "Zot!" He also wrote several comic books about comic books as a medium, the most famous of which being "Understanding Comics."
Curiously, he was born Scott McLeod, and the Highlander's last name was MacLeod, and he was Scottish. However, Scott McCloud was born in 1960, and the Highlander film was released in 1986, so if it's anything more than coincidence, the Highlander was named after the cartoonist.
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
So will Google add ad filtering capabilities?
There are several answers for that question in the comic. Most of them can't be implemented in Firefox (in fact, any of the other browsers afaik) without a major rewrite, and you could want some of the features they are introducing there.
This isnt about "just another open source browser", it goes to the core of several problems that browsers have with today's web requirements.
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.
the name of the VM doesn't exactly send the signal that it will be the fastest one around?
Hey, I'm a RoadWarrior driving one of the last of the V8s, you insensitive clod!
That's because Flash 9 received a brand new Virtual Machine. FireFox was given the code for it (it's called Tamarin), but it has not yet made it into a release. Once it does, FireFox and Flash 9 should show similar performance profiles.
Previous versions of Flash were absolutely terrible from a performance perspective. So the entire JS-language community is slowly moving forward. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
All their moves are remarkably coherent for the amount of activty/discussion they provoke. I think some of the people around google (investors) are a little wonky, but the major moves seem to be consistantly towards a handful of goals:
-Divorce the application market from the platform. To the extent of making their applications more desirable (with ad placement). Thus preventing users from offline software. I worry about this goal as it also is encouraging software subscription models.. The alleged chrome aims to bring these 'gadgets' to browsers to allow richer content than the current standards provide. Without the process of trying to ratify standards, just putting it out there and saying 'standardized or not, here it is under a license that lets other browsers copy it'. Firefox will probaably embrace it, though MS will push silverlight for all its worth.
-Get everyone looking at ads they charge for, and correlating whatever data they can to make it targeted (search related, location related in maps). Android is a recent example, a move essentially to get people looking at the internet more, and undoubtedly to provide ad-revenure-influenced POI in their GPS capabilities.
-Help the general state of internet-based commerce. I don't know much about google checkout, but at least google is making sure they have a controlling stake in the game. In part, they directly profit, but more importantly, they have the capacity encourage secure online payment strategies to more arbitrary vendors. Google Chrome (if real) would play into this based on the comic. A lot of emphasis on sandbox and isolation. Hopefully, meaningfully more secure, but at the least instilling consumer confidence in online commerce in the face of media discussion of online commerce and identity theft.
-Trying not to look like a big, scary company as they do this. They realize their product is the attention of the users. They must keep the users from being mad, which means free services of quality. The more they succeed, the more data they inherently have access to, and the more privacy concerns they face. For the time being, they haven't been too overt in doing evil, as they know how tenuous their position is. Google came from nowhere, and is currently a funnel for revnue and investing. Google always must know the next anybody is waiting for their chance to usurp when the masses declare google either stagnant or evil.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Opera_9.5.png
Once again, Opera leads the way.
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).
Does that mean that their relationship with Mozilla will be ending?
2. Does it run on Linux?
3. Does it support Plugins?
4. Does it phone home and notify Google of important statistics, like what web pages I view, what ads I click, what products I buy, etc.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".