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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
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.
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;
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.
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
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
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.
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 ]
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
That would use too much screen space for me. Also, you would be taken more seriously if you don't present your personal preference as some kind of universal truth.
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?
Yes but unless you regularly open 20+ tabs it going to waste a lot of screen real state.
Besides it's ugly, the tab titles get cut tiny anyway, this time always not just when using many tabs.
Now if you only use one window I understand it and I in fact would demand such a layout, but I *like* having separate windows for separate tasks. I often have 2-3 windows (spread on 2 virtual desktops) each one with 1-4 tabs.
Other times I use the tabs as a stack where I simply middle click what I want to read further and keep reading, sequentially. In this case screen space is more relevant than navigability.
All around I like that horizontal tabs are supported and default in most modern browsers but I do understand why these extensions exists.
But... the future refused to change.