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Examining Chrome's Source Code
An anonymous reader writes "Chrome is open source, and there's clearly still some work to be done on it. In this article, Neil McAllister decided to take a peek under Chrome's hood and view it through the eyes of the developers who will improve and maintain it in the coming years. It seems Google's open source browser currently has much to offer prospective hackers — provided they use Windows. Quoting: 'The Chromium site explains how to download the source code for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows. Unfortunately, if you're eagerly awaiting a Mac version of Chrome, you shouldn't hold your breath. As the Mac OS X area of the Chromium developer site explains, "Right now, the Mac build is a work in progress that is much closer to the start than the finish." In fact, according to the latest status report, the Chrome developers have yet to get even the browser core running under Mac OS X. Rendering actual Web pages is still a long way off, to say nothing of a usable Aqua GUI. Then again, the Linux version is in arguably even worse shape.'"
So they want to develop a cross-platform browser.
Why exactly is it then tied that tightly to a platform that porting it over to other platforms seems to basically mean starting all over again? After all, it's not like all 3 platforms would be completely alien in the backend -- they are POSIX compliant. Then the GUI: it's not like there aren't any cross-platform widget sets out there. But even if you want to go for individual approaches for each platform, then you still can separate functionality from the GUI.
So why again is the Mac port "closer to start than finish" (especially when reminding that Chrome is based on Webkit) and the Linux port "even worse"?
Chrome is a combination of numerous libraries and source code, from sources as diverse as Google, Microsoft, the KDE project and Apple. While this allowed them to initially put together the browser relatively rapidly, there is a lack of cohesion. This will surely lead to maintenance issues later on down the road, due to the hacks necessary to get everything to mesh.
There are enough maintainability issues with, for example, the Mozilla codebase, where they wrote most of the code themselves. It'll be far worse for Chrome.
They still have a near monopoly on the entire Linux desktop market!
Truth is, I don't really care if Chrome runs under Linux or not. What _is_ important is that there is a lot of buzz about a non-IE browser out there, and that will help Linux users no matter which browser they use. Chrome will get the attention of at least some PHBs and Frontpa^w webdevs who code IE-only websites. I have been complaining about this for years but now there finally is a product that they will have a hard time ignoring. Firefox was close, but was only talked about by gearheads. Even my mother-in-law asked me about Chrome. Which is too bad, as she's on Ubuntu and feels left out...
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
i knew it from running chrome in wine there are just too many issues already, too many pure-windows dependencies, the code seems very windows centric. Which is real pity for google, they might as well go to kiss and make up with Ballmer so they can throw chairs together at Steve Jobs and the linux community. Also a real pity, i wonder if the so called improved javascript VM will actually ever make it in the real world... cause we REALLY REALLY need optimized javascript; not to mention optimized Flash but thats another problem... - zanfr http://www.kruhm.org/
the point is that since webkit was written for and compiles on mac, what've they done to break it?
Chrome is currently faster than Firefox at most things even when Tracemonkey is enabled. I mostly work with browser based math/finance apps, and one of the most intensive things that can be done is a numerical integral. No other browser even comes close to Chrome in terms of speed. The only drawback is that it isn't cross platform yet. From what I hear, Tracemonkey is working really well on different processors so it will be an interesting match up. Try pasting this code into JavaScript Shell from Chrome and Firefox for a comparison.
It uses webkit for layout, but it uses a (sort of) homegrown library for rendering:
http://gigaom.com/2008/09/02/google-open-sources-skia-graphics-engine/
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/skia/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Unfortunatelly, Firefox wasn't close at all; it simply shifted the mindset in most places from "we support only IE" to "we support only IE and Firefox".
It was noticeable when you use something else, like Opera... (luckily not on sites originating in my area of the world, since Opera here has from 5 to 25 percent, depending on the country; and since Firefox has over 40% in most of them, aiming sites for duopoly doesn't work)
Seems like three major browsers is a minimum needed for them to start noticing _true_ interoperability...
One that hath name thou can not otter
The great irony of all of this is that Chrome (also Safari) directly owe the KDE and Qt projectÅ credit for constructing the base on which this is built. And now they are primarily targeting windows. When discussing either Safari or Chrome, I never ever even see mention of the F/OSS projectÅ to which they owe their existence. More than a pity, itÅ a crying shame. Do no evil my ass.
That was a fun read.
I mean FireFox 3.0 was touted for its "security"....In reality that browser offers even less protection / mitigation against web exploits than IE7 on Vista...
and this
I for one don't run FireFox 3.0 . . . I don't consider it even a worthy challenger (though it sure is fast) to IE7 let alone IE8 (due to lack of protection / mitigation technologies, the vuln counts etc.),
Now, I'm no expert, I'm not saying he's wrong, but what I do know is that this goes against everything I've been hearing around here.
And google is really happy with that. They don't need to target the linux market because Mozilla is already working for them here.
The target is obviously internet explorer.
I disagree for two reasons.
First, we can only presume Google wants Chrome to run on Android, Google's handset OS. Which is based on Linux. So clearly Google has a direct and powerful motivation to target Linux with Chrome. (In fact a much stronger motivation than to get Chrome running on OS X - I wouldn't be surprised to see the Android/Linux version out earlier.)
Second, one of the best ways to weaken IE is to weaken Windows - the less people running Windows, the less run IE. But if Chrome is Windows-only, that just strengthens Windows as the only platform able to run the 'best' browser ('best' at least in Google's eyes and those that like Chrome).
In other words, every IE convert to Chrome is still locked in to Windows. Whereas Google's long-term goal is to make the OS irrelevant so long as it can access Google's web services.
If a large enough subgroup of "the blue e takes me to the internet" group starts thinking that google=internet, then a convenient "Download chrome! Make your google experience even better." link on every search page can easily convert them.
Chrome naturally consists of many other components as well, such as the actual user interface, all the glue code to actually read and write files (like the cache), doing network connections, DNS lookups, checking SSL certificates, handling its famous sandbox processes, loading plugins and all sorts of other things.
I'd say that under google's perspective, the core is the Javascript VM.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Less crashing, more fastyness.
The *real* benefit would be to have a button that reloads the page using the MSHTML engine, and then intelligently remembers that for next time, so that broken shitty sites would continue to work. It could be a sort of crowdsourced, 'everyone seems to prefer this in IE' kind of approach.
Some sort of automated compatibility would basically remove any reason to use IE over the faster, snappier, more stable Chrome.
There are some theories on the internet of what RLZ.DLL is doing, no one is 100% sure. The problem is that google can change RLZ.dll via GoogleUpdate at any time and it can potentially do anything.