The Future of Google Chrome

TRNick writes "Lars Bak, who heads up development of Google Chrome's cornerstone javascript engine, talks about why Google is so focused on in-browser javascript performance, the role Chrome has played in driving up javascript performance in other browsers, and why it's taking so long to introduce support for third-party extensions. 'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more,' he says."

Comments

As we've seen.

[stonedcat]

As we've seen with Windows and IE.... the distinction between browser and and OS matters quite a bit. That is if you don't want to get accused of being and evil monopoly.

Re:As we've seen.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are fairly clearly two different senses of "distinction" at work here.

The lawsuit concerns the question of whether or not a web browser is structurally distinct from the OS or not: is it an integral component, or an instance of bundling of two essentially unrelated things.

This interview concerns the developer's observation that people's use of the browser doesn't draw much of a distinction between the browser and the OS(in that they consider the computer broken if web access isn't working, and in that they consider webapps to be on par with native apps).

It is also quite possible that, shockingly, an individual developer, speaking semiformally about his project, has a slightly different view than does Google's legal department, speaking on behalf of Google's official position.

Re:As we've seen.

[elrous0]

in that they consider the computer broken if web access isn't working

I suspect that will be MS's essential defense of bundling a default brower (IE) with Windows. People EXPECT any modern OS to come with a default browser. Most of them don't even realize the browser is a distinct program from the OS itself. The argument against MS not bundling a browser with their OS is a relic from the 90's. These days it would be suicide for anyone to release an OS without built-in web capability right out of the box.

Re:As we've seen.

[Tarlus]

Buzzwords like "cloud computing" and "online OS" don't change the fact that this is not a paradigm shift

And "netbook."

Thank you for writing this post, it really nails my opinion of the matter on the head as well. This whole new webapp craze has created such a stink in the IT world because so many people assume that it's going to phase out good-old-fashioned binaries. This is simply not the case. Like any tool, webapps are extremely useful for the right job. Regular binary programs are extremely useful for the right job. Writing a document with a webapp that is OS-independent and stored remotely is a nifty idea (especially if your laptop dies or is stolen, your data is safe), but the thought of something like MatLab, number-crunching or large spreadsheets using Javascript makes me cringe. Of course, people out there are still going to try doing this, and that's the crappy part about webapp popularity.

The two approaches just need to find a balance and coexist. There will continue to be a distinction between webapps and the local OS because there will continue to be different people who have different uses for their computers. Average Joe will not know or care what OS is on his Eee as long as he can use his Google Mail and Google Calendar and Google Documents... and as long he knows that when the Eee is pickpocketed or dropped and broken, he can still get his data back from Google using another computer. IT Dude Tarlus (me) will continue to be anal-retentive about my OS, my software and the more advanced applications I have for them. I admit that I have written and use webapps, but only because they're the best tool for the job at hand. But I'll stick with a native word processor. (And no vasectomy, please.) =)

The whole point of Chrome

[LeDopore]

is that its future per se doesn't matter.

What Google cares about is that there is a least one standards-compliant browser out there with fast javascript. Sure Google might have a slight preference for people using Chrome over another browser with fast javascript (like, say, Safari), but what really matters to them is that they are able to deliver web apps that are fast enough to be reasonable competitors to traditional desktop apps.

Chrome is a combination insurance policy/open-source soapbox whose purpose is to make sure that Google apps (and other web apps) will always have a browser to run on.

Re:The whole point of Chrome

[m.ducharme]

Maybe 1) re-writing the firefox JS engine is too much work or 2) would be too disruptive to a well-established open-source project, or 3) wouldn't be as supa-cool awesome as starting from scratch (I'm assuming that Chrome began as a %20 time project), or 4) they felt the Firefox dev team would have simply ignored the work done by the Chrome people, or 5) they would have to've reworked the whole browser, and not just the JS engine.

I'm sure I could think of more reasons why the Chrome developers would want to do their own thing rather than submit changes to the Firefox engine, but I hope you get the point. Nothing about the bazaar forces you to join a current project and push updates, or even makes that practise logically necessary. Sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes not.

Re:annoyed

[Stormwatch]

Am I the only one annoyed by "Google are..."

That is UK-English, it seems TechRadar is a British site. I agree, it sounds really strange and illogical if you are used to US-English.

If the browser is the OS...

[MobyTurbo]

How come it's Windows-only still if the browser is all that matters and the OS isn't, Google?

Re:I know the future...

[Kagura]

Being uninstalled?

Until they get support for Firefox addons or get a base of addons equal to Firefox's, it won't be going on my computer anymore. ;*( I used it for about two weeks after its release, and then switched back to Firefox and never looked back.

Re:annoyed

[MrNaz]

YES!

YYYY/MM/DD makes so much more sense, as it means that you get sane sorting when ordering using a computer.

DD/MM/YYYY results in a mess of dates, whereas YYYY/MM/DD always orders dates in chronological order.

Re:annoyed

[john.wingfield]

To be fair, we've butchered Latin as well as German.

Re:I know the future...

[cyclocommuter]

More specifically for me, until Chrome incorporates addons/extensions equivalent to NoScript, Adblock, and Flashblock I won't be using it except perhaps when I need to do a quick check of my Google Calendar appointments.

Re:I know the future...

[Ninnle Labs, LLC]

Because not everyone in the world is a programmer?

Re:Muddy-soft waters...

[__aamnbm3774]

ok, it was exploitable, but does that mean it was fundamentally a bad idea?
can't we have some type of integration once in a while?

Re:I know the future...

[digitig]

Now everyone stop complaining about Chrome having no extension! If Chrome is really that good for everything else except has no add-ons, and if you really so sick of getting that noscript/adblock add-on, why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?

Am I missing something?

Yes. Not all potential users are developers. In fact, I suggest that the majority of potential users are not developers. Telling a random user of web browsers that they need to learn to program to make it do what other free browsers already do is unlikely to convert them. And of those of us who are developers? Well, lets see: shall I spend my free time developing tools for Chrome that are already working perfectly satisfactorily for me in Firefox, or shall I spend my free time doing someting that I think actually needs doing?

Re:I know the future...

[0xABADC0DA]

if you really so sick of getting that noscript/adblock add-on, why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?

Time to develop extensions support and equivalent noscript add-on: six months, full time
Time to complain about lack of extensions in Google Chrome: <10 seconds

Your question is why people don't give up 6 months of their time instead of complaining why Google released a browser without modern features? That's madness. Developers work on open source for free when they feel like it, so unless some developer is really excited about reinventing NoScript they are going to complain instead.

And I'll go even further and turn the tables on you. If you are so sick of people complaining about lack of extensions why haven't you fixed it yet? And even if you are contributing to the project, why are you taking your free time to complain about everybody else instead of working on plugins? The chromium code is right there, so get back to work.

Re:I know the future...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Because not everyone in the world is a programmer?

I'm a programmer. But that doesn't mean I don't have better things to do than play with web browsers.

If I wanted to work on yet another solution to an already solved problem, I would write accounting software for fun.

Re:I know the future...

[Jurily]

why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?

Because we already have it with firefox.

Re:Either I don't get it, or they don;t get it

[Lord Ender]

The combination of your statement and your sig makes it clear that you are one of those people who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. You weren't like that when you were young, were you?

I think it's pretty clear when he means: the OS is becoming little more than the driver for the dumb-terminal you use to access your web-based applications. Stuff like file system management is pointless if all your data lives server-side in web apps.

You can go after his terminology in a display of petty pedantry, but it doesn't change the fact that what he is saying is becoming increasingly the way things are. We may not be there yet. We may not ever get there. But that is certainly where the momentum is.

Re:

[drew]

I strongly disagree. JavaScript is a great language - in fact I think it is one of the best dynamic languages out there. The biggest problem is that 95% of the people who program JavaScript never bother to figure out the right way to use the language. I have heard people who had worked for years programming in JavaScript (actually JScript) claim that the language does not support inheritance, which could not be more untrue. As Douglas Crockford stated in a talk titled "JavaScript: The Good Parts":

I began programming JavaScript the same way everybody else began programming JavaScript: I didn't learn it. Just tried to figure it out by trial and error. It was like "There's not enough here to be worth having to learn it. I'll just fumble around with it." That's not true of any other language. Every other language that I've ever attempted, I would learn it - I would learn it deep and I would learn it good. JavaScript is the only language I've ever encountered where "I should be able to fake it."

I don't know why JavaScript has that aspect about it, but I find that's pretty much universal. Most of the people who start using JavaScript really don't bother to learn it. But they expect it to work anyway, and often they are disappointed when it doesn't work the way they thought it should, when they have no reason to expect that it should work the way they thought it should.

If people would actually bother to learn the language (and could be convinced to give up the notion that you can't do OO properly without classes) you'd probably hear a lot less hatred for it.

Also, adding other support for other languages wouldn't do anything to address the biggest difficulty in writing code that runs in a browser, which is the incompatibilities between the different browsers' DOM and CSS implementations.