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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."
Being uninstalled?
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.
You can't take the sky from me.
Am I the only one annoyed by "Google are..."
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.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
I ask, because I don't know of many. Additionally, it is viewed as "unsafe" for corporate use. My company will not allow us to use Chrome on our computers, but we are allowed to use IE and FireFox with impunity.
I have a bad feeling about this...
And its built on JavaScript.
If they they create a framework or engine which internet would be dependent on, they would control the web. The plugins which try to compete against JavaScript will lose their place when its achieve this speed and Google Gears integration.
I think what would happen is Chrome framework being (a restricted) interface to the OS and media control libraries which would try to be what ActiveX,Flash and Java do today(within their plugin interface). Except it would be built-in into Chrome and executed inside the content.
More "the basic distinction between the shell and the browser". OTOH, when you can run MacOS, Linux, and WinXP simultaneously on not too high end equipment (a 2 year old 24 inch iMac w/3gb ram in my case) then you have to ask just which layer is the "operating system", and which is the shell.
Best Slashdot Co
I would rather have the browser guys work on getting something OTHER than javascript into the browsers. Javascript is getting better, but you only polish a turd so much.
With compilers like GWT, Pyjamas, and HotRuby, I sometimes wonder if JavaScript is starting to emerge as a "portable assembly language" for dynamic languages, the way C is often used by higher-level language compilers. I mean, when it comes down to it JS is basically just hash tables and closures, some of the basic elements required for dynamic language execution.
Given a fast-as-C javascript engine, you could have a pretty decent VM to share between several dynamic languages, and due to JS's dynamic nature compiling these languages to JS is fairly trivial.
I mentioned this once on reddit and someone called it a 'braindead' approach. That may be true. I'm not sure. He also pointed out that many things you'd have to do to get languages like Ruby running in JS would require passing the context as a function argument, which he claimed would probably bypass any potential optimization by the JS compiler. Not sure about that either.
But I find it really interesting (and cool!) that JS's heavy web presence is giving it such attention in both the "compiler backend" and optimization departments simultaneously. Whether it's a braindead approach or not, it sure seems to be drawing a lot of interest lately.
How come it's Windows-only still if the browser is all that matters and the OS isn't, Google?
So Javascript is becoming what Java should have been, the run-anywhere language, if only Java hadn't been such a superficially ugly language and goddam slow - the browser is the equivalent of the JRE.
If all JRE's (browsers) are alike in syntax, semantics, security and libraries then the faster one will become the shell of choice to run these cloudy, ajaxy apps. And we'll partying like it's 1980 with browser-and-cloud architectures replacing greenscreen-and-mainframe.
It's a shame that, like you said, javascript is superficially pretty but deeply broken (namespaces? proper, native OO? etc.)
'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'
Wanting it to be so and it being so are two entirely different things.
I disagree.
The problem with javascript is still browser incompabilities, and that would not lessen with other scriping languages.
How about haskell-script?
I use it as my main browser. I've got a portable Firefox and (of course) IE, but I only fire them up when something isn't working right in Chrome. This is happening less and less.
If Google REALLY wants to help people out, they'd provide Chrome with native support for the functions that the noscript plugin gives to Firefox.
...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.
Ah, to clarify, it was Microsoft who managed to muddy the waters first between browser and OS with their implementation, with every damn window on the screen essentially being a IE browser. I certainly don't get the same when I install Firefox on top of any other OS.
I'd be much happier with Chrome if they fixed the little things, like rendering checkboxes properly (especially when it breaks Gmail, of all things) or getting Flash to stop freezing after a few seconds of video after fast-forwarding (which breaks sites like Youtube)
That would be far too awesome to ever happen on this side of the mirror.
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The problem is people still fail to grasp the difference between Javascript and DOM and CSS manipulation....
All Javascript engines have been ECMA compliant for 5 years now. Javascript incomparability is not the problem, it is the DOM and CSS incompatabilities.
"resistance is futile, you will be assimilated"
i think slashdot needs to update its icons
the borg bill gates icon is threatening only circa 1996. microsoft of 2009 is on a real decline
meanwhile, the company of all-domination in 2009 is obviously google. we need a remake of the google icon for slashdot to include the borg cube
and the microsoft icon should be remade with just a non-borg bill gates holding a jar of mosquitoes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Me fail English? That's unpossible.
Google is a company. "Google" is a single noun, just like "group", "family", "staff", etc.
The staff is ready to work.
My family is going on a picnic.
The group is going to be late.
Google is working on Chrome.
Hey, I hate Javascript like any other, but Python?
Ugh. You ain't serious, are you?
Yes, people tend to use OS as a synonym for the shell (graphical or text) or the packaging environment, where the OS is normally just the kernel and maybe its modules.
"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"
Um, the Web is actually an internetwork, that is networks of networks. It is *not* part of the computer, it is a resource the computer accesses, based on user commands.
Remember Larry Ellison telling us "The network is the computer"? No, Larry, the network is the network. The computer is the computer. Apparently you get this in your CS4xx classes, the ones you skipped when you had your one Big Idea, kinda like the kids who come out for the NBA Draft a year early and skip their NBA4xx classes on foul shots and firearm safety.
The browser may be the most-used, most common, multifunctional software on the computer, but the basic distinction between the OS and the browser is that the browser can't yet boot the computer, or render it useful for other things such as file management, network connectivity, or printing. The browser is an application. We see Windows with so many services and features that intertwine the browser (and other apps) with it that it is hard to tell where the OS stops and the app begins, but that's the simplistic view anyways.
How about Google makes good on that statement and pump out a down and dirty OS/browser combo that just does it? Include an install that lets you multi-boot XP/Vista/Windows7 or whatever Linux ya got, and people will be choosing either 'ChromeOS' or 'my usual OS', and lamenting that they have the wrong one loaded for whatever they want to do next. Or go whole hog and write it as a VM shell, and let Windows run underneath it. Xen is giving their stuff away now, how about leveraging that? And yes, I know of at least one reason right now why that doesn't work. I'm just ignoring it for the sake of the argument.
I know, I know. One of my machines is still a Sempron, the others are Pentium 4 CPUs, and I had no real reason to upgrade until now. So current VMWare won't like those so much, what with VT extensions missing. So I've got a reason to upgrade, finally - taking Xen up on their offer.
Bleagh. The apps guys are still trying to make the OS superfluous. And making stupid statements.
ps - which CPU should I buy to be able to dive into VMware and Xen in a big way? Core 2 Duo or AMD?
arghhh....
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It seems to me that the browser will not be able to replace the desktop ... or even claim to be an "OS" in anything but the most attenuated sense... until we have the ability to use something other than javascript in a reasonably cross-platform way. Imagine for a second that Windows could only be programmed in Visual Basic, or Linux could only be programmed in C. We'd absolutely hate it, and we'd be right to hate it.
Now, granted, any given development platform generally displays a preference for a given programming language. If you're going to develop Gnome applications, you're probably going to use C, if Cocoa, then Objective C, etc. But right now the situation in the web space is one of total locking to Javascript, which isn't even all that good of a language.
What I really want to see is a reasonable degree of cross-platform support for the use of a reasonable variety of object-oriented scripting languages embedded in the browser, as plugins. So I can develop web pages in HTML + Ruby, or HTML + Python, or HTML + Javascript, as is best suited for my application. The hooks are there in the HTML specs to do this, but browser implementations don't seem to have caught up.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Javascript HAS proper, native OO. It just doesn't have class-based OO (though some libraries like Prototype hook onto the prototype-based OO and provide not only class-based OO, but with mixins, too). Yes, there IS a distinction; no, just because you don't use prototype-based OO often or aren't used to thinking in its terms, that doesn't make it `improper'.
it's faster to develop for a single platform than to use a shotgun approach.
Yeah, but telling your developers that they can develop for windows only and then porting the application is likely to be a lot slower than writing things portably from day 1.
An argument to back this assertion up: the sooner you fix a bug, the cheaper it is to fix [this is widely believed]. Every dependence on a particular platform that's not put into a platform abstraction layer is a bug. If you develop for every platform all the time, you'll find and fix those bugs immediately, paying the lowest possible price for portability. If you develop for $PLATFORM first and then port, you'll pay the largest possible price for portability.
The stereotypical Brits I've met have too many conflicted ideas about the staid traditions of their mythical England to internalize the linguistic fact that US English is the archaic snapshot of common English from the American colonial era. They are emotionally invested in the idea that Brits are traditional and Americans are new-fangled and immature, when really it is the UK that has been punking out the language and forgetting its past.
Fortunately, many of the Brits I've met in the tech sector are not stereotypical Brits, so we can get right down to drinking and laughing at our respective stereotypical cousins further down the bar...
I would rather have the browser guys work on getting something OTHER than javascript into the browsers. Javascript is getting better, but you only polish a turd so much.
Right! What we really need is a platform-independent, reasonably fast language, with built-in security.
Perhaps we could have a language which compiled into some sort of 'bytecode', so if developers wanted to use Python or Ruby or Whatever they could, and they could still compile into the same bytecode.
While we're at it, we could have one language particularly aimed at writing this bytecode. It could retain the popular syntax of C and C++, but fix confusing and often-misused features like nonstandard numerical types, pointer arithmetic, and operator overloading.
We could even enable this new web-programming-language in older browsers using plugins, like Flash and Quicktime do, so anyone who wanted to take advantage of its functionality could just download a plugin.
I, for one, look forward to the future when this fantastic technology becomes available. I'm certain web application writers will be all over it, in preference to the slow, browser-incompatibility-laden morass that is JavaScript.
This entire issue rapidly becomes a non-issue.
Be DAMNED if I'm running anything on my computer that some yahoo out there at some web site has decided is gonna run. Momma didn't raise no fool.
And the godz bless Firefox for the NoScripts addon!
I'm not buying into this "Your PC is a web client" concept.
yes! please!!! almost any other modern language would be preferable over JS!
i keep dreaming of Lua on the browser...
of course, if NativeClient ever gets stable and popular enough, it would be dead easy to use whatever language you wish to compile
-Kz-
the language itself is mostly compatible across browsers. the main problem is premature standardisation, see crockford's website to see how the language design was frozen before it was tested enough. so now we're stuck with terrible design decisions, like the 'which' keyword, the changing meaning of 'this', the 'not-quite-lexical' scoping of 'var', etc.
(of course, that's besides the DOM incompatibilities, and even worse, CSS completeness)
-Kz-
With my new phone, running Windows Mobile 6, I've struggled to find a good browser. PIE is dated and nearly useless. Skyfire is really neat, but it's still beta and it shows. Opera Mini is the best of the three, but it requires a Java MIDLet engine to run it. I would install and use a Google Chrome mobile browser in a heartbeat if it was good and fast. With Android, I'm hoping that that was part of the plan with Chrome all along!
The Future of Apple Safari
I guess the distinction between OS and browser does not matter much in the sense that eventually most browser will implement each browser tab/window as a different process. Which is actually a good thing. It can be used to enforce a stronger Same Origin Policy.
'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."
Outch. After this quote, I know I'm never going to test Chrome.
There is an absolutely vital distinction. The damn browser will happily run any code embedded in any website I visit. My OS (don't know about yours, but mine) only runs stuff that I explicitly tell it to, usually after explicitly installing it. In fact, I'd prefer even tighter limits on that.
If you don't get that distinction, your security mindset is fucked up.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Perhaps it's time to do away with phrases like "browser will replace the desktop" and "browser-based OS", because they seem to bring about angry friction in old-school developers. I tend to think that "desktop" operating systems and their BIOS's will eventually merge to provide a base hardware interface whereas the browser becomes a base for most software. And I say most, but realistically everything is on or going to the web and to say otherwise is a denial. It's been nearly 15 years since I started using the internet and all I've seen is a inexorable shift from OS-specific to browser-based. Sure there's obstacles related to privacy, technology, and people but it's only delays (the singularity is near?). All that said, I prefer Chrome as my primary perusal platform. It generally stays out of my way and handles things as I expect. Whether or not Google has its eye on a permanent place amongst similar products, its speedy minimalist approach is a sexy suggestion to its peers.
-- NeilO
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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":
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.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
as of now Chrome is windows-only.
There has been much talk about the browser (pick one) as being platform independent, but no one seems to have done this, esp. IE.
Building things like JS into a browser is nice and all, but until and unless all browsers stick to standards, we the end users will not see any true benefit.
I'm tired of switching from one browser to another just so I can see a web site or watch a video. I use Linux, BSD, and Windows, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but this is getting ridiculous...
I'm ready for Google to take it further so we can log into a google terminal server for our computing needs. Then we can really have $100 computers that are capable, since all they will have to do is work as a dumb terminal!
http://www.AmherstburgVisionCentre.com
last time I checked, it was a long way from even building properly.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Java doesn't want to be Javascript which is still a hack of a language where you can't even do basic things like simple AJAX calls without writing a load of code to compensate for the fact browser developers (well one developer in particular) are too petty to agree and make things work one way and as far as security goes it's all or nothing with Javascript unless you install some third party add-on (which should be unnecessary) to manage your per script settings.
I don't get what's so innovative about V8. Didn't both Apple and Mozilla do these things long before Chrome was announced?
Clever signature text goes here.
"basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more"
Oh yeah? Then why the fuck did Google do this http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/26/1547223&from=rss
I know comments against Google and supporting Microsoft get modded down on Slashdot (and still Microsoft continues to advertise here..werd) but Microsoft's share of the browser "market" is no more than Google's share of search.
What's the difference between the OS and the browser? Besides the obvious one, that an OS doesn't need an OS and desktop to host on, here's my number two difference: I can use (for example) KDE and Konqueror on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, other BSD variants, OpenSolaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OSX and Windows. I can use most Google websites with exactly three browsers: IE, FF and Safari. Konqueror is not supported. WebKit browsers are not supported. Hell, Chrome isn't that well supported, and it's their own dogfood!
Google is an advocate for what I call "cross-platform lite". Which is about as tasteless as "miller lite" but not nearly as filling.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"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,'" which is exactly where Microsoft went wrong with Internet Explorer. That's why the OS-wide 'Internet Options' are on a menu inside an app, which is even more stupid and illogical than complaining that a UK website doesn't use US English.
'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."
Wasn't that MS' argument in the 1990's about not removing IE? Didn't they say that IE was an integral part of Windows and therefore couldn't be removed? The more things change, the more they remain the same!
I use firefox at work because it has great add-ons to help web development. I use Chrome at home because it's fast and has clean UI with innovative , useful features.
Most people just use IE because it is they think it IS the internet. They don't really understand what a browser is so can't really judge differences.
The browser(s) that most people use in the future will be the one(s) that is/are most easily accessible and easy to use for most people. Hence google creating a decent user experience and getting involved in the MS anti-trust procedings.
Why should they bother with add-ons? They are used by a tiny minority of people.
Can they just put that on android?
Because I'd recommend opera, ff, safari, ie (for intranet with BHO); in that order. Google only adds to the browser requirements that clients would ask. argg