Interview With Google's V8 Author Lars Bak

Dr Pete writes "Financial Times has an interesting piece about Lars Bak and Kasper Lund the authors of the V8 virtual machine in Google's Chrome browser. 'Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that's an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission's antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors such as Google a chance to claim ground.'" Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.

Comments

Chrome as the built in?

[moniker127]

May actually be an option very soon. Internet explorer is completely uninstallable in the latest build of windows 7. (7022 & later)

Re:Chrome as the built in?

[moniker127]

No. IE 8 comes with windows 7, but you can remove it through programs and features.

Re:Is this the guy?

[Gnavpot]

Is this the drummer from Metallica?

No, but the country is correct. Lars Bak, Kasper Lund and the drummer are all from Denmark.

Re:Linux and osx

[Tacvek]

Non-scalable fonts are not subject to copyright in the United States, but may be subject to design patents. Scalable fonts in the other hand, are subject to copyright. The output of these fonts are not, but the font files themselves are.

If you want to think of it one way, scalable fonts are full blown computer programs, and are thereby subject to copyright, even if what they output is not. I can write a program that outputs the first million digits of pi, and the program can be subject to copyright protection, even though the output mist definitely is not. Same basic idea.