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?

[Nethead]

or did he mean that you couldn't install IE at all?

Re:Chrome as the built in?

[moniker127]

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

Re:Chrome as the built in?

[moniker127]

I'd like to note that google chrome on windows 7 is a ridiculously fast browser. Even faster than it is on xp or vista for some reason.

Re:Chrome as the built in?

[icannotthinkofaname]

In Windows 7 Beta build 7048 and later:

Control Panel --> Programs and Features
In a sidebar, there is something that says "Turn Windows features on or off". It is an administrative action, and marked as such, though the UAC doesn't nag you about it by default in build 7048.

Just uncheck the "Internet Explorer 8" item, restart twice (really; no, I can't think of a good reason why), and iexplore.exe (at least) is gone.

I dunno what it removes other than iexplore.exe, but it at least removes the application.

What about Iron?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard so much about Chrome on Slashdot, but nothing about Iron.

According to the Wikipedia page on Google Chrome:

SRWare Iron is a release of Chromium software that explicitly disables the collection and transmission of usage information.[30]

The Wikipedia page further details the information collected by Chrome.

Any comments?

Chrome has much lower market share than Safari

[caffeinejolt]

Over six times less currently. Of course, the general Slashdot usage trends may be different. I am sure Google can steal market share from others though - especially if they release viable Mac/Linux versions of Chrome.

Linux and osx

[Joe Tie.]

I've been playing around with the ongoing ports to linux and osx and have been really impressed so far. The linux port is now equivelent in speed to 2.0 on windows, tabs are functional by keyboard shortcut if not mouse yet, spellchecking is in, the startup time blows away all the other browsers on my system, and in general it's looking like a first class port instead of the afterthought I'd initially taken it to be. Obviously there's still a ton more to do on it, but the foundation's looking really solid.

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.

Re:Linux and osx

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the hinting - an embedded program used to transform the glyph images at small sizes, so they don't look crap.

That part definitely is copyrightable.

However, Freetype doesn't use hinting in TrueType / OpenType font files by default, because the technique is patented (by Apple). Instead, it has an auto-hinting system, which works just great when you have anti-aliasing or subpixel rendering turned on. I suppose one could simply create some fonts with the same metrics and general appearance as the Microsoft fonts, and use those instead.

Oddly, Apple don't seem to use hinting either since OS X.

slashdot browser / os stats

[jeffstar]

Maybe I have imagined this, but I thought there used to be a slashbox which displayed OS and or browser stats.

I think it got to be a bit depressing to see the % of linux users dropping as /. attracted bigger and bigger crowds so that slashbox disappeared.

I doubt there is another website which has more linux users so the /. stats probably represent a best case number for linux market penetration.

Re:slashdot browser / os stats

[Anonymous Coward]

Take this with as bigger grain of salt as you should with any AC post. But I run a couple of medium-size sites, technical in nature, but not exclusively for GNU/Linux users: the percentage of our visitors using GNU/Linux is at approx. 10%. My educated guess is that Slashdot's would be between 10-20%, given that it's aimed a little more at GNU/Linux users than either of the sites I run. Note: the second figure was pulled from my arse, the first figure was based on months of statistics for two Web sites.

Maybe Slashdot doesn't wish to publish that GNU/Linux only has 10%-20% market share, based on their statistics, but I don't think it's too shabby!

One thing's for certain: none of Slashdot's, or my site's, visitors are being recorded by the lame HitsLink software people keep referring to (as some panacea of evidence against GNU/Linux having any market share). Frankly, I know of no Web sites using their tracker, every site-owner, with a clue, uses Google Analytics. Sample bias anyone? :)

GoogleUpdate

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I'd be a lot more inclined to use Chrome if I could do so without it installing the GoogleUpdate service and then turning it back on after I've explicitly disabled it. Windows is bloated enough without me being "tricked" into running additional services that I don't want or need.

Re:GoogleUpdate

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use either portable chrome or portable chromium then, replacing the app folder with nearly-hourly builds from http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/LATEST (delete rlz.dll). But no auto-updates this way.

Re:GoogleUpdate

[DrEldarion]

For the vast, vast majority of people, forcing updates on them is by far the best way to go. How many computers could be virus-free right now if everything were always automatically patched?

That said, there SHOULD be a way to disable it without having to jump through hoops.

Re:I won't switch to Chrome

[moniker127]

Google chrome 2.0 has image scaling.

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.

Obvious joke

[Weaselmancer]

I could have had a V8!

Re:This will be a big help for server side Java al

[larry bagina]

couch db is based on erlang. Also, java and javascript are not the same.

Non-tech conclusion: Google should buy Sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know Google is a python shop, but geez, every product having:

.

A virtual machine.

JIT.

sandboxing

frameworks

cross-platform capability

bytecode (at least for Android)

.

Might as well buy Sun, use their IP and re-implement everything in Scala.Then they'll be ready to take over the world.

i would find it highly ironic

[drolli]

if an anti-monopoly ruling of some court would help the biggest search engine to bundle their browser preinstalled to consumer PCs.

Re:awesome!

[Thinboy00]

Why would you want to keep IE at all when Firefox, Chrome (as soon as they get around to porting it), Konquerer, all the Gecko browsers besides Firefox, etc. are readily available? Why would you force yourself to undergo the sheer agony of using IE?