Google Browser is Go
It’s hard for Google to keep any of their products a total secret for very long. Somewhere along the line word leaks out and the internet starts buzzing about their next killer app; I think they like it that way. Turns out those sneaky Google engineers were working on a web browser all along.
The story reminds me of the early days of Firefox. "We didn’t totally like the browser scene, so we started coding from scratch…" It worked really well for Firefox, but can Google swoop in and take away some of their hard-earned market share?
"Chrome" brings some cool ideas to the table, mostly in the way of isolating all the resources associated with one tab in it’s own process. That way if you run into a page that starts to bog down your browser, you can close that tab without the whole browser crashing. The "omni" bar seems like a similar take on Firefox’s "awesome" bar with the added feature of "capturing" search functions from other sites for later use. They’ve also written their own JavaScript engine and created a cool "web process manager", letting you see which sites are stealing all your resources.
Google is in an easy position to get this product out in front of a lot of eyes. The question is: will it be slick enough to make a dent in the browser market. I suppose if anyone can, it’s Google.
They’ve put out a promotional "comic" that gives the low-down on all the features of Chrome (also check out their blog post). Keep an eye out for a beta release sometime tomorrow.
UPDATE: Looks like they’ve released it to the masses. I’m pretty impressed so far. Go get a copy and see for yourself!
[...] Original post by Jesse [...]
posted on: September 2nd, 2008 at 1:48 pm