Google Chrome - A New Browser
One youtube video starts with a spectaled young man saying,”As much as the web has developed , Web browsers have not ” . There were speculations before that Google was in the process of bringing out a new browser. Further speculations targeted Google has been mimicking Microsoft or Mozilla to enter the browser arena.
On Sept 1 2008, all speculations were put to rest and the reality hit the web. This was an occassion not to be missed for it goes directly into the historian’s account of the Internet Era . Google indeed came out with a new browser, the Google Chrome. This new browser claims to be a cutting edge browser technology that will interest developers and web users alike.As a Google follower and a critic ,this got me interested .
I decided to wait a day and then I downloaded the Google Chrome. The download was slower than a Firefox or an Opera Download and hence I decided to educate myself a little more on what Google Chrome was while the download was on. Well, from what I gathered within the first few minutes,I felt I could write for days.
The Browser design
Google’s all new Google Chrome is a browser that immediately transmits the Google aura . WIth a Spartan feel to it, It clearly reflects the minimalistic design always followed by google. Keep it simple. I w
as instantly reminded of the all powerful simple white GOOGLE.COM homepage.
The browser has a feel that is simple and elegant at the first glance.The title bar and the menu at the top is removed saving space for more viewing area. The search is directly integrated with the address bar. The menu options are listed under two simple drop down menu at the top and there is really not much to ponder about it except the complexity of its operation.
The Features
Although it is too early for me to conclusively state the pros and cons of the Google Chrome, I can say that the Google Chrome is here to stay. As a developer, I was interested in the new features of the Chrome so I opened the source code of the start page and related the officially listed features of the Chrome browser.
This is what I found.
| This page is optimized for perceived performance. Our enemies are the time | |
| taken for the backend to generate our data, and the time taken to parse | |
| and render the starting HTML/CSS content of the page. This page is | |
| designed to let Chrome do both of those things in parallel. | |
| | |
| 1. Defines temporary content callback functions | |
| 2. Fires off requests for content (these can come back 20-150ms later) | |
| 3. Defines basic functions (handlers) | |
| 4. Renders a fast-parse hard-coded version of itself (this can take 20-50ms) | |
| 5. Defines the full content-rendering functions | |
| | |
| If the requests for content come back before the content-rendering functions | |
| are defined, the data is held until those functions are defined. | |
There it was!!! The Google Chrome employs a all new parallel processing architecture that enables independent browser processes. What this essentially means is better handling of failures. In case one session in a tab of the browser malfunctions and has to be shutdown , the independency of the tabbed processes eliminates the need to shutdown the entire browser. These processes do not ‘talk’ to each other thus are totally independant and yet parallel.
With a new techonology called the V8 and the webkit HTML rendering engine at its core, the Google Chrome will feed a lot of developers with lot of debates and exercises in the coming months. Developers will now seek to target Google Chrome although Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser used. This is because the Google Chrome handles the web very differently from what the rest of the browsers do. It is designed to handle web applications , scripts and programs better than any other browser. Its performance however remains to be measured.
I timed and loaded various heavy websites on three browsers simultaneously and seperately. Google Chrome indeed enables faster browsing than the rest.
Whats the wonder feature is , the Google Chrome is an open source project. This means the bugs reported in the BETA version available today are expected to be fixed along with many updates very shortly.
The downside though , it takes time to get comfortable with the new browser and I found a couple of instances pages did not render properly as it did in firefox. I will not dismiss it for that reason because it is still in the BETA stage and updates are on the way. Within hours , the first security flaw was reported.
Read Chrome suffers first security flaw But as I see it , it may be the first , but it wont last long too many.
If you’d like to download it and give it a try then the beta version is available here…
The verdict
The Arckytekt
Web Developer
Here www.arckytekt.com
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