So what is Google Chrome? It is a new Web Browser. But before you say: "Enough, I can't keep track of IE7/8, Mozilla, Safari, now I have to take a look at yet another browser!!!", there is something interesting and different about this one.
It appears that the Google team has been writing a browser from scratch, not worrying about baggage like what is found in IE or Mozilla. It is Open Source so they have been able to take existing bits and pieces from other projects as needed - shortening development time, and at the same time adding a ton of completely new stuff.
First reason to take a look at this browser would be:
- How many times do you deal with IE that fails to load one of the tabs, end up locking the whole browser process, and there is nothing you can do about it but kill the process. Mozilla is a bit better, but to me it seems that it is "allergic" to Flash.
Chrome's Solution: Each Page loads in its own Process. There is no way that JavaScript failing on one page can hang the whole browser - you just get what they call "Unhappy Tab". Each Tab manages its own memory and garbage collection, assuring that once the tab is closed all of its memory is released, which is not the case with the other 2 browsers.
Talking about JavaScript - they have build a brand new Virtual Machine for their JavaScript that besides supporting objects also adds support for classes in JavaScript. Not just that but all of the existing JavaScript objects are assigned to "hidden" JavaScript classes, allowing categorization, and caching. In addition, there is a built-in performance advantage of VM where JavaScript is compiled and then binary is re-used instead of re-interpreted each time JavaScript is re-executed is priceless. Google site points to huge performance increases. I have not run a numbers, but just a visual rendering part of UI components that are generated by JavaScript looks awesome. I have run Chrome against the ExtJs.com demos - ExtJs being most JavaScript intensive UI/Ajax library, and have not seen yet such a performance out of those components.
From that we move onto rendering engine. Used with dozen or so web sites - it is flawless. Smoothest page rendering, and there are no visual differences when compared to IE. It appears that google.com cached searches help Chrome folks in their automated testing of the layout engine - they virtually have whole of the web at their fingertips.
and finally some typical Google touches:
- if I type "news." in my url bar, I get news.google.com, and news.yahoo.com in the dropdown below it and not 500 articles I have previously visited on those 2 web sites
- when I open a new tab in Chrome, by default I get a sidebar with my most used bookmarks, as well as thumbnails of my most visited pages, allowing me to open one with a single click (image below)
All in all this product has left an excellent first impression and even though it is still beta I would recommend everyone to check it out.
http://www.google.com/chrome
