The Twitterverse first started the word going round about this yesterday after Philipp Lenssen scanned in a comic he’d been sent from Google (which they’ve now posted up), telling the story of why and how they’ve finally made their own browser: Chrome.
There’s long been rumours of a ‘GBrowser’ coming and it seems that Chrome will be built on WebKit (which powers Safari), so hopefully we as developers won’t have to bust a nut fixing every site we’ve done to render well in it!Ã? TechCrunch has some of the first screenshots and demos up, showing the newer interface and integration with Gears.Ã? But although it follows the Google minimal aesthetic, it seems that most of the work is under the bonnet as John Resig points out in his blog relating to how the new javascript rendering engine will be a killer feature.Ã? Each tab will in effect be an instance of the browser with independent memory allocated; so if one tab crashes, it won’t effect any others.
For far more detail and more in-depth analysis, I recommend you read Chris Messina’s post (Factory Joe), Mashable and of course Google’s own blog!
This could well be a game changer.Ã? Although Google are still helping to fund Mozilla, this could well be to hedge their bets and between Chrome and Firefox, try usurp Microsoft’s dominant position, which could in turn force MS to step-up their game yet again.Ã? It’s a shame if because of Mozilla’s apparent lack of direction or cohesive plan for the future, that it might end up getting left behind; for all it’s memory leaks and little glitches I do enjoy using and developing on it.Ã? Still Opera 9 is a sweet bit of kit.
Like John Hicks, I too am a browser polygamist!
Update: Firefox chief quoted by the Guardian.
Hey there!
Chrome is OK from my perspective. It will definitely grow to be a very polished, secure, and important peice of software in the months to come. This is Googles operating system. They will do everything to make it work correctly and smoothly, and you better believe that they will make sure to make it standards compliant to help out developers so they give it a good name!
Also, competition is always good, the more the merrier. Hopefully this will help Mozilla push forward and do some important stuff.
Anyways, thanks for the post.
Thanks for the comment Chris.
I think there’s an assumption that this will naturally eat in to IE’s dominance, because that’s what developers want to see. I think as it’s mainly technically minded people downloading an experimenting with this beta release it’s not happening. Perhaps it will once it’s public?
It is a good start because it shows a clear interface for use and shows a back-end difference for those that have noticed performance issues in other browsers.
PC World released a list of the top 10 Google Chrome Add-ons. http://www.pcworld.com/article/185744/top_10_chrome_browser_add_ons.html