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A little over a week ago Google unveiled its new browser, throwing their propeller-hat into the ring to challenge Internet Explorer which currently holds just over 77% of the market and FireFox which is closing the gap with 17%. Like most people whose livelihood depends on a browser, I was filled with dread at the thought of our development team having to cater to yet another browser platform. It's already painful enough to insure compatibility across FireFox, IE, Safari, and more across three different OS platforms, why did our friends at Google have to throw another variable into the mix?
After downloading, using the new browser and doing some research into this question I came to realize that the answer is really quite simple: because it was time. The solutions and services that are being delivered through a browser with the dawn of every new day are evolving and redefining our experience of what it means to use the web. Amazingly, neither the underlying technology, nor the user interface and feature set behind browsers has changed appreciably in almost ten years. They still use the same overloaded toolbars, tedious bookmarking, slow loading, often crashing goodness we have come to accept as the experience of using the web.
Unless you have been asleep for the past four years, you have noticed that Google and many other technology and service companies, including Digital Positions, have begun to deliver web applications that have more in common with desktop software than they do the humble HTML brochure web page. The success of these powerful applications is completely dependent on the conduit that delivers them to you and me and that conduit is the browser. The Google engineers set out to build a browser that would address the brave new Web 2.0 world of applications with four primary objectives: speed, stability, security and usability. After banging on it for over a week, I have to say they have delivered a stellar "Beta" that lives up to the promise.
Let's break this down by these four objectives for the brave new browser and see exactly what makes Chrome a contender for the title in the browser wars.
The all consuming Buzz-Acronym that gets thrown around in any discussions related to the web these days: AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is the primary programming methodology behind all of the cool applications in Google's arsenal. The backbone of an AJAX application is of course the enormous amount of Javascript that powers them and this Javascript is interpreted via a Virtual Machine that is built into the browser. Google wrote a completely new virtual machine called V8 from the ground up for Chrome fueled by everything they have learned about the inefficiencies of the VMs in the other browsers out there. The result: noticeably faster and more responsive applications across the board.
It is worth mentioning that there is a considerable amount of speculation as to whether or not V8 is faster at interpreting Javascript than FireFox 3.1. An article published in Computer World underscores this debate. Either way, we all come out ahead when these guys are competing to make a better rendering engine.
Browsers crash a lot In fact, they crash much more these days because of the heavy applications they are trying to run. The frequency of crashes is amplified as you run more and more windows or tabs in the browser. The culprit here is the fact that the browser is essentially running one process on your computer and it has to manage memory usage for all these applications running in multiple windows. While you are getting directions to dinner, checking your account balance, updating your LinkedIn profile and streaming music from Pandora, your browser's single process is groaning under the strain and eventually gives out and crashes.
Google addressed this issue handily by giving each new instance (tab or window) of the browser it's own dedicated process on your machine. This distributed model means that if the Banking site application crashes, it does not crash your dinner directions, music, and LinkedIn profile. In a world where we spend increasingly more time working on mission critical data in the browser, this is a huge improvement.
If you have used G-mail, you are aware of the intelligent spam and phishing filters they have in place. By drawing on their vast database of servers that are blacklisted for this bad behavior, Chrome will actually kick up a big red warning sign any time you attempt to visit one. The result: less viruses, less spyware, less intrusion on your privacy. In addition, Chrome introduces a new feature called Incognito Browsing which allows you to browse the web without recording your history or allowing the sites you visit to store cookies on your machine. This means that you can shop for your wife's anniversary present online and when she fires up the browser tomorrow, she will have no idea what you purchased.
In recent years, the more enlightened members of the application development community - Digital Positions included - have made great strides in working to put the focus on where it should have been all along, which is the CONTENT, not the buttons, knobs, sliders, scrollbars and menus commonly referred to as "the chrome" that seeks to crush it. Google's spartan user interface design has always been intentional and Chrome is no exception, though admittedly it is a little cuter and a lot skinnier. Every pixel in Chrome is accounted for and designed to do it's job and get out of the way so you can do yours.
The OmniBox, which is effectively a combo address/search input field is perhaps the coolest feature in Chrome. Google engineers really outdid themselves on this feature. It filters a list as you type, making amazingly accurate guesses as to what task you are trying to get to. For instance if you type www.ama --- it determines you are likely trying to visit amazon.com and offers that URL up and makes it accessible by simply hitting the "enter" key. If however it determines by what you are typing that you are searching for "transmission repair in Atlanta" it will begin to show you a list of top ranked sites returned by this query, or give you the option of seeing the Google search research.
The Browser Tabs in Chrome are a huge selling point. You can drag them around to change their order, you can drag them out of one window into a new window, but probably the most unique thing about them is that they are positioned at the top of the browser reinforcing the mantra that "Content is King" rather than buried beneath all the toolbars as in other browsers.
There are a number of other great things baked into the Chrome user experience, but rather than go on and on about them, I will hit the high points and you can explore them on your own:
In a word, no. No one, apparently knows the pain and suffering of building web sites that work across all browsers and platforms more than the Google engineers, so they made the decision to build their new browser using the Safari WebKit which is an open-source code base. Essentially, what FireFox did with Mozilla is what Chrome is doing with the Safari WebKit.
The best news for web site owners - and for web development firms like DP - is that if a web site or web application runs well and looks good in Safari, then it will work in Chrome. At Digital Positions, we have been testing all web sites and web applications we deliver in Safari for the last few years, so we expect no issues as more people start adopting Chrome.
You can learn a lot more about Google Chrome and download it for yourself to take a test drive. Unfortunately, they have only released the PC version, but have said that they are fully committed to a Mac and Linux release in the near future.
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