Google Releases Open Source Web Browser

By Greg McNevin

September 3, 2008: Today Google will launch itself headlong into the world of web browsers with the launch of Chrome, an open source browser it hopes will solve the challenges of the modern web.

News of the new foray leaked out of the company on Monday, when a web comic explaining in detail what Chrome is all about was accidentally released early.

The browser has generated a large amount of interest already, with many commentators intrigued by its familiar, but significantly different design. Google says that web browsers were developed in a different time, and claims that now more people are using web-based applications a new breed of browser is required.

“[W]e began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realised that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser,’ wrote Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director, on the official Google blog. “What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.”

The browser will incorporate many popular features, such as tabs, and will also offer a privacy mode similar to that appearing in Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 8. Called “incognito” the feature ensures that nothing from the session is saved locally, preserving privacy in situations - such as shopping for presents as in Google’s example, or using online banking on an unfamiliar machine – where users want to cover their tracks.

Beyond these more typical features Chrome separates itself from the pack by offering greater control and transparency. For starters it is multi-threaded whereas normal browsers are single-threaded. This means that while things are processed one bit at a time in other browsers (for example, a piece of javascript must execute before control of a page is given back to the browser) Chrome’s process manager enables may processes to be running at once, and each to have its own memory.

This way, if something crashes, it doesn’t hang the entire browser, rather just the tab it is running in. Likewise, if a page or a plugin is hogging too much resources, it can be terminated to retrieve the memory without restarting the whole browser.

Google says that this means more memory is used initially, but less is tied up in the long run, and there is less memory bloat.

“By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites,” wrote Pichai and Upson. “We improved speed and responsiveness across the board.”

The self-contained construction of tabs also means that what happens in the tab, stays in the tab. For example, if a virus is executed in one tab Google says that it is unable to spread to the rest of the computer (although it does admit that a plugin could theoretically provide a bridge).

Google will be releasing a beta for Windows this week, and says that Mac and Linux versions are currently in the works.

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