Ecominfozone

Google just released its own open source Web browser in beta. It is called “Google Chrome”. The guys at Google said they launched Google Chrome to add value for users and to help drive innovation on the web at the same time.

To explain the philosophy behind its new Web browswer, Google coined a new promotional move: announcements with an e-comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics.

Bloggers labeled this launch an assault on Microsoft, both on the browser level and on the OS level. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft will respond. In its bid to expand, Google has no choice but to take on Microsoft. It still remains to be seen whether Google is able to succeed where so many others have failed.

With this being said, Google has repeatedly dodged the idea of an operating system. The Google Chrome launch is just a sign of Google’s determination to go head-to-head with Microsoft. Some said Google Chrome is an answer to assuaging fears that Microsoft’s new MISE 8 browser has the capability of blocking the text ads Google relies on for revenues, while others speculated that the language used in the e-comic book is surprisingly similar to traditional operating system overviews, like multi-threading, stable development platforms, etc.

In a nut-shell, here’s what the e-comic book announces Google Chrome to be:

• Chrome is Google’s open source browser project, which is built from the ground up with the existing rendering framework WebKit. Plus, Chrome incorporates Google’s Gears.
• Google built its own a JavaScript Virtual Machine (V8) to speed up web applications with multi-threaded efficiency.
• Chrome uses special tabs that is different from those tabs seen in Firefox and is placed in the upper corner of the window. Tabs get their own process rather than share processes, thus solving the freeze-and-crash problem by freeing up memory and reducing memory fragmentation.
• Chrome has an Opera-like dashboard start page, where most visited webpages are shown as nine thumbnails.
• Chrome has an address bar with auto-completion features, offering search suggestions, most visited pages, popular pages you didn’t visit, and much more.
• No about:blank pages. Chrome defaults to a page featuring the four most used search engines and the user’s nine most visited Web pages.
• Chrome has a privacy mode, allowing the user to create an “Incognito” window. Nothing that occurred in that window will be logged.
• Web applications can be launched in their own browser window without the address bar and the toolbar.
• Chrome is pretty strong on the security front. It is constantly contacting with Google to update a list of known harmful sites to warn the user. Web pages are also sandboxed to prevent drive-by downloads and installations, but installed plugins may escape this security measure.

It’s good to have more competition in the browser field. Now we have Internet Explore, Firefox, Opera, and even Safari on the Mac platform (Oh! I almost forgot we still have Netscape). Firefox is my favorite, but I keep IE because some crappy sites out there can only be viewed correctly within IE. I hope Chrome will prove itself to be the next generation Web browser, so I won’t have to live under the shadow of Microsoft any more. We still don’t know how much Chrome communicates with Google. It won’t surprise me that Chrome would gather browsing info for Google to use for it search and ad-serving algorithms.

Google Chrome is just in beta. Stablility issues will still need to be solved. I’d like to know how much of the Chrome interface will be configurable in the future.  Google Chrome looks like an interesting project. For now, only the Windows version is available. And Google says it will release versions for Mac and Linux as well.

Resource: WebProNews

Posted under Ramblings