Mountain View (CA) - Google just posted its brand new web browser, and maybe slightly more. Chrome offers a fresh new look at the web browser with a focus on running applications and not just displaying text and pictures. Of course, that claim makes Chrome much more than a browser, but extends a trend we have witnessing in the cloud computing space: Chrome may actually conceal what may evolve into a cloud operating system for client and thin client computing devices.
We can’t help but thinking back to May 31, 2006 when Google CEO Eric Schmidt “crushed” any rumors that Google was working on its own web browser. "The industry is obsessed with this browser question," Schmidt told a Lehman Brothers analyst back then, "and our observation is that you have a number of fine browsers now, [and] people have some good choices."
You could complain that Schmidt was not entirely truthful, but then there was this quote, which puts Google’s Chrome browser into perspective: "The way Google operates," Schmidt said, "we would not build a browser for the fun of building a browser and creating another choice...We would only do something along the lines you're describing if there was a real end-user benefit. So far, we've seen the end-user benefit has been to augment or expand both AJAX and JavaScript, which is available on all the browsers.” But the times change and cloud computing trends haven’t certainly had enough impact for Google to make a bold move with a new browser/OS.
The Chrome announcement came unexpected yesterday and now we have finally a chance to get a glimpse how Google’s browser idea looks like. The first beta of the web browser is immediately available as an XXMB Windows download in over more than 100 languages. Versions for Mac OS X and Linux are in development, according to Google, and will be posted when they are ready for public testing. The company played a bit of hide and seek game with users today, briefly publishing the Chrome download page only to remove it from its cache just moments later. The company also tested the patience of the blogosphere by refusing to post Chrome early in the day - when most users are at their computer and have some spare time as they prepare for their day.
On the surface, Chrome is a regular browser with a clean, uncluttered user interface. "Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast", Google said. "It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go." But underneath the hood, Chrome comes with high-tech engine designed from ground up to efficiently power complex web applications. "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters," wrote Google in the blog post. "It's only a tool to run the important stuff - the pages, sites and applications that make up the web."
The privilege to start a major browser from scratch led to entirely new engineering solutions and a browser platform that has very little in common with Firefox and IE. While Mozilla and Microsoft are clearly on an evolutionary path, Google wants to take a few steps in advance. At least partially, Chrome practically runs an operating system of its own that embeds the browser firmly into the system. It knows how to allocate and manage memory, collect garbage, multitask browsing processes and protect each tab so that a web page that runs in a tab can't crash the browser itself. This approach may solve most core problems that plague today's browsers - such as memory leaks, slow performance, instability, freezes, etc.
There is even a process viewer similar to the Windows task manager that allows users to see the amount of resources used by each tab, web application and even a single browser plug-in. You can ask the Chrome task manager at any time to pinpoint the tab that is eating most resources or kill the one that misbehaves. When you kill a tab, Chrome de-allocates a chunk of memory that it occupied without fragmentation. This fact alone contributes to a much smoother experience that doesn't show a performance slow down over time. All other browsers fragment memory as you open and close tabs, forcing the operating system to allocate more memory, leading to unnecessary hard-drive swapping.
Web applications could see the most dramatic speed improvements due to a new V8 scripting engine that executes JavaScript programs, which make up most web applications. The engine is an engineering miracle in itself: It doesn't take JavaScript programs to translate them into so-called byte codes, an internal representation optimized for interpretation. Instead, it compiles JavaScript programs into executable machine code that runs directly on your computer's processor. This leads to significant speed gains that other JavaScript interpreters can't achieve. Also, V8 enables "the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers," Google said.
“Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better,” the company said. “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. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.”
Google said that Chrome is far from done but it still decided to release the product to gauge how users will respond to it. Chrome uses some components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, so Google decided to make its code freely available to anyone on an open source basis. This decision alone could spur further innovations as anyone can take Chrome code base, improve it or use it as the basis for a completely new product. Microsoft will have a tough time battling such a strategy - Chrome can easily isolate Microsoft further and it certainly makes IE8 look outdated and bloated.
The idea that a web browser may be the operating system of the future isn’t completely new. For example, the developers of the (not yet released) Cherrypal PC are using Firefox as the operating system GUI, while hiding the Linux core below. It is not particularly difficult to imagine that such exotic ideas could receive a significant boost from the participation of Google.
What we today see in Chrome may very well be the first Google OS so many have been talking about for years.
You can download Google Chrome here.