Google rocks the Web with browser release

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By David Worthington

September 4, 2008 — A new 800-pound gorilla has entered the browser market. Google has released a beta version of an open-source browser that is designed to make Web applications faster and more reliable.

On Tuesday, Google Chrome became available as a download for Windows users in 100 countries. It features a thread manager for plug-ins and tabs, as well as a new JavaScript engine that runs independently of the browser.

Chrome runs plug-ins and tabs as isolated processes. Google, in an online comic explaining its design decisions, wrote that each tab is its own process with its own copy of global structures.

A team of Google engineers in Denmark developed chrome’s JavaScript engine, which is called V8. V8 parses and compiles JavaScript into representative binary code, eliminating the need for JavaScript to be reinterpreted by the browser and improving overall speed, Google says. It also has aggressive garbage collection, according to Google.

That architectural change, the company noted, will mean an end to rendering errors, or JavaScript operations locking up or crashing the entire browser. However, spawning off tabs as individual processes does use more memory upfront, the company acknowledged.

Chrome includes an API for V8, which is independent of the browser. V8 may be used by other applications in addition to Chrome.

“Chrome is a unique beast in that it is optimized to be an application browser, not a general-use browser. Its target is less IE and more Windows. So the application developers getting targeted initially are the same set currently building applications for the Android phone (and probably the iPhone),” Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, wrote in an e-mail.

Its release is a flanking move against Windows and a springboard for Google Apps targeting Microsoft Office, he explained. However, he added that Chrome’s success will depend largely on how well Web applications replicate the responsiveness of in-premise applications.

“Competition often results in innovation of one sort or another; in the browser you can see that this is true in spades this year, with huge JavaScript performance increases, security process advances and user interface breakthroughs,” Mozilla CEO John Lilly wrote in his company blog. “I'd expect that to continue now that Google has thrown their hat in the ring.”

While it may be innovating, Google owes the open-source community a tip of its hat. Chrome is an amalgam of open-source software, borrowing from Apple and Mozilla, and is itself licensed under the BSD license.

Google chose Apple WebKit as its rendering engine because, according to the company, it is well suited for mobile devices, performs well and has a low memory footprint. Many other components come directly from Mozilla Firefox.

But reliance on the work of others comes at a price. Shortly after its release, security experts uncovered several vulnerabilities in Chrome, including a critical flaw stemming from Google’s use of WebKit and a flaw in one of the browser’s core DLLs.

The upside is that as a result of its heavy use of Mozilla components, “Chrome does not really represent another browser for developers to test on,” Enderle said.

Indeed, Google is doing a lot of that work for them. It has developer Chrome Bot, an automated testing service that performs fuzz testing by sending Web applications raw inputs, UI testing and unit tests on pieces of code; password protected pages are not tested. Google claims that Chrome Bot will test millions of Web pages every week.

Related Search Term(s): browsers, Java, open source, Google, Mozilla

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