Early Screenshots from the Mac Version of Google's Chrome Browser

[MikeTheC]

Chrome is based on WebKit for the html rendering. Same as Safari.

arn

Absolutely. While the web benefits, as much as anything else, from plurality and competition, there are certain things best handled by initial competition and a open, standards-based best-practices approach which then picks the best standard and actually sticks with it.

Why this is such a hard thing for designers and web client developers to grasp, I simply don't know.

EDIT:

Except that Chrome uses Skia to render vector images (including text), so there will be rendering differences:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kurafire/2822606444/

Yikes! I had no idea. Well, let's also stop and take a moment to consider Chrome is still in the very early, developmental stages of its life. Hopefully, this will change for the better as time passes.

 

[Garemz]

Is this a serious question?

Here's a serious answer:
1) It's a LOT faster, especially on pages that use JavaScript excessively
2) It's a LOT less memory consuming (in conjunction with Firefox I'd even say "memory wasting")
3) It's more stable. Well, it's supposed to be, due to its architecture.
4) It's a bit cleaner, UI speaking

Oh, did I mention that it's a LOT faster?

On the other hand, the lack of features like add-ons and plug-ins might be a reason for one not to use it instead of Ffox.

Cheers,
Georg

Let's Say it's Much Fater will an extra 1-2 SEC loading a webpage make you happier?

Firefox is fast already.

 

[Jayomat]

i just want the add ons and a good bookmarks manager... if safari could provide it, i wouldn't have to use firefox ;X

 

[0488568]

Question is it faster than Opera?

 

[50548]

not a compelling browser on windows and even less so on osx. oh well it is nice to have options.

edit: Don't love google...fear them. They are posturing to be a most evil tech company.

I like Google, but...am I the only one who thinks that this news is pretty much irrelevant?

Who cares about another web browser whose main advantage will be independent processes, when both Safari and Firefox are close to crashless nowadays? And if it's about beauty, even Flock is better than Chrome...I couldn't care less about it.

 

[AidenShaw]

This has nothing to do with multi-core...

This also plays very, very well with multi-core CPU as each process could run on a different CPU or not, the OS' scheduler will decide

The OS scheduler schedules threads, not processes. (At least on Windows, OSX and the current Linux systems.)

A browser with a thread-per-tab (like IE7) or multiple windows per process can exploit multiple CPUs just fine. The OS scheduler will run as many threads simultaneously as it can.

Threads share memory space, though, so one thread can corrupt memory used by other threads - which is why IE8 and Chrome are protecting plugins from each other.

 

[pohl]

The OS scheduler schedules threads, not processes.

So what do you call the mechanism that places processes into the priority queue then, if not the 'scheduler'?

 

[Ping Guo]

Minimalist design generally means minimal features.

Generally, yes.

Who cares about another web browser whose main advantage will be independent processes, when both Safari and Firefox are close to crashless nowadays?

Firefox has become inexplicably crash-prone for me on my Windows laptop, seemingly out of nowhere. I switched to Chrome, and it totally outclasses FF in speed and stability. I hardly use plugins, but I can see why others like FF for that reason. Just today I had a tab hang in Chrome and no big deal, I just closed it. With FF it was happening over 10x a day and each time the whole browser would crash.

 

[megagoune]

That's a bizarre inference to make, when other hypotheses are so easy to come up with - like, um, not having yet hired/allocated a cocoa programmer for the task?



You're so right. All they need is a programmer who can type Cocoa with his left hand and Win32 with his right hand!

They have a mac team that have been working on chrome for a long time. Maybe they are very small compared to the windows team, and that's the only reason why it's taking so long to have an OSX version, but from the blog post it seems to me that they are having problems with the shared code.
So that's why I am thinking that their shared code was developed without consideration for other plateforms than windows.

 

[gmcalpin]

Hahaha. "Aw snap" might be the greatest browser innovation of all time.

I groaned at that one, myself. To each his own.

 

[GGGUUUYYY]

I found chrome to be too slow compared to safari on windows.

 

[Mac OS X Ocelot]

Chrome is my favorite browser on Windows (right ahead of Safari and then IE). I love Safari on Mac, but I'm interested in how sweet Chrome will be. Safari doesn't have a good competitor on Mac right now. Camino used to be my main browser, but now it's lagging far behind.

 

[cwwilson]

I have been using Chrome for a while on Windows. I was a Firefox user since 0.8 so I go way back with that browser. Now I'm 90% Chrome and 10% FF. I didn't like the Windows version of Safari and haven't used it since it first came out on the platform (don't know if they've bothered to improve it) but Safari on Mac/iPhone is great.

 

[DocNYz]

I didn't like chrome when I tried it on windows, so I can't really be bothered. It's pretty stupid anyway that they're so far behind on the osx version.

seriously, aside from the theoretical one tab crashing at a time, I don't see the point in this aside from giving google more access to our day to day behavior.

 

[tufaw]

In my opinion privilege separation is a great thing as it reduces the risk of unexpected bugs/"features". Since there's no point in letting two unrelated tabs communicate or otherwise affect each other, enforce at a low level the rule that they can't.

For instance, try typing the following in your address bar:

javascript:void(window.onunload=function(){for(var i=0;i<10;i++)alert(i);})

Hit return and close the tab. Image if that loop went on forever... Sure, you don't need Chrome's approach to handle this -- Opera for instance does it in another way -- but it shows why the basic idea is great: don't let one misbehaving tab affect another!

 

[petermcphee]

On the Windows version type about:internets in the URL field.

Hilarity ensues.

I love it. "Internets" with a 's'

INTERSPACEWEBNETCYBERCOMNETSPAAAACCCEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for that. I love stuff like that.

 

[calicardiff]

Google announced Chrome for Windows back in September and stated that they believe they "can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web."

Looks like the MBA Crowd have infiltrated poor Google as well.
Is no-one safe from their evil nonsensical grasp

 

[Catfish_Man]

I figured that was their thinking. Except Javascript doesn't have true pointers, so separate address spaces (processes) should not be necessary for complete separation of programs. Separate namespaces should be sufficient.

I remember Dashboard started out the same way. In 10.4 there was a separate Unix process for each widget, but then in 10.5 it became one shared process. I don't recall any single widget bringing down all my other widgets yet. However I imagine what Google have in mind is a bit more heavyweight than widgets.

It's not just javascript being segregated. Renderers are split off from the browser, and sandboxed (no IO allowed except through IPC to the network loader) to mitigate the impact of any security holes. Plugins are separated out from the renderers, so when Flash crashes it doesn't take the whole page down.

In response to the people suggesting they just drop a WebView into a window in IB, that doesn't work with the process segregation. If you're loading a view in IB, it's loading in your process. They've had to make fairly large changes to parts of WebKit to get this working.

 

[iJawn108]

meh... ill stick to camino the 2.0 builds are great

 

[Stridder44]

not a compelling browser on windows and even less so on osx. oh well it is nice to have options.

edit: Don't love google...fear them. They are posturing to be a most evil tech company.

 

[Riemann Zeta]

I'd never trust a google browser. Considering that google's primary mission is total information awareness and their primary source of revenue is advertising, it is a virtual certainty that this browser's modus operandi is to profile and report to advertisers.

If you fear google (and you should), join me in the tinfoil hat brigade.

 

[exabytes18]

I'm a fan of Chrome on windows. It's noticeably faster, but there's a bunch of little features which all add up.

1. I use Chrome on Vista and appreciate it supporting transparency (love the eye candy).
2. Searching for a word/phrase on a page is pretty nifty. It displays where all the occurrences reside (much like IDEs).
3. It has a clean interface. It doesn't leave anything to be desired.
4. You can allow it to automatically update itself. It does so transparently without the user being bothered or interrupted. This is something you must experience to truly appreciate.

Then there's incognito mode; complete with a dose of humor.

 

[winninganthem]

The windows version is prettier. I'm so sick of everything on osx having that same metal finish look why can't it be blue like the windows version.

I know nothing on stability or speed or anything just that its purtty

Heh, yeah, make Aero in OS X

Might actually be not too bad looking

 

[Eric S.]

You can allow it to automatically update itself. It does so transparently without the user being bothered or interrupted. This is something you must experience to truly appreciate.

It was a nasty surprise to me that Windows apparently promotes these "stealth upgrades" and even system reboots without user intervention. I disable this functionality whenever I find it.

Then there's incognito mode; complete with a dose of humor.

Since all of those things are basically Google's modus operandi, I don't really find any humor there.

 

[kironin]

As a web designer, the LAST thing I want is another web browser to have to worry about...Firefox and IE are enough.

Please Google...stop wasting your money on this useless project and invest in something that people actually need.

well, as a web USER and web designer, I disagree. Chrome is actually useable in VMware Fusion on OS X. I would love to see Chrome on OS X. Safari and Firefox can be real dogs sometimes and of course IE doesn't exist.

and if you are just worrying about Firefox and IE, then you are lazy.

I check Firefox, Safari, Opera, Omniweb, Chrome, Camino, Shiira, and oh, yeah, the ugly step child IE last (that's dead last).