Nektra Advanced Computing Blog

Even if you have A.D.D. (Attention Deficit Disorder) it is impossible not to notice the wave spreading through the blogosphere, Google chrome, Google chrome, Google chrome…

Last Tuesday almost the whole Techmeme page was filled with chrome,   Google chrome has a lot of energy and has spread like an Internet Meme! Does that make it a meme? Well its on the Timeline of Meme’s so I think that settles it.

The problem is not with chrome, the problem is with the media coverage, even TechCrunch follows the cash cow like a zombie. But the most interesting things happen behind the scenes, so the technical masses need to discuss it!

Try any random combinations of keywords in a search engine and you will now get a web page,  for example try iphone google gears, and you will find somebody asking if google chrome is coming to the iphone or even the ridiculous:  http://www.freechromethemes.com/DownloadGoogleChromeForiPhone.php
But, very few seems to understand what Google chrome offers to the world beyond the end user experience.

For the user:
Chrome seems nice and fast, but you can’t compare its end user features with Opera, Firefox (and Flock!), Safari and even Internet Explorer yet.
We need to think about what Chrome means for the average user, for the power user and for developers.
Firefox and Flock have extensions, a whole architecture for developing Add-ons, and Google Gears is available too. Internet Explorer has extensions and Google Gears. Opera doesn’t but provides a very complete browser experience.  Comparably there are many different options you have with Google Chrome. Safari seems to have the lowest feature factor here.

For the developer:
The development side seems the more interesting place to look. See Peteris Krumin’s Blog.
What Google is doing is cleaning up the web platform from the mess & confusion of the past, and taking the performance factor very seriously with V8.
Look at the Dan Ingall’s Lively and you will see the javascript speed (although it currently works better in Safari).
The Architecture seems very interesting, plugins, incognito (seems a native cookiepie will be easy to implement)

Now, questions for the near future:
- Can Google Chrome run Python, Ruby etc in their Virtual Machine?
- There will be tools to speed up development for the platform?

An interesting move from Microsoft or Microsoft’s friends will be to extend Google Chrome itself with .NET, an extensible browser in .NET ala Firefox, .NET/WPF is currently very constrained to IE… and think about Google Docs? An experience with Silverlight/WPF will be hundreds of years better.

Looking at the architecture behind Chrome is very interesting.  Everybody has experienced their Internet Browsers of the past Locking up. As Google say “it’s nearly impossible to build a rendering engine that never crashes or hangs. It’s also nearly impossible to build a rendering engine that is perfectly secure.”

They go on to compare the current state of web browsers with operating systems of the past where  A misbehaving application could take down the entire system. “All it takes is one browser or plug-in bug to bring down the entire browser and all of the currently running tabs.”

Chrome is not a web operating system as many try to convince us, but it’s a modern and more advanced web browser implementation that provides a more stable solution as it puts applications into separate processes that are walled off from one another. “A crash in one application generally does not impair other applications or the integrity of the operating system, and each user’s access to other users’ data is restricted.”

V8 Google’s open source JavaScript engine is also very interesting.  Marc-André Cournoyer asked What if we could run Ruby on V8? well he managed it and its fast!

Google also use hooks like Deviare/Hooklib in Chrome to add some extra security to the sandbox, although it’s obviously not considered really secure. An insightful analysis is at: http://gynvael.coldwind.pl/?id=49

I expect http://www.chromeplugins.org/ to provide some interesting plugins for Chrome in the coming weeks and you should keep a watch on the Forums to see what people are developing.