UPDATE on Sept. 2, 2008: Chrome beta has been released. Find it at http://www.google.com/chrome [1].
Yep. That’s right. In case Firefox [2], Opera [3], and Safari [4] all don’t satiate your burning desire to be rid of Internet Explorer (even if it is improving with age, after it started to ripen at least), Google said they are releasing the beta of a new web browser [5] called Chrome today, Sept. 2nd, 2008. It’s been in development for two years, and they’re beta-testing it with thousands of webpages automatically after each build. How? Well, they have this little archive of webpages stored somewhere… :-)
They accidentally leaked the news a bit early but have now come clean and written a blog post announcing it, and have released the original leaked “comic book [6]” describing the project, which will be open source and they claim has pulled from both Mozilla (Firefox) code and Apple’s Safari WebKit rendering engine. The comic book is very descriptive and indicates that each tab of the browser will run in a separate process, which will reduce memory usage over time and allow multi-threaded JavaScript, as well as allowing individual tabs to crash without taking down the whole browser. If this works as advertised, a few tab-users I know (with myself as the number one offender!) may flock to this quite a bit faster than users have moved to, say, Flock [7]. Sorry, couldn’t resist…pun fully intended :-D
I, for one, will be grabbing the beta ASAP and taking it for a spin. As long as rendering is consistent enough to not intruduce more headaches for web designers (basically, standards-compliant, kind of ), I’m excited to see if it lives up to its claims! And I love testing new software. I’m always amazed at the things I haven’t thought of yet, that others have. Nowhere is it easier and quite flexible to showcase stuff like that than in software! Just bang a few keys, hopefully in the right order, and you have something new. The only thing easier? Web design (which is correspondingly more limited most of the time). Of course, both can be done very badly…
Now I’m rambling. But this is unexpected and exciting news! I would say, don’t knock it ’til you try it, and read the comic [6] :-)
3 Comments To "Google makes its own web browser called Chrome"
#1 Comment By Chris Green On September 2, 2008 @ 9:03 am
I feel like I watched a Job’s keynote address, but with a huge let-down at the end!! Where are the download links?? LOL
#2 Comment By David Szpunar On September 2, 2008 @ 9:24 am
Yeah, good analogy! But…at least we only have to wait one day at most for this one. There was at least a month between Jobs’ last keynote and when the iPhone 3G came out. Much longer to wait! Granted, the iPhone is a bit cooler than a web browser, but as I read the comic I kept thinking “Yep. Wow. Man, why aren’t browsers like this already? I used to think Firefox was so cool!” ;-)
#3 Comment By foxnomad On September 3, 2008 @ 8:56 am
I’ll give it a whirl, but it will take a lot for me to leave Firefox and all of my plugins behind.