Google Chrome: N Browsing Technology

Just a short note about the forthcoming Google Chrome browser (to be launched tomorrow). Looking at the Google Notebook leak, no Linux-y Goodness (tm) just yet. :(

Looks like tomorrow Google will release their own open source browser called “Google Chrome.” It features:

Prominent tabbing (the top of the browser is composed of tabs)
Threading (each tab is its own process)
Integrated Googleness (Gears, integrated Google searching, etc.)
V8 Javascript VM (faster? remains to be seen)
Webkit rendering (a la Safari, Konqueror)

I called it “N Browsing Technology” because of the threading aspect. It will be interesting to see how they handle that. The comic they put out admits to higher memory use initially, but it’s not yet clear how small each thread will be and how much sharing is possible between the instances (that’s partly OS dependent anyway). It will be interesting to see whether this is a Windows-only release or Windows+Mac or if they’ll actually hit us with a Zero-Day Linux Release ™. Not holding my breath on that one, but that would be a pleasant surprise. It will also be interesting to see if they have taken a note from Mozilla and made this extension-friendly or not. Anyway, it’s exciting even if it doesn’t replace Firefox as my browser of choice. Certainly will try it out tomorrow (if there’s a linux version, of course). Bah. Some more news seems to suggest the initial release will be Windows-only. I am not installing Windows, not even to try Google’s browser out. Update: The other notable about this release is the fact that they are using what appears to me to be some kind of temporary 404 that isn’t part of their regular system. My guess on this is that whatever their webservers are (probably some distant cousin of Apache at this point?) they have a redirect level that allows them to redirect to a static file and someone threw it together just to have the ease of waiting until X:xx o’clock and “flipping the switch” (probably just swapping out a conf somewhere). Also, I find the choice of name interesting as Mozilla heavily uses the term chrome to refer to its UI. -Adam

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