Google Chrome: what's the point?
With little warning, Google gave us yet another Web browser. We've already got Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and many others - so why do we need another browser?
20 September 2008
What a strange time to launch another browser. Netscape has just hung up its development boots, having decided that with Firefox around, there’s just no point.
Microsoft has finally blown the dust off Internet Explorer and delivered a substantially improved version – IE 7, with IE 8 looking even better and just around the corner. Firefox gets better with every release and Opera is as good as it’s ever been. Safari is pretty good too, and there’s now a Windows version – though the security on both lags behind the others. They’re all free – so do we really need another browser?
On the face of it, we don’t. But it’s not the face of it that Google’s worried about – it’s under the bonnet.
The problem with all modern browsers is that their implementation of JavaScript is a bit – well, old and tired. It’s good enough for most modern sites, which even in their ‘Web 2.0’ form (whatever that means) perform ably enough. But Google has different goals.
Google wants the world to use on-line applications, rather than the desktop programs we’re used to. These have two main drawbacks. First, they are on line. You need to be connected to the Internet to use them. Google is working to overcome that with ‘Gears’ – its own technology which allows on-line applications to work off line, seamlessly, without the user even having to think about it. Gears is still young, but the idea is sound and it works well enough. The update of Gears, though, is still far from what it needs to be in order to be a pervasive technology, as only a few sites use it (such as Google Docs and Google Reader).
The other drawback is that on-line applications make far more extensive use of JavaScript than your average Web site, so can appear to be pretty slow. Chrome’s JavaScript is fast indeed – noticeably quick, in fact. It’s properly multithreaded, unlike most other JavaScript engines – able to get on with the next task while the first is in hand. OK, users don’t care about this kind of clever stuff, but if it makes slow Web sites (much) faster, then even your granny will be for it. There are other massive changes to the JavaScript engine as well, which make it lightning fast – such as the JavaScript being a virtual machine, able to operate in the optimum way, and adding hidden class transactions, to overcome the inefficiency of JavaScript’s classless structure.
Another factor in Chrome’s design is getting rid of what Web designers call ‘browser chrome’. These are the things such as title bars, menus, toolbars and status bars that Google believes are a distraction to users. Coincidentally, removing these items also makes Web applications look a bit more like actual desktop applications, blurring the division between desktop applications and on-line applications further still.
The user experience is pretty good on Chrome, with the ‘omnibox’ replacing the URL and search boxes, plus Chrome gives you a home page that automatically shows your most-visited sites (be careful with that one) all in one place.
Pop-ups are pretty much annihilated by Chrome, as they are suppressed to a small part of the window and only pop up if you actually want them to.
Security looks promising too, with each Google Chrome window being ‘sandboxed’ so that Chrome strictly limits how a Web site can interact with the computer itself.
Overall, these are good features – but, as you can see, the most interesting stuff is under the bonnet. And that’s the real point of Chrome. Google’s aspirations to offer on-line applications to the world have been held back by in-built limits of the world’s browsers.
Google Chrome makes a series of giant steps forward in terms of pushing these limits to one side, and, combined with Gears, enables on-line applications to run off line, securely, and pretty quickly.
Should Chrome gather momentum in a big way, Google’s competitors will have no option other than to add in similar features to their products – making it another win for Google. It’s hard to see many instances of a competitor making a better product that’s actually good for you.
It was amusing to watch the press get the wrong end of the stick with Chrome, with many of them believing that Google had launched a new OS as a mainstream competitor to Windows, and yet, in many ways, that is what Chrome could ultimately become – that Holy Grail of Web browser and on-line application that renders the underlying operating system not actually obsolete, but irrelevant.
