Google to introduce open-source 'Chrome' browser
San Francisco, Sep 2: Google announced on Monday, Sep 1 that it has been hard at work on an open-source browser known as Chrome, a beta version of which will be released in 100 countries on Tuesday, Sep 2.
New features will included 'isolated' tabs designed to prevent browser crashes and a more powerful JavaScript engine. The reason that why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web," Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, Google engineering director, wrote in a blog post. Google was apparently looking to keep news of Chrome under wraps until after the holiday weekend. A 38-page, online comic book that provided details about Chrome hit the blogosphere Monday morning, but Pichai and Upson said in their blog post that Google had 'hit 'send' a bit early' on the web comic.
The comic depicts various Google engineers describing Chrome's features, including the isolated tab idea. By keeping each tab in an isolated 'sandbox', we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites, Pichai and Upson told. Having a number of tabs open in a single browser eats up memory. If a browser is running slow, a user's natural inclination is to close a few tabs? In some cases, however, little bits of the closed tabs remain, which eats up space and requires the operating system to grow the browser's address space, according to Google. With Chrome, there will be a different tab for each process, including plug-ins.
'When a tab is closed in Google Chrome, you're ending the whole process,' according to the comic. 'You can look under the hood with Google Chrome's task mananger to see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your CPU" so you can place 'blame where blame belongs.' Google also promised to improve speed and responsiveness across the board and it also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers,' Pichai and Upson said.
Like
OpenSocial
and
Android,
Chrome
will
be
an
open
source
initiative.
'We
owe
a
great
debt
to
many
open
source
projects,
and
we're
committed
to
continuing
on
their
path,' they
wrote.
'We've
used
components
from
Apple's
WebKit
and
Mozilla's
Firefox,
among
others
--
and
in
that
spirit,
we
are
making
all
of
our
code
open
source
as
well.
We
hope
to
collaborate
with
the
entire
community
to
help
drive
the
web
forward.'
The
team
selected
Webkit
because
it
uses
memory
efficiently,
was
easily
adapated
to
embedded
devices,
and
it
was
easy
for
new
browser
developers
to
learn
to
make
the
code
base
work,
according
to
the
web
comic.
'Webkit
keeps
it
simple.'
Google
recently
extended
its
financial
deal
with
Mozilla
until
2011,
according
to
a
blog
post
from
Mitchell
Baker,
chair
of
the
Mozilla
Foundation.
On Tuesday Sep 2 release will be available for Windows users. 'We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust,' Pichai and Upson added. 'This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done,' they said. 'Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.'
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