Google Chrome
Google's chrome is out and its in beta. My very first impression of chrome, was mediocre. I didn't know why another browser? and what is special about this one? It's new different look did not dazzle me either. I didn't spend much time on it though...there was work to do (I was at work and stumbled upon it when I was going to do a search).
Few hours later...at home I thought I'd look into Chrome and see if I can find some answers, thats when I stumbled upon the Chrome storyboard. It was a little long, but by the end of it I loved the idea behind Chrome. It was spectacular. It was neat. It adds new fire to a somewhat long stale mate in the browser world.
By the way, I highly recommend anyone interested in knowing more about Chrome to visit: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/. I did learn in the "Intro to Design" course that using a story board to present concept ideas can be very useful. Chrome's storyboard did a really good job of it. And I am impressed by what the medium can do.
For people not interested in going through the storyboard or just don't have the time, here is a summary of whats special about chrome:
- Chrome supports multiple tabs like other browsers, but the difference is - chrome gives each tab its own process, instead of all the tabs residing in 1 process. Sure, this increases the upfront memory cost of chrome, but this turns out to be very advantageous in terms of long-term memory management (long term = a few minutes - hours).
Have you ever noticed, you keep working and opening tabs and closing tabs, sometime later, you feel your computer slowing down - you check the memory usage and it is insanely high! you start closing tabs and windows, but it barely drops. :(
The reason this happens is the browsers allocate a fixed amount of memory and starts fittings tabs into it, as you need more memory another block of memory gets allocated. When you close a tab, that space becomes free and can be used by another tab that is opened later. But that would be the ideal case - in reality, memory corrupts and for other reasons, when a tab is closed, the memory sometimes does not get cleaned completely. And this space becomes unusable, so when new tabs are created, more memory gets allocated, and you end up with a bloated memory usage problem.
With separate processes, you close a tab, all the resources allocated to the process get cleaned - you get them back. So in Chrome, when you close a tab, you do get back the memory. - Each tab is sandboxed - meaning a malicious site can access at most that tab's environment. So everything else (other tabs and processes) is safe.
- Since each tab has its own process, when there is a crash - only the tab crashes not your whole browser!
- Chrome uses the V8 javascript engine. Javascript is not interpretted, but gets compiled and executed - leading to faster perfromance and better garbage collection (hence better memory management).
- After using chrome for a couple of hours, I am beginning to get used to the interface and I feel like i actually like it!
- It feels very responsive. Firefox is not bad in this aspect and IE7 feels painfully laggy (though it did feel a little better in another computer I worked at recently)
- Last but not least, the browser has a lot of neat easter eggs like the about:stats, about:histograms pages etc (you can find a complete list of the about: pages - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-chromes-about-pages.html)
Chrome's official stand itself is by no means competitive. It doesn't seem like Google wants to engage in a browser war, but is just interested in making browsers better and more suited for the new "media-javascript-rich" web. Supporting the stance, the project is open source as well.
I hope this gets firefox and IE rolling in the right direction in making the browsers better, and helps us the users and developers with a much pleasanter experience in the web.
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