Of course, the big news this week is the beta release of Google Chrome, the Googlicious new web browser that’s supposed to be a whole new approach to the seemingly simple task of web surfing.

You might do well to think “Do we really need another browser?  With Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE, and countless variants on those themes - not even getting into the world of text-only browsers like Lynx and elinks - the market seems crowded as it is!”  Chrome, however, claims to have some new and interesting ideas, based (of course!) on Google’s approach to the Internet in general.

On paper, Google’s approach makes a great deal of sense.  All modern browsers, even Firefox, are still developed using the same paradigm that can be traced back to NCSA Mosaic back at the dawn of the Web.  That is, the browser treats each website as pages in a book, with hyperlinks (textual or graphic) to other pages.  This was all well and good in the days when text and still graphics constituted the bulk of the WWW, but these days it’s a bit more complex.  Javascript applets, Flash videos, and more have conspired to make websites less “static” and more “interactive,” as if each site was in fact an application all its own.

Chrome was developed with the notion that the Web has evolved immensely from its early-’90s origins.  (Google, in fact, boasts that theirs is the first web browser to be developed entirely new from the ground up since the adoption of Java/Flash-style technologies.)  In a nutshell, Chrome is less of a monolithic program in and of itself (the way Firefox and IE tend to be) and more of a framework for displaying applications, that just so happen to be loaded remotely via the Web.  In other words, Chrome treats each webpage as a separate application, using an approach similar to what used to be known as “multi-threading” in the operating-system world; each process runs in its own little corner of your computer’s memory.

What are the advantages to this?  There are two that come readily to mind.  First, just like a true multitasking OS, if one webpage you’ve loaded goes haywire you don’t have to exit and restart your whole browser just to get control back.  You can just open up a Task Manager-like utility to close the misbehaving tab, which does not take down the rest of the browser.  You can then resume browsing as if nothing ever happened, with no loss of data or information in your other tabs.  Second, since each tab is running in its own process, each tab uses its own memory as well; the OS doesn’t have to keep reallocating memory whenever you open a new tab, which can get messy when you have many tabs open, giving your computer fits when you start to reach the limit.  Chrome’s approach is much cleaner internally, and in theory should work better on lower-resource systems (or on systems where resources are tied up within the OS itself).

When you start up Chrome for the first time, you’re greeted with a page not unlike the “SpeedDial” panel Opera boasts about, where you’re presented with thumbnails of your most commonly-visited websites.  However, unlike Opera, you don’t have to manually set these buttons to favorite sites; Chrome does it for you automatically, based on its own calculations of how often you visit a site.  Additionally, the address bar only remembers addresses and search terms you explicitly typed in, unlike other browsers that keep every site you go to in memory (including obscenely long search results that would make even TinyURL run screaming into the night).

In my own brief experience with Chrome so far, I must confess to being surprised; for such an early-release product it’s already quite useful and usable.  However, there are several drawbacks already, not least of which is the fact this very website is not rendered correctly with it.  Whether this is a fault of Chrome itself or the use of oddball code in WordPress is unclear (I suspect the latter, since I’ve seen wayofthegeek.org do the same thing in Safari), but it is an annoyance for me personally.  However, this is still considered a “beta” release, so maybe this is something Google can work on for the future.  Chrome already passes Acid Test 2 with flying colors, and scores between 75 and 82 on Acid Test 3, which is great for such a new product.

Chrome is currently available only for Windows, though Mac and Linux ports are absolutely in the pipeline and will be forthcoming soon.  In the meantime, Scott McCloud has developed a comic book that goes into detail on all of Chrome’s features, and even gives you a look into what was going through Google’s collective mind when developing the browser.  It’s absolutely worth a look.

Keep your ocular input devices at the ready, because this browser will be one to watch in the coming months as it matures.

If you liked that, try...

1. Google Does a Take-Back on Chrome License
2. Firefox 2.0 released
3. Acid3 Test Is Good To Go
4. Firefox 3 Released
5. Wii to feature Opera Web Browser

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