With its beta release of Chrome, Google confirmed two years of Silicon Valley rumors that it was working on a next-generation web browser. All existing web browsers with any real market share - Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Opera - have their origins in a different era, when the main tasks a browser had to perform were rendering HTML pages and ensuring that plug-ins to play any embedded video or audio worked smoothly.But, increasingly, this is not the way that the web is used today.
Instead of simply displaying pages, users increasingly require access to application-like functionality, whether this is for online gaming, communication via email and messaging, photo manipulation or media playback.
And if Google and the other vendors of web-based productivity applications competing with Microsoft Office and other desktop apps continue to gain traction, the demands placed on browsers will increase further.
To respond to the profound shift in the way the web is used, Google went back to a clean sheet of paper in designing Chrome.
This is evident in its user interface, which downplays familiar browser features such as bookmarks, history and menus.
But the surface makeover is just the beginning. Underneath Chrome's minimalist interface lie several innovations that even more fundamentally rethink the way a browser works.
One is parallelism: Chrome creates a new process for each web page opened, and allows the different tasks involved in displaying a website to take place in parallel, rather than serially.
This makes it faster, and also ensures an error that crashes one process can be insulated from the others; the tab crashes, rather than the whole browser.
This contrasts with current browsers, which are single-threaded (each task involved in rendering a page has to wait its turn, contributing to the long delays that users experience in surfing some sites or services).
Another is vastly improved garbage collection.This avoids the bloated memory consumption that at times brings existing browsers to a halt, and may even crash the whole computer. Stability is also a huge area of gain.If users are considering switching critical tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets and email to web-based applications, they need to be far more certain than they are at present that their browser will not fail.Chrome represents a massive step forward in this area, despite its beta release status.
Finally, Chrome also marks a major step forward for the popular scripting language JavaScript in the standards battle that is emerging over how best to perform complex client-side operations required for today's richer web pages and web apps.At the core of Chrome is a new, parallel-system JavaScript engine called V8 that offers blazingly fast performance compared to existing software.
All of this suggests that Chrome is potentially (once the rough edges are smoothed off) a significant advance beyond today's web browsers.
Even better for Google, it doesn't need Chrome itself to be massively adopted by end users for it to win this particular phase in the browser wars.
I personally don't think its a matter of one thinking that Chrome is a cool or not. The world needs better software, change is inevitable. one can choose to resist(but for how long?) or to be part of the change. I choose to welcome change and to be part of it. I also have a feeling that other web brower vendors will soon imitate some of chrom's nice features. At the end of the day we have better software. Lets be open minded guys rather than beign judgemental. That way, we may never realise the good in what we think is bad.
By the way, thanks jimmy for you initiative