In fact, I am posting from it now.
I was skeptical, and I wasn’t alone in that feeling, but I only had one day to be skeptical because they only announced this thing yesterday! (Kudos for keeping it under wraps).
Google Chrome is a web browser built on WebKit, which powers other well known browsers such as Apple’s safari and KDE’s Konqueror. Google included a cute online comic book to explain the technology here. The gist being that the web browser uses entirely separate processes to load each separate tab. This goes beyond simple multi-threading, and gets into OS territory. They want to do this to eliminate browser hangups from ultiple tasks needing to use the same process. While this can and will usitilize more memory and processor power, it also allows one to regulate it easier, especially memory-wise. Plug-ins (when they appear) will also use separate processes.
The comic gets into computer science territory when they explain how they built their V8 from Webkit. It streamlines object manipulization and pointer calls and other things you can read about there.
I’m impressed. First off at the ease of slipping into it right from Firefox. It handles the same keyboard commands I’m used to, and tabs behave much the same. Two things it does not have that firefox has:
- Memory munching. Yes, it uses a spearate process and memory space for each tab, but these are confined spaces, unlike Firefox which could eat all my memory if I let it.
- Addons. none. Zilch. Yeah, it’s a beta, but man I need my add-ons.
The lack of add-ons will make me only piddle with Chrome when I feel like, not use it for a main browser. For one, I have many that are hard to live without. And two, Firefox is damn snappy without any add-ons, too, so it’s unfair to compare Chrome until it’s got the same capablities as a fully-loaded Firefox browser.
But the technology is impressive, and obviously since everything is open source, we are going to have a flood of add-ons coming very soon.
