Rob Young

Google have recently caused a stir by releasing their take on the web browser.
The main USP of Google’s browser over others is that each new browser tab is a process of its own, which is meant to isolate any malicious code that may crash the browser. The other main innovation it brings to the table is a completely rewritten JavaScript engine – which actually interprets and compiles JavaScript to generate machine code to be run locally.

While this uses a bit more memory to start with, it’s designed to make JS-intense webapps run better with heavy use, GMail and Google Docs included! I’ve found myself using Google’s online apps a lot more lately – especially for collaborative documents and knowledge sharing, as well as being a good place to store little scraps of information you want to be able to access from anywhere. It’s not too much of a surprise that Chrome has Google Gears built in, but as a new feature you can create desktop shortcuts to webapps like GMail, Google Docs or any others – these are then given a simple window instead of a browser window, much like any other desktop application.

Some people have been shy to adopt Chrome initially as it had a fair few bugs when it was released (or maybe it was the fact that all bugs were made visible as it is open source?) I’ve been using Chrome for a few weeks and it’s very good from what I’ve seen.  It’s lightning-fast to start, and the task manager is pretty useful. 

At the time of writing, it’s only been released for Windows as this was Google’s first focus. I’m very much looking forward to the release of Chrome for Mac OSX and Linux, but there would be nothing more disappointing than to find it was a rushed release that looked nothing like a Mac OS application. The message from Google however, is a reassuring one:

In order to make sure Chromium feels right, each platform’s version is being built by people who live and breathe that platform; the engineers working on these versions are long-time Mac and Linux engineers who are just as picky about the details as anyone. It’s also not just the engineers; Macs and Linux machines are very popular at Google at all levels, so progress is already being followed avidly across all levels of the company.

These versions are not being built by separate teams, however. Everyone working on Chromium can and does contribute to all platforms, in order to keep things from diverging too far, and all versions are built from the same sources. You can see the first steps of this in the source tree right now: you can already build some modules (and run unit tests!) on the Mac and Linux, and more will be landing in the tree as we move forward. Our build infrastructure also notifies everyone when a change on one platform breaks the build on another, which keeps everyone in sync.

As the bigger pieces come together, parts of the existing Chromium code will need to be refactored or rethought, of course. Sometimes even code written with multiple platforms in mind (as much of the Chromium code already is) will turn out to have embedded assumptions that aren’t valid once it’s actually running on the other platforms. The team is fully aware of this and is prepared for it, rather than dictating that everything accommodate to how things work on Windows.

For those who are using Mac OSX and Linux and are itching to get their hands on Chrome, Crossover (the makers of Wine) have ported it for the platforms as a “look what we can do!” exercise – there’s no promise of stability or lack of UI bugs, but it’s certainly better than nothing

OSX Gets Gears

Google have also officially released Gears for Safari after a short beta period – now Mac users are able to turbo-charge their web experience on a number of sites, including WordPress, Google Docs Offline and YouTube