Brian's Brain

As a few of you may have heard, some obscure little company in Mountain View, CA called Google ;-) released the Windows XP/Vista-specific (Linux and OS X also planned) beta Chrome version of a new open-source browser called Chromium on Tuesday, one day after a 38-page website-hosted comic strip explaining the concept, aspirations and implementation accidentally (or not) went live. After waiting a few hours, wherein I monitored various websites' RSS feeds to see if any showstopper bugs had been uncovered, and after just-in-case backing up my VMware-managed Windows XP Pro SP2 virtual machine, I tossed Chrome on the MacBook and took the browser for a spin.

Why'd Google undertake this project, especially given its historically tight relationship with the Mozilla Foundation and its Firefox? Considering the rising animosity between Google and Microsoft, many pundits immediately deduced that Internet Explorer was in Chrome's bullseye, and I tend to agree, at least in the long term (I'm sure the marketing moniker selection was completely coincidental, for example..ahem...). In fact, given that Google bundles Gears with Chrome for on- and off-line (the latter regardless of whether the disconnect is of your making or the fault of your service provider) application execution, I'd go a step further and suggest that Windows-slaying is Chrome's ultimate aspiration. Google generally, and Chrome specifically, represent the most realistic example yet of the platform-agnostic browser-based computing threat that prompted Microsoft to 'cut off Netscape's air supply' over a decade ago. To wit, check out this excerpt from Google's developer documentation:

In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.

Near-term, though, and especially if Google isn't able to secure abundant bundling deals (which consumers detest), IE's ubiquity and momentum (along with that of Safari on Apple platforms) mean that Chrome's market share gains will mostly come at the expense of other 'power user' (aka me) alternative browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Camino. Chrome is based on the WebKit open-source application framework, which also fuels Safari, along with the browser planned for Google's Android mobile phone O/S. As such, and befitting Chrome's spartan user interface, I suspect there'll be quite a lot of cross-pollination between the Chrome and Android teams going forward.

With no offense intended to Opera's miniscule-sized but passionate user base, the Mozilla Foundation and its Firefox seem to be the biggest losers in this particular story, no matter how politically correct a spokesperson couches his positioning response. Why else, after all, would the Mozilla Foundation quickly release benchmarks in striving to reassure users that TraceMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in upcoming Firefox v3.1, will be faster than the V8 JavaScript engine (pun intended) now in Chrome?

Gecko layout engine technology has to date, in fact, incurred surprisingly little industry adoption. The only large deployments outside of Firefox that I'm aware of are the Camino browser for OS X and the browser included in recent Nokia Internet Tablet O/S builds. The Nintendo Wii's browser was developed by Opera, and Sony licensed its PlayStation 3 browser from NetFront. I don't expect an Xbox 360 browser any time soon, considering the consequent conflict-of-interest with Microsoft's PC sales aspirations, but even if I'm wrong about Microsoft's console plans, I bet I won't be wrong about the browser's IE foundations ;-)

Firefox v3 is my primary browser in both OS X and Windows, so Chrome comparisons will inevitably derive from that particular starting point. As such, I'm impressed with Chrome's slick tab management capabilities, as well as its purposeful home page implementation. With a nod to now-pervasive multi-core CPUs, Chrome spawns a unique process for each open tab (thereby one-upping IE, which optionally albeit not by default spawns a new process for every IE instance). As such, at least theoretically, a crash in one tab won't entirely cripple Chrome...although Flash lockups still seemed to bring down the entire browser for me.

When I installed Chrome, it offered to import my Firefox (or IE) configuration information, including bookmarks and search engines. By default, it did not override my currently selected search engine even if it wasn't Google (though it offered to)...it also didn't automatically make itself the default system browser (though again, it offered to)...both 'light touches' are greatly appreciated. Like Walt Mossberg, I don't find Chrome to be noticeably faster than Firefox either at launch or runtime (admittedly, perhaps in part because I'm running Windows virtualized), though it's especially speedy with JavaScript-rich sites (such as Gmail and Google Apps...how convenient!).

The per-tab unique-process approach makes Chrome a bit of a memory hog under heavy use, albeit arguably still more svelte than IE 8 Beta 2 (which I haven't personally tried). As someone who currently has almost 20 add-ons installed under Firefox, I also find Chrome's current lack of expandability quite constraining...then again, this is just the first beta of the product. But I wonder, even in the long term, just how supportive advertising revenue-fueled Google will be of extensions such as Adblock Plus (or, for that matter, CustomizeGoogle...or Flashblock...or Gspace...). It apparently is incompatible with some websites (beyond those, of course, which require IE's ActiveX support), thought I haven't yet encountered such problems, and there's also currently at least one security vulnerability resulting from its use of an out-of-date WebKit version.

My biggest concern with this or any other Google product, no surprise to long-time readers, involves privacy. Check out this portion of the end-user license agreement:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

'Nuff said? Yeah, I thought so.

Check out these other chronologically ordered writeups for more details (including screenshots) on Chrome:

• Google Chrome, the Google Browser
• Google opens up new front in browser wars with Chrome
• Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web (background on the article)
• Our review: Chrome more than capable of taking on IE and Firefox
• Straight out of Compton
• Google Chrome: Performance and First Impressions
• Hands-on with Chrome: Google's browser shines (mostly)
• Google's Chrome in a word: revolutionary
• Google Chrome, Day 2

Here's a video of Tuesday's press briefing:

And as a wrap-up chuckle (or few), reflective (in the first two cases) of the reality that Google's 'Don't Be Evil' mantra is no longer universally trusted, hit these links:

• Google's Chrome Comic, Stripped
• Google's comic capers: what they really meant to say
• Today's Joy of Tech!