I don't think this is an attack on Firefox over 50 million bucks. I think this is Google looking at the web and saying we need a faster, more stable, more rich, browser that has these 20 features to allow us to push our web apps forward. Their game is to make web apps equal to desktop apps so that they can sell advertising on them - and hammer Microsoft. This goes towards that goal. I'm looking forward to it. Firefox is in a lot of ways IE done right. This looks like a step forward in a new direction. Maybe not revolutionary, but a step forward none the less.
Think about it. People always make fun of how our computers are thousands and millions of times faster than computers of yore and seem to do basically the same thing... except that my word processor has live spell checking, and so on and so forth. Speed is technology enabling. Being able to add features to your site that won't make it pathetically slow when it would have been previously is huge.
Screw buzzwords, infrastructure is king. You are only as good as what lies beneath you.
However, Google does not have a good track record of delivering product for non-technical end users. GMail, their one succesful homegrown, mass-market, non-search product that I can think of, is a mess (haphazard user interface, no improvement for years, still beta). For such a strategic app, that is worrying.
As for their platform vision, it also seems very scattershot. They have visionary initiatives (GWT, Gears, App Engine, now Chrome) but it seems awfully disjointed with hardly any synergy between these projects.
I think it has yet to be proven that these projects can be integrated into something larger than the sum of its parts. For my money, if they can't do it with Chrome I have no confidence they can do it at all.
GMail has been improved in ways other than UI changes.
They have rewritten the HTML, CSS and JS to make it more hackable for Greasemonkey - and in the process, optimized that HTML, CSS, and JS to reduce number of connections and subsequently load time.
The backend has seen massive scaling. They added POP and IMAP.
I don't know what I would change for GMail. It's a strong email client that gets the job done. I wouldn't consider it "worrying".
Other than the faster javascript, I don't see a lot of "game changing" innovations in this browser. These seem like mostly incremental improvements and small features. If the java engine is significantly faster this could really push things forward. Otherwise this is less than world beating.
Just to be nitpicky... it sounds like they're using separate OS processes rather than threads within a single process. Hence, each tab would have its own entry in `top`...
edit: that'll teach me to not read the comic before commenting. It sounds like they're actually using lightweight processes.
perhaps this has more to do with recognizing mobile devices as the next big thing (tm), and providing a seamless experience on both mobile and desktops ?
Have you guys SEEN the respective code bases for Mozilla and WebKit?
Really, this was inevitable. Their whole tabs-as-process thing is too, when you think about it. Just imagine the potential for a browser-as-OS-with-processes-and-everything and how much they must be salivating to get it on devices and desktops NOT running Windows. It's a hell of a trojan horse in their winning battle to make Microsoft irrelevant...
Basically, WebKit is the most immediately understandable large scale C++ codebase I've ever seen. They have a strict culture of code reviews on check-in, and reverting any changesets that cause regressions. My commits have been rejected for style--I was first pissed, and eventually impressed :P
I can't speak for Mozilla's collaborative culture (and the fact that Firefox emerged from Netscape means it can't be half-bad), but just on an aesthetic level, WebKit C++ is a lot easier on the eyes than Mozilla. One thing that's interesting about WebKit is that in the last 12 months when I've been pulling upstream changesets from them, I've noticed that they're not afraid to do project-wide renames to keep the code clean. It seems like a small thing, but it's a lot more approachable to see clean C++ that uses namespaces and abstracts away platform differences in a coherent way. Mozilla is full of COM interfaces like
#define NS_IHTML_CSS_STYLE_SHEET_IID \
{0xb5cc4ac0, 0xeab6, 0x11d1, {0x80, 0x31, 0x00, 0x60, 0x08, 0x15, 0x9b, 0x5a}}
class nsIHTMLCSSStyleSheet : public nsIStyleSheet
... and so on. edit: To be fair, I'm just a lot more familiar with WebKit, so maybe someone can defend (or pick apart) Mozilla's sources better than I can. If you check out WebKit, you'll also notice that there's an impressive collection of 210MB(!) of individual layout tests.
Mozilla/Gecko is not just a browser engine, it's a platform (XPCOM) and everything is implemented on top of this platform as XPCOM components/interfaces. The bad thing is that these components are not very easy to use, write and integrate into anything else.
You can't kill a single thread safely because threads of the same process have shared memory. For example, a thread might be in the middle of some operation that's destructive if it's aborted when only half finished.
If this seems unlikely, think of adding an element to a hash table used by many threads and having to resize it, copying all the old elements to the new one. If you kill the thread in the middle of the resize (which might take a while if it's allocating a lot of memory) then all the other threads that use that hash table will get screwed up.
There's also no good way to tell which memory is being used by which thread. Often the whole point of threads is that they use shared memory; in this case the memory bloat might be _caused_ by a single thread but end up bloating a data structure that is _shared_ by all threads.
By giving each tab its own process, Chrome uses more memory to start out with - each process must have its own data structures for some things which in normal browsers are in shared memory - but hopefully in the long run it will avoid memory leaks.
It's because there isn't a compacting garbage collector running. The core is C/C++, so it relies on the OS allocator to keep memory from becoming fragmented. The OS allocators are good, but they aren't that good. In a browser you're constantly allocating and freeing large amounts of memory, so you're going to end up with some holes. Its usage pattern is way different than most applications because it's used like Google finally designed it: as a window into a bunch of different processes.
Well, assuming it uses a pristine WebKit backend, you should only have to test in one browser with the same WebKit build. :) I guess that might be idealistic thinking, but hopefully it pans out.
They seem to be using their own javascript engine, so it might need separate testing because of that. Although if it becomes popular enough, most javascript libraries and frameworks will surely support it.
There are actually very few inconsistencies in browsers implementations of the JavaScript language, it's the DOM that's the problem. If all they're doing is swapping out the engine for a JavaScript 1.5+ compatible engine, then we should be fine.
You can bet they will. The V8 engine is unlikely to present much of an obstacle. We have a large JS codebase and the Opera, WebKit (Safari), Spidermonkey (Gecko/Firebird), Rhino (Spidermonkey port to Java) and JScript (IE6/7) engines are no hassle to support.
The hard part is DOM interaction and styling. But as they're using WebKit and are putting a lot of effort into compatibility - this should be a breeze.
The really hard work is support for IE6. 1990s JS assumptions, very bad and inconsistent DOM behaviour, etc.
New, open JS engines with a different take on executing JS (Tamarin, V8) are wonderful news for JS developers everywhere. And consumers too, of course.
I know the portion of IE6 on the web is still around 25%.. but do you know what portion of your customers is actually using IE6 still?
I wonder at what point it is justified to return a 'please update your browser, preferrably to one of these: [list of reasonable browsers]', just because of the effort it takes you to keep IE6 compatibility.
any link to V8 project? Comic strip says its just a module in Chrome and can be used extensively for other projects i.e. that means games/cool desktop/mobile apps
This is a competitor in the AIR / silverlight / JavaFX space
Javascript can be enormously faster: compare ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0, which are implementations of ECMAscript (which Javascript is also) in Adobe's Flash.
If Google can basically get these things right - local persistence, speed and animation tools - the Web OS that Microsoft has greatly feared will be finally upon us...
Who knows but that what's next on Google's plate is a great implementation of SVG or whatever, to be a completely open alternative to AIR and Silverlight. I think we can almost expect it.
There are some very interesting technical points in the presentation, it's a good thing to redesign some of the core elements of such an important application as a browser. It's sometimes easier to implement something new then rewrite legacy code.
As someone who is fed up when Flash crashes and takes down the whole browser IT'S ABOUT TIME someone put each tab on a separate thread! The small performance penalty will pay for itself abundantly with the improved stability it will provide.
What struck me is how technical it was (for a comic book quick overview). It's obviously geared towards developers--they really wanted to plant their flag in the sand and say "we're doing this: here is why it is good."
I liked that the actual developers were giving the presentation in comic book form, instead of showing anonymous people. Or worse: imagine it Google had hired Marvel or DC to do the comic. We would be seeing Batman or Reed Richards trying to explain how multiple processes are more efficient.
The term "rock star" is way overused in the software field. It's nice to see some developers actually being treated as stars.
Strikes me as a very catchy name for the typical user, who most likely doesn't have "browser chrome" in their vocabulary already. And I doubt it'll be that hard for the rest of us to keep straight.
You're probably right, but there are so many other potential catchy names that aren't the same as Mozilla's interface layer, so I don't know why they couldn't have just gone with one of those and made it easier on everyone.
Chrome has been called chrome since time immemorial. I remember that's what it was called in the IE-vs-Netscape days. You know, the days that drove me to become a Flash developer.
"Several years ago Microsoft had a project code-named Chrome. It was supposed to be a multimedia browser. The project was killed a few weeks away from shipping."
This is tremendously exciting. There are tons of comments here that are insinuating that Google is doing this to screw over Mozilla somehow. I think this is bogus:
1) I know the comic was long, but they explicitly cover their agenda -- they're taking the time and money to make some hard decisions about the browser that really need to be made (or at least investigated), like separate processes per tab / embedded-object, aggressive javascript revisions and embedding features that are relevant to the new world of applications design.
2) Mozilla sending impressions to Google is still money in Google's pocket. Judging from Mozilla's $millions cut, it's handsome change, too. They have no incentive to kill this golden goose.
3) With all due respect to the (tens of?) thousands of people that have contributed to Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox, why should we even care about Mozilla/FF? When the Mozilla codebase was open sourced, it was roughly equivalent to NS6, which was a dog compared to IE (remember why even the majority of geeks was using IE5/5.5? NS4 was an ancient PoS and NS6 was glacially slow and horrendously unpolished). A lot of us only cared about NS because it ran on the open source OSes we preferred to use, and it represented an alternative to the MS-only world we saw coming our way otherwise. I don't see how Webkit isn't better than the Mozilla codebase in any metric you can throw at it.
Conspiracy theorists: Stand down. Sure, a monopolistic Google would be as bad as any other monopoly, but I don't think this is the keystone piece to the formation of the new evil empire.
I agree that the theory is bogus. But..
1) Explicitly covering their agenda only has value if you trust them. If Steve Ballmer was telling you about how he wants to improve the web experience for everyone, would you buy it.
2)They don't lose any impressions by replacing FF. They just stop paying for them.
3) I agree. But that just means you don't care if they kill FF. Not that they're not.
I don't like the idea of YAB, yet another browser. It's absolutely necessary that we have competition but it's way too easy to dilute the market.
It's like the problem of too much choice. We all face it. We go to the store and are greeted with 10 slightly different versions of the same product. Mint toothpaste, mint with extra-whitening, mint-flavored baking soda toothpaste. I don't want to buy one that tastes bad. This stuff is going in my mouth 3x a day, after all.
So I'm confused and cranky because I just want my normal toothpaste. My brain remembers the box had the certain logo and the certain white swish of box art. Found it! What size, big or small? Done, continue on to shopping decisions I actually want to think about like what's for dinner.
These days, the choice of a browser by 90% of people is the same kind of commodity thought given to toothpaste. They know what they're familiar with. They identify it via the shape and color of the icon, and maybe whether it says "internet" or not.
We've had to take 4 years to push Firefox to ~20% marketshare. Internet Explorer still has 75% total, with 30% of that being IE6. Safari, Opera, and all other browsers squeeze into the rough remaining 5% of the market. Adding YAB to the party won't serve anything except to dilute the last 5% some more.
What we need is not new browsers, OSS or not. We need marketing. Microsoft had easy marketing for IE. An icon on the desktop called "Internet".
We need Apple-style ads with Jason Long as Firefox and John Hodgeman as Internet Explored. Boil the message down to the barest essentials of the message and make it as clear to the "other 90%" as the Big Blue E meant "internet".
I think you underestimate Google's ability to push their goods. They've shown time and time again that they can enter a cluttered market and make a name for themselves nonetheless.
You seem to assume that the average person isn't going to want this rather than Firefox. That's patently false. I dislike Gecko: in my experience WebKit works better and faster. I dislike Mozilla: they seem to me to be manned with incompetent workers who are each brilliant at one small thing, poor with everything else.
Above all, I dislike Firefox. I think it's extremely ugly to look at. I've had more crashes with that in Windows than I've had with Safari, and Safari on Windows isn't nearly as stable as it is on OS X. Its developers focus too much on hype and not enough on reliability and ease of use. They're arrogant about it, too.
So if Google makes a web browser similar to how they made their chat client, they'll find a market. All they need is something simple, uncluttered, fast, and efficient - and that's what they're offering up here. They don't list one feature here that I don't think is essential, and they don't miss more than one or two features that I wish they had. I think that, in terms of browser design, we've just seen Google announce that there's finally a competitor to Apple's browser. And the thing is, there are a lot of people who dislike Firefox but use it for plugins. If a browser appears that's better-designed AND open, Firefox is going to get hurt.
Also, how do you think Firefox got 20%? Google. Google Google Google. And I'm certain that they can push Chrome much faster if and when they want to.
The solution isn't advertising. The solution is figuring out just how to make a browser that users will actively seek out. Firefox was like that for a while, before other browsers got tabs. Beyond that, though, it's never had anything that new users really care much about, with the slim exception of the tech market. Most Firefox users can't tell the difference between it and IE without a hacker friend pointing it out. And I think Google is aware of that.
With the feature set of WebKit + Gears + faster Javascript, as a developer, I'm much more likely to write apps against this platform. I am thinking specifically of distributing the Chrome browser with my app:
User goes to the site and already has Chrome. My site automatically detects that, and they can download my Gears app.
User goes to the site and has Firefox. My site detects that and gives them an option of the "lite" and the "full" version of my Gears app. The "full" version just happens to come with an install of the Chrome.
User goes to the site and has IE. My site detects that and gives them the download link to my app that comes with a Chrome installer.
In all three cases, I get what I want -- users use my app, and preferably running on a platform that runs fast enough. If I'm targeting "mom and pop", I doubt they'd notice that it happens to come with Chrome.
Because I can write a Gears app that doesn't have the URL links or the menu links, as far as the user is concerned, they are simply running my app. I can easily see Google pushing an "office suite", which simply consists of a gears version of Gmail, GDoc, etc.
Personally, I liked Firefox 1 and 1.5. I thought Firefox 2 was horrible, and all the IEs worse. When Firefox 3 release candidates came out, I switched to it immediately. Reading through those feature lists, as soon as Chrome is available for Linux, I'm getting a copy of it. Maybe I won't have to keep disabling Javascript by default with Chrome.
That is an interesting question. (An is it evil question ).
I guess it comes down to what they are trying to achieve with the browser in the first place. Is it improving the web experience or creating a dominant browser?
I think it's likely that the latter will creep in once they're at it for a few years. But for now the first seems to be a pretty important goal. For now, Firefox is a pretty important way to further that goal. And for now, Google seems happy enough to sink some cash into that goal. $15m-$20m p/y is probably a reasonable sum (compare to other expenses in this area) as long as A: Firefox significantly improves the web for users & B: That is a Google goal that they're willing to pay for.
It's not charity either. What's default search worth on the open market? Probably something.
Google just signed a 3 years deal with Mozilla. So, personally, I don't think that Google Chrome would be direct competitor to Firefox. They are in fact in two different market - normal browsing VS web application.
They're definitely competing but Google knows that browser usage stats don't change overnight so they're just hedging their bets. So it doesn't matter whether Firefox or Chrome wins, Google wins in the end.
I meant distribution as in partnering with AOL to use IE, leveraging Windows monopoly consumer side and enterprise side, and arguing with the DoJ on software tying.
In terms of marketing, Microsoft did very little compared to Mozilla.
Think of library computers, or the "Telecentros" in São Paulo.
Even more important. With the browser being a true OS and more and more applications living in the cloud, there is a slight chance that people would have less of a need to carry their own laptop around, and just work on someone else's. Incognito mode could be a way to make that easy and worry-free.
A lot of people are concerned about privacy on the internet in general without understanding any technical details. So there will probably be some people that browse with "incognito" on all the time, just to feel safer.
good move google! this has nothing to do with firefox. it has everything to do with webkit and ie. basically if you wanna be a big player you need your own toys. a google browser will be googles entry to to the new app space on an equal footing with ms. this is a place where you can bring in money by sale or subscription - without advertising.
but beyond that, google needs to compete with apples webkit on the mobile front. they need to embed a browser in android - preferably their browser ;) so far mozilla does not have an answer to the mobile webkit.
i dont see this as a dig on mozilla, google is funding them. i see mozilla remaining the best consumer app and goggles chrome becoming standard fair for mobile and desktop app browsing/computing for enterprise.
I'm curious why there aren't any platform partisans screaming "bloody murder" about Google's obvious flaunting of GUI tradition on this one. Putting tabs on top of the window titlebar may be the greatest UI innovation since tabs themselves, but it's going to make Chrome windows look and act differently from every other application on the user's computer.
That being said, a browser using WebKit + Gears + solic process sandbox model appeals to me a lot. Props to Google for explicitly referencing the Biba model, too -- if they can get web developers to start paying attention to the body of security theory published in the last 40 years, the browser itself could be a huge flop, and still leave us better off than we are currently.
It's brilliant design work. Favorite thing I've noticed so far: The trick of managing to introduce N different members of the design team, and give you an idea of what each one is working on, during the presentation by having each one deliver five lines and then hand over to the next. This trick would never, ever work in a screencast or a movie -- even if every individual had the acting chops to pull it off, it would feel like a circus act. But in comics, it works, because the comic characters are sufficiently abstract that they can take over from each other, almost mid-sentence, without a jarring discontinuity.
I swear that reading McCloud is almost enough to send me to art school.
They just renewed the contract with Mozilla. That's got nothing to do with it. And there's not nearly enough competition in browsers. Sure, there are lots of projects, but few of them are serious contenders for the average Windows user -- maybe Opera and Firefox qualify, but that's about it.
If you've ever tried to write a complex web app you immediately bang your head against the low, low ceiling afforded by the browser. Google knows this as well as anybody and it impedes adoption of Google apps like Gmail or Docs. Making the browser into a better platform is good for their business -- note they are giving away their spiffy new JS engine and the whole thing is open source.
If Firefox adopted their innovations tomorrow or one-upped them, I'm sure the Chrome team would be very happy.
Plus, a little less altruistically, it lets Google embed stuff like Google Gears and Google Toolbar directly into the browser, set Google.com as the browser homepage, and add a bunch of buttons linking to various Google services. Companies like Google pay a lot for defaults like that.
Plus, like Apple, they've got a mobile platform now so maybe they'll use some subset of Chrome in Android.
Is there any/much value in controlling the browser or owning the most popular browser in itself?
*By 'in itself' I mean ignoring advantages such as Google's: 'We need web-apps to work' or Microsoft's: 'We need web-apps not to work'
If default Search Engine settings are actually worth what Google paid ($55m for 15% of the market X 3 yrs) & no other revenue sources exist, the market's worth about $120m p/y. is that it?
Google already represents the internet to a lot of people as a result of it being perceived by these people as the entrance to the internet. "The portal is the network." From this perspective a Google browser is a seriously good way to lock these users in further. The multi-functional use of the address bar is also important - many people use it like this already.
- selling it as a corporate intranet platform -- in fact, knowing Google, this is probably already in beta internally
- similarly, convincing corporations to make it the installed browser of choice, due to improved security
- selling a low-priced GooglePC, or even giving it away. Preconfigured internet with some partner, and make Chrome the default and only shell, with prominent links to Google apps.
- putting it on cell phones via Android? But it sounds like the Android team is going with WebKit and not Chrome just yet.
All I am seeing is a lot of material about Chrome, but has anyone here actually tried it out? It is supposed to be available today (September 2); has anyone been able to download it?
Yes, really. I've heard from one of the Webkit JS guys(hey, cpst!) and I think it's because of all the C(++) code you have to interface with it's all conservative.
It's hard to believe that Google feels threatened by Firefox when they are directly paying the lion's share of Firefox's development/operating expenses -- a deal which they just extended by three years (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrati...).
In the post in the official google blog they said that they are also preparing versions for linux and osx. This makes sense, as they want everybody to be able to use the webabs of the future.
