Why Is Google Building A Browser (Chrome)?

For how much the web has evolved, browsers as a platform hasn’t evolved that much.  What Google is trying to do with Chrome is to make sure that browsers are really evolving along with the Web.  So the web can evolve to the next level.

Browsers need to get better because they were designed  for a era where pages were doing completely different things.  Today, most of what we use on a day to day bases are applications and not web pages.  People are watching videos, uploading videos, chatting with each other, playing games, and all of these things sincerely never existed back when the first browsers were created.  Wouldn’t it be great to design something from scratch based on the needs of today’s applications and webmasters.     

Google Chrome Speed – V8 and Webkit

When Google first started Chrome, they wanted to make sure that it improved browsers along the line of speed, stability, and security.  Speed is always very important at Google, and they wanted to may sure that Chrome executes as fast as possible.  Everything from the java script engine to the renderering.

Google started a program called V8, which was designed to allow java script to execute extremely fast.  Java script is the language that is used everywhere on the web; it was performing too slow, so Google decided to make it faster.  The team that work on that did an amazing job, and we are all stun by how fast it works.

Google saw a big opportunity to take a fresh start, and to use a different renderering — Webkit, which is something that Google spend a long time evaluating.  Webkit is the underlining web engine for Chrome; because it’s very fast, lightweight, very small and easy to maintain code-base.

Google Chrome Stability   

So, Google has worked really hard to keep the browser very fast, especially when it’s accessing these very powerful sites — and also to keep it very stable. If you doing something, like playing a game in one browser  tab and it slows down a lot because you have 58 monsters on the screen that you have to kill — your next tab over that is running your email will not be slowed down by that.  And so, Google came up with this system — whereby each web app would be run in it’s own environment; isolated from the others and this allowed for Chrome to be more robust.

In other browser, what might happen if your browser crashed — you would lost your online banking session,  you lost that document you were editing, you lost everything; with Google Chrome if one tab goes down the other tabs will stay up.

Google Chrome Security

so in building Chrome, Google was very concerned about security.  One of the things that gives Chrome a lot of miles is the multiple process architecture of Chrome.  So each renderer run in a separate process on your computer.  That means that they are isolated from each other, so that one can’t talk to each other and steal information.

So, what Chrome does is given each individual page its  own playground/sandbox. (Example) You’ve got your online banking running in one tab, and you have your search results and Gmail in another tab the two can’t talk to each other.  So, if something bad happen in one sandbox — (giant flood) the other sandbox is going to stay completely nice and dry.  Your tabs are isolated.  (Note from the transcriber — This guy talks better to computer than humans LOL). 
Google Chrome Invisible Browser

From a engineering and browser sense, Chrome is the user interface itself.  It the stuff around the outside of the window — the buttons, the toolbars … hand and hand with that is the physiology that Google took was “We want to maximize content and minimize Chrome“.

In designing Chrome, Google felt as if they had to make it invisible.  People shouldn’t have to think about Google Chrome– people should have to think about their applications.  In this process Google has taken a very minimalist approach — just like Google.com (search) the blank white page; they have tried to do the same thing with the browser.

From top to bottom Google has designed the interface to make sure it was as efficient and clean as possible — which they argued over very single pixel, and the Chrome of Chrome (geek humor) to make sure there was nothing wasted. 

Google Chrome Code Is Yours

Google Chrome is a fully open source browser and Google wants to release it in a way for others to adapted good ideas — and for Google to adapted other’s  good ideas and help the browser get better.  People should be able to dig into Chrome and learn from it and contributed.  Google really wants the work  it does to raise the bar for browsers, push browsers further, and make the capabilities better.  Google wants to allow for better web applications to be delivered.  Even if Google Chrome is not used by everyone on the web… as long as it makes the web better, Google has achieved its goal.

google.com/chrome

This is an unofficial transcript of the included video – The story behind Google Chrome.

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