Google is launching their own open-source web browser tomorrow in 100 countries. The browser's called Google Chrome, and there's several reasons they decided to build their own (based on Webkit) rather than just latch on to Firefox.


The perceived need for a new browser was prompted by the new generation of websites that are really web-based applications. The original browsers were not built with this purpose in mind, and consequently there's a lot of struggles by both users and site developers in using these applications. For instance, you could be using Photoshop Express, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Calendar all at the same time. What happens if the Google calendar tab ends up trying to process something impossible or waiting on a server request indefinitely? You can't get to any of your other tabs. And if that process ends up crashing, it takes down the whole browser with it.

That's one of the big features in Google's new browser. Separate tabs are actually separate operating system processes, so they can't take each other down or cause everything to stall because they're waiting on something as with most current popular browsers.

The whole Google Chrome story actually got scooped first at Google Blogoscoped, which received a comic book in the mail that described the features in detail. I'll link to the relevant pages for each point below.

Here's the big features of Google Chrome:

• Each tab gets its own process - as I described above
• The browser uses a Javascript virtual machine - This will result in drastic speed improvements on Javascript heavy sites like Gmail
• Tabs appear at the very top of the window, rather than below the address bar - not sure how much I like that idea
• The address bar is replaced by the Omnibar - the autocomplete pulls from your recent site history, popular searches, etc.
  • Related: The browser remembers search boxes from pages - If you went to Amazon.com, later you can type "Amazon" in the Omnibar, hit tab, and then type your search in the Omnibar as well...it seems like it saves the search boxes automatically
• The start page - they comment that many people go with a blank page just to make the browser load quickly. The new start page shows 9 thumbnails of your most visited sites, along with a right column of searches you do often.
• Privacy mode - aka "Porn Mode" as the Microsoft version of this feature got dubbed...Google says you can use it to keep gifts a secret
• Popups get trapped and show a little notification on the tab they try to pop from - if it's legit you can drag it out to a new window
• For those that like things clean, you can launch apps in a navigation and menu-less window - This really doesn't seem very useful to me...unless you leave something like Gmail open constantly, what's the point of not being able to navigate somewhere else? Mozilla added this with a feature called Prism and this is the same thing.
• All tabs run in sandboxes so they can't harm your system and files or affect other tabs - Plugins do not get sandboxed though, so there is still some risk to your system
• The browser checks against a malware and phishing list to prevent accidentally going to those sites
• Gears is built into Google Chrome - This adds capabilities like offline access to applications that build in support for it (Gmail has taken forever to add this...you would be able to compose an email even without internet access in Gmail, and then as soon as you get an internet connection it would send)

A kid that was wise beyond his years once said, "Mozilla Firefox is the greatest web browser available!" But tomorrow he might be crying in a corner :)