A sophisticated browser, which straddles the desktop/server divide has been launched by Google. It aims to create a better platform for its webapplications, which need to be faster and more secure to compete with the local desktop, currently dominated by Microsoft. The download should be available from http://google.com/chrome any time now.
The browser is built on top of Apple’s WebKit HTML rendering engine, a lightweight renderer that is known for its clean code base, good performance, and excellent standards-compliance. WebKit’s versatility and the ease with which it can be embedded in applications has led to its adoption in numerous contexts, including Google’s Android web browser. Alongside WebKit, Google will be using its own JavaScript virtual machine called V8, which was designed for high performance and has some compelling features.
One of the most impressive technical innovations that Google has brought to Chrome is a multiprocess design. Each individual browser tab runs within its own isolated process, much like the way that processes work in an operating system. This will massively increase the robustness of the browser by insulating the application from bugs that cause crashes within individual tabs. The tab will go down, but the rest of the browser will remain unaffected. The multiprocess design also reduces the impact of memory fragmentation by ensuring that the memory used by a tab can be reclaimed completely when the tab is closed.