Google Chrome - The Reality

From today, Google is entering into the battle of browsers: Google Chrome is in the house! While Internet Explorer -yuck!- continues to lead the market, having it competing with Firefox and now with Google Chrome should be something interesting to see.

Google directives Sundar Pichai -VP Product Manager-, and Linus Upson -Engineerging Director, announced yesterday the launch of the beta version of this new browser in more than 100 countries around the world. Chrome has been built thinking about all this new technologies and web apps that are currently making the web - and also leaving some room for the next generation of web apps.

There are a few remarkable highlights from Google’s browser Chrome:

Google Chrome is open source, which means that its code will be available to everyone and other web browsers developers can take whatever they like from Chrome and use it. Hopefully, this will help make new standards and make all browsers better.

Security matters. Chrome will continuosly download lists of phishing sites and malware. We have already seen some of this on Google’s Search engine - you’ll get a warning if you’re entering a site with suspicious scripts.

Tabs goes first. Unlike Firefox and Internet Explorer, Google Chrome will display tabs on the upper side of the window. Also, each tab will work as an independent process on your system, so whatever happens to one of them won’t affect the rest. A question popped up in my head: how come no one thought about this before?

Built to run fast. Google Chrome will make use of a new Javascript engine called V8. This new engine will add more power to current web apps and also support those yet to be invented. This should improve Javascript’s speed and responsiveness, making web apps faster and also opening new horizonts to invention and creativity. We’ll surely witness the rise of new, and more powerful web apps in the near future.

A better address bar: Omnibox. Omnibox will not only work as a traditional address bar but also will include a more powerful suggestion tool based -naturally- on Google SE.

Here are some screenshots that have slipped into the public and republished at several websites in the last couple of hours:

Google Chrome should be launching today within a few hours from now. What should we expect from it? To be honest, I don’t know. Being a web developer I can only hope that it will comply with Web Standards so I don’t have to use hacks while coding websites to make it look good on Chrome… too - I already have hard times hacking my coding to make sites work on IE.