8-bitDesign

Becky made the mistake of asking for my opinion on the new Google Chrome, and how it’s going to affect my day to day life.

This is a mistake: I’m a web dev, and we tend to have very strong opinions about our browsers. Anyways, here are my thoughts on what Google’s doing here.

To start with, Chrome is different from most browsers in two ways:

1. It isolates each tab. Effectively, instead of opening 4 tabs in Firefox, you’re opening 4 browser instances in Chrome. The difference here is that if one tab explodes, the rest of the browser stays stable.
2. It has a shit-hot Javascript optimisation/compilation engine (V8), meaning Javascript goes way faster.

So, the big thing here is that they’re going to an OS model for browsing. Most modern OSes have protected memory, meaning that if Word crashes, the whole OS stays stable. OS8 on the Mac side and Win95/98/ME lacked this, meaning that any application crashing would hose your whole OS and force you to restart.

Nowadays this seems silly, but back in the 90’s, most of us were restarting our systems on a daily basis out of habit, presuming the OS didn’t pre-empt us. Understandably this is a modern OS feature and something sorely lacking from our current crop of browsers; if YouTube crashes or slows to a crawl, you may lose an email you’re composing in gMail or Google Docs.

Also, they’re including a “Task Manager”, so you can see which tabs are acting up, using a tonne of memory, or otherwise being pricks. Currently if a site is slowing your browser to a crawl, there’s no way to tell which one’s responsible, leaving you scratching your head when you get yet another “A script on this page is acting up” type message pops up. This is another OS standard OS feature, which gives users the ability to force quit, or otherwise kill any offending tasks.

So as for how this changes my life? It doesn’t. Sadly IE6 is still the lowest common denominator, so we can’t do anything new that would exclude that. And hell, apart from the two points above, it’s the same rendering engine as Safari, so there’s not the greatest shift in how pages render.

Once this browser makes its way into the mainstream, however, we’ll get good feedback about how fast/sluggish our pages are, and be able to optimise them. At the moment, traditional browsers lump all resource allocation together, so I can see that Firefox is bogging down, but not which tab in Firefox is bogging down.

Oh, and Javascript based Apps like Google Reader, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Spreadsheet will be much faster and desktop-like.

And that’s the big point of this. Instead of downloading Word, you can use Google Docs, and with all the optimisations here, using Google Docs on Google Chrome is almost as fast as Word. Hell, look at all the OS features here. Any ideas spring to mind?

Google can’t unseat Microsoft in the OS space, but they’re building an application platform that doesn’t care about the underlying OS. Apple, Linux, Windows… Google’s trying to make those distinctions irrelevant for 90% of the programs out there.

Combine some of the cool things going on in the plugin space, like the ubiquitous Flash or the up-and-coming InstantAction.com plugins which enable advanced interaction outside of a specific OS, and soon we’ll be able to party like it’s 1999. That’s right, after decades of hype, the era of the Thin Client is fast approaching… again.