Google Chrome Browser: A High-Level Overview

Google announced today its latest project, Google Chrome, a competitor in the browser market. Here are some of the high-level points to know about Chrome:

• Uses multi-threaded processes to isolate page executions, allowing for better performance and quicker, more reliable memory freeing
• Built off the WebKit code base (used by Safari, Adobe AIR, Nokia, iPhone, Android mobile platform [Google’s mobile OS) due to its impressive speed
• Faster and rebuilt JavaScript virtual machine called V8 (Virtual machines provide safety and platform independence)
  • In V8, as execution goes on, objects that end up with the same properties will share the same hidden class
  • In Chrome, JavaScript is not interpreted, it is compiled to machine code for faster execution in the browser
  • Precise garbage collection
  • V8 is independent of the browser so other projects can use the engine
• Better URL bar interaction design
  • URL box (coined Omnibox) is a apart of each tab (rather than the browser window)
  • Omnibox not only handles urls, but also suggestions for searches, top visited pages, and popular pages you haven’t visited
  • Full text search for your historical pages
  • Smarter URL completion
  • Searching sites like Amazon or Wikipedia, captures their search boxes on your local system, allowing you to search those sites later on straight from your URL bar
• New “home page” when opening a new tab displaying your nine most visited pages and the sites you search on
• Incognito window for private browsing
• Pop-ups are scoped to the tab they came from and confined there. If you do want a popup to occur, just drag out a graphical area to open it’s own window
• Webapps can launch their own browser window with a minified chrome without the URL box and the browser toolbar
• Sandboxing to keep page processes from being able to write files to your hard drive or read files from sensitive areas on your computer
  • User must initiate actions requested to run by the browser
  • With one exception, plugins, can run at higher levels than the browser itself.
• Plugins are now run in their own process
  • The rest of the page can still be sandboxed
• Chrome continually downloads lists of harmful sites, one for phishing, one for malware, presenting the user a warning if they stumble upon either
  • If a user visits a site with malware, Google notifies the owner of a website to let them know so they can clean up their site
• Google Gears is built in
• Completely open source