Google made an announcement a couple weeks ago that they were developing and releasing a new web browser. Considering that they've been pretty active in Firefox development, I wasn't really sure what to make of Chrome, the name they're giving it. Also, the fact that they only have a windows beta, while I've been using my mac exclusively, left me uninterested.
I finally gave it another look this week though, and my opinion has shifted into the "maybe-this-isn't-such-a-bad-idea" category.
After going through a number of the new features, many (but not all) requiring deep architectural considerations, I remembered the reason Microsoft got into the browser war to begin with: there was a risk that Netscape would become the new platform, and the OS would become a much less-important commodity. Application developers (and not just web applications) would target the browser as a solid and flexible base instead of needing to learn how to port to different OS'es and machines. That vision has stalled for a few years (I think) because MS won the browser war, and stopped pushing. But with AJAX, flash, JavaFX, Silverlight, etc all promising full rich content applications using the browser as a base, I think there's an updated showdown brewing.
And the thing I like about Chrome is that it does a lot of things to give the user control over the browser as a platform. Between the builtin javascript debugger, the ability to start and stop running scripts, inspect variables, and even tell me which pages and scripts are hogging all the memory or CPU cycles, it gives the user the most control over the pages they view since GreaseMonkey*
Interesting side note, it looks like Google commissioned Scott McCloud to summarize the major changes going into Chrome, which he does in 5 chapters. He's a fairly well known cartoonist on the web who's blogged about micro-payments and comic theory. Michael should recognize him.
So I finally fired up a virtual windows machine and installed it, and it seems to run just fine. But with a 400+ MB source tree, I'm still hesitant to try and help with the mac port... :(
*Greasemonkey is a really cool plugin for Firefox that lets you rewrite pages before they get rendered. People have used this to, say, block (delete) the really noisy ads, or skip the scripts that want to send up pop-ups. Others have written greasemonkey scripts to add subdirectories in gmail, or mashup gmail and gcal. You can inspect the script before you install it and control which scripts run on which pages.
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I also wanted to add that JavaScript performance is one of the main goals behind Chrome. To that end google has written their own JavaScript engine called V8. They (of course) open sourced it and are encouraging other open source browsers to start using it.
This should be seen as what it is: google trying to get their own AJAX applications to run faster. But in the end, is there anything wrong with that?
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