Google Chromium

Opera was a trendsetter. You could tell that people worked on it very hard for a very long time, and in just a couple of days it was essentially kicked to the curb.

Google’s Chrome captured more market share than Opera ever had. How sad for Opera; how great for Google. Opera had a ton of features and a sidebar that offered so much to the user.

Chrome doesn’t even have that. It’s very minimalist and simplistic. It seems that a lot of people like that, however, because it became wildly popular in the space of about ten minutes. It doesn’t seem like it will take over from Firefox or IE, but it looks like it’s here to stay and like it will keep other, smaller browsers from making much headway in the market.

If you want great browser security, Chrome might be the way to go. A lot of people still love Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Chrome has stronger levels of security, and a lot of people appreciate that and see the importance of it. Even though it’s still a beta release, the browser has so much to offer.

The security is important, though, because it’s something that’s getting harder and harder to come by. Most browsers are able to be hacked into, and since that’s the case, there is no way to ensure that your information is safe.

You have to find something that you feel the safest with from the choices that you have available, and Chrome is the best one to protect what you do on the Internet. It not only helps to protect your information, but it also works to let you browse without logging information, keeping your surfing private, as well.

There are all different kinds of shortcuts that can be used for Google Chrome. You can make shortcuts for:

• The start menu
• Your desktop
• Google apps – like documents and calendars
• Windows Live Hotmail, and more.

But that’s not all you can do. Other things you can do with this new browser include:

• Opening sites in such a way that they don’t appear in your browser history
• Loading your home page with thumbnails of the sites that you visit the most
• Hide your bookmarked sites from prying eyes, and
• Drag your links around to put them where you need them.

The greatest thing about the tips and tricks that work with Google Chrome is that people continue to find more of them, and when they do they blog about them, putting them out there on the Internet so that everyone can get use from them.

Helping people out with a new browser is a great way to make friends and share ideas, tricks, and new tips. We don’t know how many more shortcuts are still out there, but we bet you’ll find more of them to talk about. Google Chrome seems to have a lot to offer.

The reason we’re so stoked about Chrome isn’t that it’s just a browser, or even a better browser. This is the glue. It’s the central hub of connectivity we’ve been waiting for — the final piece of the Google puzzle that has been building since they started growing beyond the ad market and into products and services that actually do things. It gives Google a new platform to target services upon and coupled with their brand awareness, stands to invade the desktops in a way we haven’t seen since Internet Explorer 3 brought “the web” to the masses (and more importantly, gave some honest hooks into a web platform). Only this time the benefit is a modern, stable and powerful browser that also works as a mini-OS. If you like Google docs, Gmail, Gtalk and the myriad other services Google creates, this will be the primary target that’ll bring all that under one roof.

Yeah this guy gets it. Now someone do me a favor and go explain it to the guys on Google Finance. lol For the record, tonight as GOOG hits a 52-week low I increase my position!

Google has quickly fixed the offending language in their new End User License Agreement (EULA) for the recently launched Google Chrome, their first version of their new browser that is sweeping the internet.
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Here is the first video from the Google Chrome team. It goes a long way in describing the Google team’s goals and some of the main focuses of Google’s new Chrome browser. Exerpts of the video are transcribed below for closer inspection.

Why is Google building a web browser?

“For how much the web has evolved, browsers as a platform haven’t evolved that much. What we are trying to do with Chrome is to make sure the browsers are really evolving along with the web so the web can evolve to the next level.”

“Browsers need to get better because they were designed for an era where web pages were doing completely different things.”

“Today most of what we use on a day-to-day basis are applications and not web pages.”

“Wouldn’t it be great to start from scratch and design something based on the needs of today’s applications and today’s webmasters?”

Speed (V8 and Webkit)

“When we set off to build Google Chrome we wanted to make sure that we improved browsers along the lines of speed, stability, and security.”

“We started a project called, ‘V8‘ which was designed to allow Javascript to execute extremely fast. Javascript is the language that is used everywhere on the web. It was performing too slow, so we decided to make faster.” e.d. I love it. So Google.

“WebKit is something we spent a long time evaluating. Webkit is the underlying rendering engine for Chrome because it’s fery fast, it’s very lightweight, it’s very small, and [it's an] easy-to-maintain codebase.”

Stability

“We came up with this system whereby each web app would be run in its own environment isolated from the others and this allowed us to make them more robust.”

“Other browsers what might happen is the entire browser would crash, so you lose your online banking session, you lose that document that you’re editing, you lose everything. In Google chrome if one tab goes down the other tabs will stay up.”

Security

“One of the things that gives us a lot of mileage is the multi-process architecture of chrome, so each renderer runs in a separate process on your computer and that means that they’re isolated from each other so that one can’t talk to the other and steal information.”

“We essentially give each web page its own little playground, its own sandbox. So you’ve got your online banking running in one tab, you’ve got your search results, your Gmail, in another tab — the two can’t talk to each other and if something bad happens in one sandbox [...] your tab is going to be isolated from the other tabs.”

The Invisible Browser

“… design philosophy that we took which was we wanted to maximize content and minimize chrome.” “People shouldn’t have to think about Google chrome, people should have to think about their applications.” “And in this process we have taken a very minimalistic approach, just like Google.com, you know if you think of the white page in Google.com we’ve tried to do the same with the browser.”

The Code is Yours

“So Google Chrome is a fully open-source browser, right, and so we want to release this in a way in which others adopt good ideas from us … and help the browser get better. We really want the work that we do to sort of raise the bar for browsers, we want to push browsers further, we want to make the capabilities better, we want to be able to allow for better web applications to be delivered.”

“Even if Google Chrome itself isn’t used by everyone on the web, as long as it makes the web better, we’ve achieved our goal.”

Today, Google launched a new web browser called Google Chrome. At the same time, we are releasing all of the code as open source under a permissive BSD license. The open source project is called Chromium - after the metal used to make chrome.

Why did Google release the source code?

Primarily it’s because one of the fundamental goals of the Chromium project is to help drive the web forward. Open source projects like Firefox and WebKit have led the way in defining the next generation of web technologies and standards, and we felt the best way we could help was to follow suit, and be as open as we could. To be clear, improving the web in this way also has some clear benefits for us as a company. With a richer set of APIs we can build more interesting apps allowing people to do more online. The more people do online, the more they can use our services. At any rate, we have worked on this project by ourselves for long enough - it’s time for us to engage with the wider web community so that we can move on to the next set of challenges.

We believe that open source works not only because it allows people to join us and improve our products, but also (and more importantly) because it means other projects are able to use the code we’ve developed. Where we’ve developed innovative new technology, we hope that other projects can use it to make their products better, just as we’ve been able to adopt code from other open source projects to make our product better.

How will we be working with the open source community?

To begin with, we are engaging with the WebKit community to integrate our patches back into the main line of WebKit development. Because of Chromium’s unique multi-process architecture, the integration of the V8 JavaScript engine, and other factors, we’ve built a fairly significant port of WebKit on Windows, and are developing the same for Mac OS X and Linux. We want to make sure that we can find a productive way to integrate and sync up with the WebKit community in this effort as we move forward.

Today, you can visit our project website at www.chromium.org, where you can get the latest source code or the freshest development build. If you’re interested in keeping track of what’s going on, you can join one of our discussion groups, where you can participate in development discussions and keep track of bugs as they’re filed and fixed. Maybe you’ll want to fix a few, too! You’ll also find information on reporting bugs and all the various other aspects of the project. We hope you’ll check it out!

This is the Chromium blog. The posts here will be of a mostly technical nature, discussing the design theory and implementation details of work we’ve done or are doing. Over the next few weeks there’ll be a number of posts that give a high level tour of the most important aspects of the browser.

Finally, if you’ve not yet done so, take Google Chrome for a spin. You can download it from http://www.google.com/chrome/.

Posted by Ben Goodger, Software Engineer

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