Google unveils Chrome web browser

 

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Posted on 2 Sep 2008 at 08:58

Two years after it ruled out development of its own web browser, Google has unveiled Chrome, an open source browser based on components from both Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Due to launch later today, Google Chrome has been built from scratch to “simplify and streamline” the internet experience. While Google says the browser draws on several projects, Chrome is based largely on WebKit, which also underpins the browser that Google has developed for its Android mobile platform. Not that users will care, according to the engineers who worked on the project.

“To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters,” Sundar Pichai, vice president, Product Management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, explained in a blog post. “It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.”

The chief concern of Google’s engineers was to create a browser that runs web applications better than its rivals.

“By keeping each tab in an isolated ‘sandbox’, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites,” Pichai and Upson wrote. “We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.”

JavaScript is the language that underpins most modern web applications — such as Google’s Docs and Gmail — and it is no coincidence that both Apple’s WebKit project, from which Safari is derived, and Mozilla have recently introduced new JavaScript engines. It could prove to be the key battleground in the future.

Chrome will first be released for Windows, with Mac and Linux versions to follow. Until it is available, more details can be found in a comic drawn to explain Google’s approach to web browsing.

Author: Simon Aughton