Google: Chrome steps in where Firefox and IE fail

 

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Posted on 3 Sep 2008 at 09:46

Google decided to develop its own web browser because the leading alternatives, on Windows at least, are not good enough.

Speaking at the London launch of Google Chrome, the company’s product managing director of applications, Eric Tholome, said that other browsers simply are not fast enough to cope with Google’s own web applications, such as Gmail and Docs.

“The pace of development of apps on the internet has outpaced browser development," he said.

“Innovation on today's websites is limited by today's browsers. Gmail today launches hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript. We're at the very limits of what you can do without crashing the browser.”

Tholome declined to say if Google had considered buying Firefox developer Mozilla, but did say that Google thought that the only way it could address the “frustration” of browser users was with a fresh start.

Tholome did not include Apple’s Safari in his list of inadequate browsers. No surprise there, since Chrome, like Google’s Android mobile browser, is based on the same WebKit rendering engine, albeit tweaked, not always in a good way, and supplemented with Google’s own V8 JavaScript engine. Google has said that it plans to introduce both Mac and Linux versions of Chrome. But they may be some time, according to Google software engineer Amanda Walker.

“Right now, both are in the ‘pieces build and pass tests, but there's no Chromium application yet.’ While we're working hard and fast on catching up to the Windows version, we're not setting an artificial date for when they'll be ready — we simply can't predict enough to make a solid estimate, and we expect to learn a lot from the Windows public beta as well,” she explained in a blog posting.

Quite whether Mac users need another WebKit-based browser is a moot point. We already have around a dozen, including Safari, OmniWeb, iCab and Shiira, all of which will soon have access to WebKit’s new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine, currently being tested with impressive results.

Author: Simon Aughton / Barry Collins