Google to unveil shiny Chrome web browser

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 02 September 2008 05:30

Business IT - Open Source

This area has attracte a lot of attention recently, with the forthcoming TraceMonkey JavaScript engine for Firefox and SquirrelFish for WebKit.

Although Chrome will use WebKit, Google has opted to use the V8 JavaScript virtual machine developed in Denmark. V8 generates machine code that runs directly on the CPU (translation: JavaScripts run very quickly) and it also provides for very rapid garbage collection (translation: fewer mysterious pauses).

Gears, the Google-initiated open source project to allow web applications to run in an offline browser, will be a part of Chrome.

Cosmetically, Chrome's major differentiator is that tabs stick up from the top of the browser window. Instead of sharing controls and the URL box, each tab has its own copy. The URL box doubles as the search box (complete with suggestions and full text searching of the browsing history), and has therefore been dubbed the Omnibox.

Talking of the omnibox, here's a feature that I'm hanging out for: autocompletion only takes you to URLs that you've actually typed in. So allowing itwire.com to autocomplete will (almost certainly) take you to our home page, not an individual story that you previously read.

But if you do want to find a story you read yesterday, that full-text history search will come in handy.

Another cosmetic change is that Chrome provides a mechanism for displaying web applications in windows that omit the usual browser 'chrome' such as the toolbar and URL box, making them appear more like local applications.

What is Chrome borrowing from existing browsers? Please read on.