I just finished reading Google’s comic book about there new browser effort, Chrome. Much has been written this week in the Tech press: Why do we need another browser? Just another attempt to gather more data about me. What, windows only?! Etc. Well, this is the first chance I’ve had to check for myself, and I must say I’m impressed.
First off, everything is open source. Re-using existing open source components when available and writing new ones when necessary to achive their goals. Very smart. Additionallly, the new components that prove to be superior can be adopted or adapted by other Firefox and other browser that choose to participate in the open source world. Much like their use of Gears to prototype things they are proposing to the W3 standards bodies, this is about building the infrastructure for a richer web. So, all the breathless paranoia about privacy is just that. There won’t be in privacy busting components in there because it’s open source and would be exposed immediately.
Second, they’ve reallly thought about what’s wrong with the browser security model, and they are not only fixing it, but showing everyone else how to do it. The comination of the sandboxing and the process model are very important. As the web moves more and more toward becoming it’s own applications platform, all browsers will need to adopt this or die.
Finally, we have V8, the javascript VM. Here, I’m excited about the performance possibilities, but also a little concerned. There is a lot of divergent work going on in this space. Mozilla is building their own VM. Microsoft is almost basing IE 8 on their DCLR. The Webkit guys also have work in this direction. Google’s, Mozilla’s, and Webkit’s are open source and will likely be used in other projects. But, as a developer, what I really want to see is a standardization of the VM interface. If my applet can be compiled, compressed byte codes, then I not only save time at runtime, but I can also write applications in other languages and use a compiler targeted at the VM. As web application increase in complexity, maintaining them will be a nightmare if we can’t use more appropriate languages.
