This week has seen a lot significant developments in the domain of web browsers. Indeed the browser war is
hottening up with the release of Internet Explorer 8.0, FireFox 3.0 (UBIQUITY 0.1.1 about which i mentioned in my last post) and the release of Google Chrome.
Being a die hard googler ^_^, i installed the google Chrome browser and made it my default browser. Installation process was fast and quick with the use of a the Google application downloader. Upon downloading, there was a brief setup screen and with a single click of Start Google Chrome, the clutter free Google Chrome Interface is encountered.
After playing around with it for a couple of moments, the only phrase i can use to describe is OUTSTANDING & CLUTER FREE!!! The most striking feature of the browser from Google : CHROME is that it has been built from scratch and uses the impressive JAVA VM V8 (Which enables the AJAX applications more responsive and accelerated). For those who are not aware of the V8, the following extract will throw some light on the features
Unlike in other JavaScript engines, in V8, can-doally created objects that have the same properties share the same class on which optimizations can be use Other JavaScript engines on encountering JavaScript source code generate an inner representation of the same that the engine can interpret. V8 uses something titled can-do code generation for this. When V8 encounters JavaScript source code it generates machine code that can run directly on the CPU that is moving the browser. This makes for accelerated and more response JavaScript applications. V8 also implements dead and additive garbage collection techniques that makes more best use of memory when executing JavaScript.
Source: http://palinvp.wordpress.com/
Its the fastest among the set of currently available browsers . Chrome has been designed to hide users’ behavior, by wiping out search history stored in the browser. It has also incorporated the InPrivate browsing feature (which is found in IE8).
I found that Chrome lists automatically the web sites that i use more frequently. It has also incorporated the Task Manager concept which enables us to treat each tab a separate entity( i.e Tabs run in isolation). It treats each tab as a separate browser. Chrome also groups related tabs. If you open a new tab from a link in a page that’s already open, that new tab appears next to the originating page, rather than at the end of the row of tabs. when i opened a new tab from a link in a page that’s already open, that new tab appears next to the originating page, rather than at the end of the row of tabs.
These guys have merged both the search box and the address box into one single box (terme as Omnibox / Omnibar ). It reduces the user interface to just two menus and a few icons. Also when i open a new tab, it does not give me a blank page but lists out
- the thumbnails most visited websites
- list of recent search engines
- recently used bookmarks
- recently used tabs..
Thus Chrome acheived the objective of maximising the screen space for the web pages. Another feature i have noticed is the popup block notifications are less intrusive. So far havent stress tested Chrome. However, some of the issues i have noticed are (which obviously will be rectified in subsequent releases)
- Tab Overflow
- No support for Live Book Marks (t’s painful drag-and-drop if i have to organise them)
- No RSS Support
- No Extensions
- While installing Chrome, it gives me an option to import stored password (It was inconvienient though to close the firefox browser), however upon open Chrome, the Saved passwords dont show up!!!
- No progess bar indicating the percentage of the webpage that has been fetched.
- No command for emailing the links directly from the browser (Reminds me of UBIQUITY – if these guys can get UBIQUITY to work with Chrome Then Bingoo you have a good combo:)!!! )
- Searching within the page, additional features like highlighting, text processing are missing.
- Yet to come up with a version for Non Windows Platforms.
I am sure that Google through the use of Chrome Spiders and it’s vast web resources, will definitely identify the bugs and issues and come up a much better version.
- Currently, Google’s Search Engine depends on the browser. With IE not belonging to opensource group, there is a speculation that the design of IE might be altered to gain advantage over google’s search engine.
- The second reason is improve the performance of web applications and change the conventional way of executing them. The current browsers are equiped to run traditional web applications. There is a need for a browser with an underlying architecture to enable future, more powerful Web applications that will rely more heavily on JavaScript. Chrome has been designed to be the world’s speediest browser at handling JavaScript.
It’s a platform for running Web applications
