On Sep 2, 2008, at 5:15 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
Google is coming out with a new browser named "Chrome." But there's a
component of Mozilla Firefox (allegedly a competitor) named "Chrome."
Is there any connection?
The chrome component in Mozilla/Firefox relates to the visual UI
elements, and is unrelated to Google's new browser. Mozilla/Firefox is
built around the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine and Mozilla's
implementation of a JavaScript interpreter. Google's browser, like
Apple's Safari, is built off a branch of the KDE project's KHTML
engine, called WebKit (both Apple and Google preferred KHTML/WebKit
over Gecko due to the former's smaller footprint and tighter
codebase). While Safari and KDE's Konqueror use the KHTML/WebKit
JavaScript interpreter, Google has chosen to re-implement their own.
The reason for that is roughly the same reason they got into the
browser business: they want more control over the application that
delivers their web services.
I have a long pending critique (in my blog drafts) of the SaaS
(software as a service) model and the idea of "cloud computing". My
doubts notwithstanding ;-), the idea is here to stay and grow. One of
my criticisms is that a slapdash reinvention of the wheel is underway
to make the web browser the equivalent of an operating system and
graphical toolkit, and this means that many of the lessons learned and
baked into current technology may be missing in the first few versions
of the web browser OS. Google's browser is their way of dealing with
some of this -- in one stroke they get both to cancel out Microsoft's
advantage in controlling the OS space, and their (Google's) dependence
on browser makers' features and limitations. For example, one of the
important (if obvious) features in Google is to assign each browser
tab its own OS "process space", which then lets them free ride on OS
provided process protection, limits, and so on. The effect:
misbehaviour of some Web application running in one tab of the browser
does not kill unrelated sessions in other browser tabs (this, to
return to my discomfort, is the lesson that Microsoft belatedly
learned in the early 90s when they moved from Windows 3.0 to a true
multi-tasking OS with user and kernel space separation).
--ravi
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