The world was introduced yesterday to Google’s new browser, Chrome, via a comic book. Today, Google is holding a press conference at its headquarters in Mountain View to demo the new browser and discuss the reasons behind its development.
If you’re interested in reading the comic released yesterday that introduces Chrome, you can find it here.
Below are our notes from the conference, which started at 11:00 am PT.
You can now download Chrome (just under half a megabyte; Windows only) from here.
Tabs are going to be the primary elements of Chrome. They are like title bars for webpages and applications. They can be dragged around to reorganize (as in Safari) and can even be dragged out of a window to create a new one.
Google Chrome has no search box – instead it has an “omnibox” where you both enter website addresses and conduct searches. It sounds very similar to what can be found in Firefox 3.
The omnibox also has smart search engine detection. If you visit Amazon, Google will detect that site’s search engine. Next time you visit Amazon from the browser, you can hit tab to search using Amazon’s search without having to fill in the field on the page itself.
Google is turning away from the typical homepage (which makes us wonder – what about iGoogle?). Your default homepage is a list of your most visited sites, each accompanied by a screenshot.
Chrome comes with an “incognito window” (i.e. porn mode). It has a little spy icon to remind you when you’re in that mode. When using the window, it won’t record any of your activity. One cool thing about incognito mode – you can have one window open using incognito and another in normal mode at the same time.
A download bar will create a bucket at the bottom of your browser window where all downloads go. You can drag each file from the bucket to where you want on your desktop. It’s meant to prevent the loss of files that you’ve downloaded because you don’t know where they went.
Some applications, like Gmail, want to break free from the browser window. Gmail could use shortcuts on the desktop and in the start menu, for example, so it can be launched like a real app. A special app view window in Chrome doesn’t have typical browser controls, just the web app itself.
Google Chrome has reportedly been in development for two years and will release in more than 40 languages today in beta.
The rendering engine has been limited to that all a webpage can do is talk to the browser. Pages are basically placed in sandboxes and the only way a hacker could cause harm would be to find a bug in the rendering engine and escape those sandboxes.
A task manager for the browser itself will let you see how much CPU is being used for Flash and other plugins on the sites you visit. When a browser tab hangs, you can use the manager to kill that single tab. This preserves the page and the position of the browser when you reopen it.
Google has chosen Webkit because it’s fast, open source, and they don’t want to force developers to learn another rendering engine. A rendering test of static content resulted in 220.64 ms in IE and 77.28 in Webkit.
Chrome’s new JavaScript engine (V8) efficiently handles hundreds of kilobytes of code, as found in applications like Gmail. Google has found a way to introduce so-called “hidden classes” through a virtual machine. The classes are used within the native code that it compiles. They are supported by inline caching and dynamic parsing, so the access of data and execution of functions are really fast.
Even though Webkit already had a JavaScript rendering engine, Google wanted to set a new bar for virtual machine performance within the browser. The team behind V8 is Danish. In speed tests, IE performed at 15.5 round trips per hour (RPH) and Chrome performed at 584 RPH.
Other browsers can take V8 and include it in their systems, because it is being provided as open source.
Chrome has no tie-ins to other major Google services. If you had Live Search as your default search engine in Internet Explorer, Chrome will use that automatically.
Larry Page is here saying he’s been using Chrome for awhile now. He says Google wants a world where platforms are advancing and the open source model allows for this. Mozilla can choose to take some of the advancements Google has made and incorporate them into its own Firefox browser.
When asked how Chrome fits into Google’s mobile strategy, especially with Android, the company said Android has a separate browser (which is also Webkit based) but that both browsers share underlying technology. The two basically only differ in their user interfaces.
Sergey Brin: “I would not call Chrome the operating system of the web application – it’s basically a very fast engine for them”
As for plugins, Chrome will support plugins like Flash and PDF but it doesn’t have extensions like those found in Firefox. Google does, however, plan to provide an extension API in the future.
Chrome is very small, about 7 megabytes in size.
When asked about gaining marketshare, Google representatives say they don’t have a target number for what they hope to achieve. They say they want “a diverse ecosystem” of users.
When asked why consumers should use Chrome, they say it’s attractive if you want a “faster, more robust, safer web experience” (yawn)
Google reps are admitting that they have to compete with a product that’s given away by default on almost every computer. When asked whether they have been worried about IE7 or IE8, Google responded by saying they started two years ago and have always wanted to provide consumers with a choice.
Here’s a brief interview with Sergey Brin:
So when should it be available for download? This browser should be a step in the right direction towards streamline fusion and integration of the internet and your desktop computer experience.
Tabs feature in Google Chrome is cool
Which part is exactly cool? The only difference with IE is that in Chrome tabs are on top of address bar. And yeah, they are tearable, from main window, usability and need of that is questionable.
i use safari daily, and often tear off tabs to reorganize them.
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Cnet (which has an actual liveblog instead of whatever’s going on here) says downloads go live at 3PM PST.
http://news.cne...-2.html?tag=txt
3PM EST, my apologies. Noon PST.
Google can really make life easy on us and make firefox plugins compatible
Yes, at least the pure javascript/XUL extensions. Or maybe an extension converter?
+1
It was leaked? Leaked right on their official blog with a long post?
Leaked, and then they wrote that post.
2 questions:
1. What is Chrome’s User-Agent, so we can track it in logs and report some immediate feedback about the usage?
2. Is Google Analytics (going to be) tracking it? I’d love to track this IE/FF->Chrome switch-over trend.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
Clicky is already tracking Chrome – http://getclicky.com
Chrome beta? i bet it is gonna be in beta mode for 2 years…
Sandboxing / multi-threading stuff looks really promising!
That goes without saying. Look forward to throw about CHROME.
ya Google Chrome is cool
Any thoughts on the impact to the large ecommerce companies, eBay and Amazon?
Chrome is live
http://www.google.com/chrome
http://www.google.com/chrome – avail now
Their video tour is still not working. I guess they forgot to restore them or refresh the links.
Creating hipe by hiding download sites….buuuu ….analretentive marketeers.
Ihave not seen it but mostof the features described here…Opera had themfrom some time now…may beis just ’cause is google ?
Will be phenomenal if it’s extensible like Firefox Add-ons (including stylish, greasemonkey, etc).
One of my must-haves is “Tree Style Tab” – it gives you vertical tabs, which is incredibly useful if you’re a heavy tab user. On a widescreen monitor, the benefits are numerous, since you can display many more tabs at once than having to scroll horizontally or mess with multi-row tabs.
Screenshots with 121 tabs:
Before:
http://img517.i...6/img014nh4.png
After:
http://img525.i...9/img015lm8.png
Furthermore, you can collapse/expand tabs into groups, dynamically resize the width of the vertical tabs to see more of the page titles, and it works hand-in-hand with Tab Mix Plus.
If more people knew about and used vertical tabs, it’d be a default feature in web browsers, not unlike how tabbed browsing is a common standard today! Just think of data in rows vs columns in a spreadsheet. Wholly recommended and I <3 hearing from people who’ve “gone vertical” and reaped the awesome benefits.
that’s interesting,
how much ram do you use and how much of your total ram does firefox use in relation?
Josh, we must think alike — I swear I said something soooo similar weeks ago! ;D Great to see you also enjoy vertical tabs, and I hope Chrome will have them too.
Andrew, my Firefox regularly uses 300-400 MB, sometimes climbing up to 700 MB if I have a lot of Flash media (e.g., YouTube videos) open. I was hoping RAM usage would be lower with Firefox 3 and I’ve seen some improvements (likely due to fixed memleaks), but still could use improvement.
Only for windows? Not for Mac..yet
Google Chrome for Mac is in development and a team of engineers is working hard to bring it to you as soon as possible.
booooo
Download works now.
this post from the unbelievably fast Google Chrome.
browsing is awesome fast. scrolling is wtf-whered-it-go fast.
It is available for download http://gears.go...om/chrome?hl=en
Interesting… this is a VERY nice browser!
i’m using it now and i am really impressed
Is Chrome capatable with AVG 8.0 free edition?
Hey it’s nice and simple, and very fast. Impressed
Aaah! No Adblock – saw Techcrunch ads for the first time
posting from chrome…awesome performance, now ajax based apps smoke on the web!!
Smart move! The ultimate way of controlling the Internet is to control the browser people use. Btw, anywhere we can learn how to do the plugins/toolbars for Chrome so we can port of our HHOTT View toolbar to it?
I like it but I won’t start using it until it has AdBlock, Firebug/YSlow, and an RSS Reader plugin preferably Brief.
Not totally excited yet. For example, TechCrunch page takes much longer to load in GChrome than in IE7. I have also not been a fan of Google’s minimalist approach to the UI, which they carried over to Chrome.
@mga911:
Firebug is built into the browser… just right-click and “inspect element”.
Just downloaded and running it. Seems kind a fast or is it the novelty factor. Miss my plugins from FF though…..
wow, it’s so fast compared to firefox and IE, I was able to download this application without having to bypass company’s lockdown on download applications, that move is brilliant!
Firefox 3 uses lesser memory than Google Chrome. The base browser itself uses about 75MB and with 5 tabs opened, the total memory usage is around 200MB. Firefox with the same number of tabs is less than 100MB. Makes me wonder how efficient Chrome is.
If you read the comic on Google Chrome that they released, it explains that upfront Chrome will use more memory, but, it will be more efficient with managing it, and help avoid memory leaks, so in the long run, when FF is using 400MB of memory, google chrome is still around 200.
Nothing much here except ultra hype for another means for Google to extract money from the public. I love the claim that they are doing this “to advance technology.” What a joke. Do they really believe that this generation is this dumb? EVERY single thing in Chrome exists elsewhere.
EVERY single thing in Chrome exists elsewhere.
Maybe, but is it integrated in one browser yet?
I don’t know if it will be my default browser, but I’m impressed by the speed of browsing.
They already did a better job than Apple with Safari for Windows. When I used that after it’s first release it crashed on almost every website I visited.
That’s true. But I’ve spent years trying to find a browser that combines all those things into my ultimate user experience. Firefox comes close to that ultimate experience after installing 15+ plugins, but Google Chrome seems to be even better, right out of the box.
Most of the time, combination of existing technologies is the most important part of innovation.
Wow… just downloaded it …first impression: its fast… really fast and it looks cool. there is not really a window around it! hehehehe….
still downloading Chrome – damn GPRS connection :d
I love it. It seems a lot faster on some really javascript heavy pages that I’m used to using. Google Docs is finally usable!
I’m switching my Windows machine to Chrome. I won’t be using it for development because Firefox has great plugins for that, but I don’t regularly develop on Windows.
This makes me think that the place where Chrome is going to eat away is at IE’s market share, not Firefox’s…at least in the near term.
It doesn’t work on Windows XP SP1. “Google Gears doesn’t support your version of Windows”. Never mind.
Could be trouble for ppl that use a lot of tabs. Relatively simple pages take up 30MB. If someone has 3 windows open each with 10 pages open, that’s going to be close to a gig of memory. Firefox, although slow, ran that on ~300 mb of memory for my computer.
@ronlg
Cool. I just checked it out. Does it offer javascript editing?
it would be better if tabs are below address bar.
btw, fast but takes up lots of memory. i always open lots of tabs in 1 windows, so this will kill me. ><
i can see the javascript elements, just can’t seem to mess with them.
Is it just me or does anyone else find the Chrome Task Manager incredibly sexy? I always hated it when a tab/window froze and I had to kill Firefox completely… now I might not have to do that anymore… although I haven’t had anything freeze on me so this hasn’t been tested yet.
There’s also an “About memory” page – shmexy.
omg
another browser. *yawn*. google using their search monopoly to extend their reach to yet another market. when microsoft does that with their OS it’s called breaking the anti-trust rules. when google leverages their Search monopoly it’s called TechCrunch news.
i love my mozilla and ie8.0. safari is cool ux but very slow on vista. all that chrome has is a windows-like logo and a start-page that looks like vista’s Alt+Tab screen.
it would be a great success just like twitter: lots of geeks in the valley would use it while the 99% rest of the world would think: jes, what are these geeks so excited about.
omg.
Nothing more than another browser we have to deal with while developing new applications…. come on Google, don’t repeat what others have already done, with minor tweaks, come with something innovative, new.
oh yeah, i forgot to mention that i just sent this comment from chrome. wow. back to ie8 and mozilla now.
Downloaded, installed and ran through all of the usual sites i use. Underwhelmed…
Oops, my google chrome browser doesn’t appear to run adblock, which blocks pesky google adwords.
Full speed ahead!
I can’t install it. I’ve tried about 8 or 9 times, and each time it either has a problem installing or a problem downloading. Guess I’ll try it when I get home.
“Google Chrome has no search box – instead it has an “omnibox” where you both enter website addresses and conduct searches. It sounds very similar to what can be found in Firefox 3.”
How are non-resolvable uris handled? Usually ISPs will redirect to a search page of their own?
Hmmm, odd it doesn’t let me scroll up on my dell touchpad…I can scroll down just fine when navigating but to scroll up on a page I have to use the directional arrows.
I also have (along with many others, apparently) the inability to scroll up when using a TouchPad.