Kyle Hayes

Tech, Musings, Life

Google Chrome Browser: A High-Level Overview

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Google announced today its latest project, Google Chrome, a competitor in the browser market. Here are some of the high-level points to know about Chrome:

  • Uses multi-threaded processes to isolate page executions, allowing for better performance and quicker, more reliable memory freeing
  • Built off the WebKit code base (used by Safari, Adobe AIR, Nokia, iPhone, Android mobile platform [Google’s mobile OS) due to its impressive speed

  • Faster and rebuilt JavaScript virtual machine called V8 (Virtual machines provide safety and platform independence)

    • In V8, as execution goes on, objects that end up with the same properties will share the same hidden class
    • In Chrome, JavaScript is not interpreted, it is compiled to machine code for faster execution in the browser
    • Precise garbage collection
    • V8 is independent of the browser so other projects can use the engine

  • Better URL bar interaction design

    • URL box (coined Omnibox) is a apart of each tab (rather than the browser window)
    • Omnibox not only handles urls, but also suggestions for searches, top visited pages, and popular pages you haven’t visited
    • Full text search for your historical pages
    • Smarter URL completion
    • Searching sites like Amazon or Wikipedia, captures their search boxes on your local system, allowing you to search those sites later on straight from your URL bar

  • New “home page” when opening a new tab displaying your nine most visited pages and the sites you search on

  • Incognito window for private browsing
  • Pop-ups are scoped to the tab they came from and confined there. If you do want a popup to occur, just drag out a graphical area to open it’s own window
  • Webapps can launch their own browser window with a minified chrome without the URL box and the browser toolbar

  • Sandboxing to keep page processes from being able to write files to your hard drive or read files from sensitive areas on your computer

    • User must initiate actions requested to run by the browser
    • With one exception, plugins, can run at higher levels than the browser itself.

  • Plugins are now run in their own process

    • The rest of the page can still be sandboxed

  • Chrome continually downloads lists of harmful sites, one for phishing, one for malware, presenting the user a warning if they stumble upon either

    • If a user visits a site with malware, Google notifies the owner of a website to let them know so they can clean up their site

  • Google Gears is built in

  • Completely open source

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