What does “Google Chrome” mean to developers

Yet another browser to code for? I guess it will obey ECMA-262 rev3 so don't worry too much about incompatibilities as of now. Lets see the positive side

  1. Its an open source, you get to participate and allows you to write plug-ins
  2. Each tab is a separate process.so the effect of one tab is not seen in another tab.
  3. Within each tab you have separate thread for JavaScript. So your JavaScript execution will be fast.
  4. JavaScript now runs inside a virtual machine called V8. The JavaScript is compiled to machine code before running. Now that's an advantage for heavy JavaScript applications like Gmail. Where most of the JS resides on client side and simply gets the JSON from server to show the data. You don't have to re-interpret the JS every time. Compile once and keep running again and again. Your apps will be super fast now. Now GWT developers don't have worry about JS performance.
  5. Rendering is by webkit which is again open source.
  6. Looks like they have better garbage collection algorithm for garbage collection. Which will again makes my work simple.
  7. Gears is part of browser now. Your offline apps will have better performance now. Think -> Gears API is loaded as soon as browser is loaded, JavaScript is compiled to m/c code, runs in separate process and thread. What more you want? Your offline application might be as fast as any native application if not faster.

Anything else you want to add.

13 Responses

  1. atin sood says:

    Guess we will be having a serious contender to firefox now.. I am a die hard fan of firefox and can’t wait to see how firefox replies to this challenge..

    Btw just to note : the main source for funding for firefox is google

  2. Dr. No says:

    MWHAAAHAHAAAAHAAAAAHHHAAAAAAAA!!!!!

  3. Puraz says:

    Hopefully, this wasn’t a surprise to anyone and unlike what people are saying, I don’t think this has anything to do with competing against operating systems.
    It’s just another way that they can promote the Google brand, and create their omnipresence.

    To compete with MS at an OS level (whenever that happens), Google would have had to come up with their own browser, so this might just be the chicken before the egg.

    Finally, not sure how the hardcore Firefox guys feel about this and it’s going to be very interesting to see how Google plans on moving in on the browser market share!!!

  4. Veera says:

    My first impression, it’s cute and fast! Yet to see the developer aids of it.

  5. Veera says:

    It has a ‘Inspect Element’ feature something similar to Firebug, but not as user friendly as Firebug.

    When you search something on a page, Chrome is not searching inside text area. This is really bad, since for blog template editing I often search inside the Text area for keywords. :(

  6. i’ve been using Chrome for about a day now and it seems to be a lot faster than FireFox or IE… though i do miss the “recently closed tabs” feature in Firefox

  7. Abhijeet says:

    GWT produced Javascript is highly optimised. But agreed that this will speed things up further.

    There is no extension development support at the moment. One cant recompile the browser for adding features. It should be made available soon since a Firefox extension style system for extending the browser is a must-have.

  8. Thejesh GN says:

    @Abhijeet Yes GWT produces highly optimized JS.But with the new V8 it run faster because it doesn’t have to be interpreted every time.
    Sure. Other wise they cant compete.

  9. Shravan says:

    I believe with Firefox 3.01 released and other versions ready for roll out..Chrome will eclipse soon .

  10. Thejesh GN says:

    Not sure but I know FF has its own place.

  11. Emilie says:

    i like chrome, it is light years from fiorfex and IE, think about the multithreaded design, is very nice and clean! it can use a dual core capabilities! and even quadri cores are used (1 thread for the browser, 1 thread for the flash plugin and 1 thread for each tab )the minimal style is what i like, and the pop up blocking is heavenly perfect!the v8 engine is an example of clever programming techniques!so i’m happy that finally this masterpiece of software is out of beta, because was a beta better than many other stable software.anyway a beta differs from a stable release only for the stability! not for the features!the features can be added with future releases!i feel chrome more stable than fiorfex at this point, there is some glitch around but nothing major!go up chrome team ! you deserve it !really you bring something fresh on the computer industry! and this is global crysis time!ps: some ideas…when i push the arrow back button, fiorfex usually is more responsive! fix that please ;-)

  1. September 23, 2008

    […] So, what does Chrome means to developers? I am sure most web developers will be not willing to come out of Firefox, because FF has plenty of plug-in-ins to help in web development (Firebug, Web developer to name a few). But Chrome still has the capability to extend it. So, we can expect more and more plug-ins will be written to Chrome, which will make Chrome as a very good alternative to Firefox. (Check out this interesting blog post on what does Google Chrome mean to developers?) […]

  2. December 8, 2008

    […] – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by eswong on 2008-10-30 What does “Google Chrome” mean to developers https://thejeshgn.com/2008/09/02/what-does-google-chrome-mean-developers/ – bookmarked by 3 members […]