Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Today there was a comic book in my mail, sent by Google and drawn by no less than Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics. The book points to www.google.com/chrome, but I can’t see anything live there yet. In a nut-shell, here’s what the comic announces Google Chrome to be:

• Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.



• The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”



• 
  Google Chrome will use special tabs. Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.
  
  
  
  
  



• The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Called ’omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular amd more. The omnibox (“omni” is a prefix meaning “all”, as in “omniscient” – “all-knowing”) also lets you enter e.g. “digital camera” if the title of the page you visited was “Canon Digital Camera”. Additionally, the omnibox lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.



• As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera. On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.
  
  
  
  
  



• Chrome has a privacy mode; Google says you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.” The latest version of Internet Explorer calls this InPrivate. Google’s use-case for when you might want to use the “incognito” feature is e.g. to keep a surprise gift a secret. As far as Microsoft’s InPrivate mode is concerned, people also speculated it was a “porn mode.”



• Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. Mozilla has a project called Prism that aims to do similar (though doing so may train users into accepting non-URL windows as safe or into ignoring the URL, which could increase the effectiveness of phishing attacks).



• To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites. Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins the user installed may escape this security model, Google admits.

This looks like a very interesting project, and I think it can’t hurt to have more competition in the browser area. Google is playing this as nicely as possible by open-sourcing things, with perhaps part of the reason to try to defend against monopoly accusations – after all, Google already owns a lot of what’s happening inside the browser, and some may feel owning a browser too could be a little too much power for a single company (Google could, for instance, release browser features that benefit their sites more than most other sites... as can Microsoft with Internet Explorer). For now, until Chrome is released in a testable version, how much of the speed, stability and user interface promises will be fullfilled – and how much of the interface you’ll be able to configure in case you don’t like it – remains to be seen.

[Images by Google.]

Update: Google now posted on this at their blog, announcing the launch date to be tomorrow, Tuesday.

Update At gears.google.com/chrome/, screenshots of Google Chrome have appeared:

The service’s logo is also shown on that page (it also appears in Google’s official reprint of the comic at Google Books):

Update Google Chrome is available for download now.

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Mozilla Prism Aims to Bring Web Apps Closer to the Desktop

The Mozilla guys aren’t just working on Firefox 3, but also on a technology called Prism which is supposed to further blur the border between desktop programs and web applications. “Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop,” the Mozilla Labs blog states.

If this takes off it might help all kinds of web apps – including naturally the Google office suite – though my first impression of some of Prism is that these are basically browser windows with the back button, address bar and so on removed... think pop-ups. And that doesn’t seem like a good idea at all in terms of accessibility & usability (and could pose additional security problems when you don’t always know which domain you’re on; note you can enable navigation & address bar though, and the domain is sometimes shown in the bottom right of the Prism window, but not always).

If you want to give Prism a try yourself, download & run the Prism setup for Windows [EXE]. You will then find a new Prism entry in your start menu, and when you launch it, the following dialog appears – I’ve entered some information already to turn Gmail into a pseudo desktop app:

Depending on the options you checked in above dialog, your desktop or start menu will then have an icon like the following (Mozilla’s Alex Faaborg describes a cool way to turn Favicons into larger desktop icons, though that feature isn’t available in the current Prism prototype):

Clicking the icon will launch Gmail in a window as shown below:

You can run Prism over any web site, not just applications, so you can even “convert” a blog.

Now, I think the Mozilla guys (partly paid by Google) identified the right problem – web apps miss some of the good stuff desktop apps have – but I’m not sure they identified the right solution, too. Traditional desktop programs had, and sometimes still have, a couple of pros which web apps are missing. I’m talking about things like:

• Being able to drag & drop stuff from one window to the next (imagine Gmail, Google Calendar, Spreadsheets etc. supporting this 100%... drop an email’s recipient name into a calendar event and they’ll get invited, etc.)


• Being offered the same navigation, interface, interface gadgets, shortcuts and so on across all applications on the system (meaning e.g. Ctrl+Z always undos the last operation, and the application menu is always in the top left; while this bonus mostly isn’t even true anymore for at least Windows desktop apps, it was once a design guideline)


• Having a consistent place to save your data, and consistent dialogs to retrieve it. Being able to access the same data from different applications (imagine you’d click “add attachment” in Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and independent of which services that individual email application decided to support – and that’s often a political decision – you would now get the chance to locate a Flickr image of yours to attach)



• Being able to connect file types to different applications (partly possible in a browser too, but not fully; a “Google Docs document” is not a real file-type known to say my Zoho web app account)


• For developers, the ability to reuse components like calendar pickers, editable drop-down boxes and so on (even when you found a great, free-to-use JS library, you’d still need to push it to the client as additional download, and the user may still not recognize and immediately understand that component’s layout)


• and more

Maybe the web at large is too diverse to ever bring any of that to (virtual) reality. Some harmless previous attempts at unifying the navigation metaphor for websites, for instance, have failed (the “link” tag in HTML, which theoretically allows consistent pagination/ home/ help buttons, is basically unused these days for that purpose). But perhaps we can at least try to achieve some of these... only that Prism-style desktop icons and navigation-less browser windows don’t seem to be helping with that.

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