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My Wild Guesses, Speculation and Unfounded Opinions about Google Chrome

September is here, and I’m slipping out of a mild off-season hibernation after a relatively laidback summer (”relative” being the operative word when you’re coming off ten years of stressful startup life). In particular, this blog has been sorely neglected. I’m planning to ramp things up once again, and what better way to start than the announcement of Google Chrome which, if nothing else, heralds a new age of plenty for a browser-focused blog like this one.

A Google browser has been rumored for as a long as there have been rumors. Well, not quite that long, but reckoned in internet years it’s been a near eternity since the first whisperings of a “gBrowser”. Back in January I speculated that Gears had subsumed the role that a fully-fledged browser might have filled:

Remember the rumored GBrowser? Well it looks like Google decided instead to build a stack of web application-focused services that run in a range of browsers using plugins or ActiveX. After all, why buy the cow when you can have the milk from all the cows for free? From where I’m sitting this was a very smart decision. Even Google doesn’t have the market power to impose a new browser brand on the world, so supporting third-party browsers is a reality that it has done well to embrace.

Oops, I got that one wrong. Google 1, Gertner 0.

That said, I retain my scepticism regarding the imposition of a new browser brand. The signature feature of the browser market is that every new personal computer comes with a pretty decent browser pre-installed, so third-party vendors are fighting over the scraps that Microsoft and Apple leave on the table. The genius of Firefox has been its ability, through high-quality engineering and equally impressive marketing, to carve out significant market share despite this. It is far from clear that “even Google” (to echo the language of my January post) will succeed in doing the same. And if it does, I can’t help but think that this would be bad news for Firefox. This town, so to speak, ain’t big enough for the two of us, sandwiched as it is between the Microsoft and Macintosh metropolises.

The good news is that the browser space, already in the throes of a Golden Age of innovation thanks to WebKit, is going to heat up even more. As Mozilla honcho John Lilly puts it:

Competition often results in innovation of one sort or another — in the browser you can see that this is true in spades this year, with huge Javascript performance increases, security process advances, and user interface breakthroughs. I’d expect that to continue now that Google has thrown their hat in the ring.

Mozilla makes a lot of the fact that Firefox single-handledly forced Internet Explorer to end its years-long stagnation. Justifiably so, and now WebKit and Google appear to be returning the favor. Firefox has made great strides recently in performance and memory consumption, and a long-overdue Mozilla Mobile effort is now in full swing. Increased competition has been a significant factor in acclerating these efforts.

So what about Google Chrome? It’s a no-brainer for Browser of the Week as soon as it’s available for download (later today, supposedly). In the meantime, the only source of detailed information is a sprawling technical treatise-cum-comic book. As an attempt to make dense discussion of process isolation, test-driven design, hidden class transitions and the Biba integrity model more palatable by surrounding it with fun and friendly illustrations of Google engineers, the comic is not entirely unsuccessful. Not that Joe Sixpack will be particularly impressed, I don’t suppose, but it’s a cute way to communicate the key aspects of the browser’s technical architecture and user interface. (But please, please provide a single scrolling page next time.)

I didn’t see much in the Chrome technical overview that is truly new. A big deal is made of the fact that each tab is isolated in its own operating system process, but IE8 already does this. Chrome uses the location bar to provide easy access to previously visited sites, which would be more impressive if Firefox 3 hadn’t already launched with the aptly named Awesome Bar. The JavaScript virtual machine with just-in-time compilation and fancy-optimization-tricks-that-I-don’t-really-understand sounds a lot like the Tamarin virtual machine (with equally fancy and, to me, incomprehensible optimization tricks) donated to Mozilla by Adobe. Displaying something useful in newly opened tabs has long been a feature of Opera and was mooted the other day as a possible addition to Firefox by Aza Raskin.

No single browser has actually implemented and released all of the above-mentioned features, and Chrome could be pretty kick-ass if they pull it all off. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that it would have been a heck of a lot more ground-breaking if it had been released a year ago, before Firefox 3 and the endless string of IE8 betas. Considering the daunting challenge of getting users to switch browsers, this could prove to be of crucial importance.

To me, the most interesting question is also the most fundamental: is tab process isolation the future of web browser architectures? Michael Arrington speculates that Google Chrome is a shot across Microsoft’s bow, not an entirely absurd notion. The idea of the browser user interface replacing the operating system desktop has been kicking around since the days of Netscape. I was a proponent of this approach for a long time, but since starting to work on Prism I’m come around to the view that modern desktops are unlikely to be dethroned any time soon.

The fact of the matter is that web browsers are doing double duty nowadays, filling their traditional role of rendering textual pages while hosting applications of ever increasing complexity. Browsers are pretty great for browsing documents, and HTML/JS/Flash-based applications delivered over HTTP have proven to be a great alternative to traditional fat client software. But it’s far from obvious to me that the browser chrome is the best place to deliver web apps. Just because web standards provide an array of compelling advantages for app developers, this doesn’t mean that these apps aren’t best hosted in a modern desktop GUI.

This may turn out to be the key to Chrome’s eventual success or failure. Hopefully one of the major browser manufacturers puts its full weight behind a single-site browser offering, and we will be able to witness the two approaches duke it out in the marketplace. (Gosh, I hope my agenda isn’t too transparent!) Unsurprisingly I put my money on SSBs, but either way it will be fun to watch the fireworks.