Today, Google is releasing a beta version of its new web browser, called Chrome. Apparently this event is big news; it merited a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal.
I’ve read a few blog posts about this announcement, such as Is Google Chrome an IE/Firefox/Opera/Safari killer?, and it really seems to me the hype is overdone. From the above blog post, the browser will be:
Open source, built from scratch
Not exactly. The most important piece of a web browser is its layout / rendering engine, and as the blog post later mentions, Google is not writing one from scratch; it is using WebKit.
Revolutionary use of tabs (the tabs will be at the top of the window rather than below the address bar)
This is revolutionary? Really?
Support multiple processes so each tab runs in isolation so bugs and slow-downs only hit a single tab (creating what’s called in the comic book a “sad tab”) rather than bring the browser crashing down
Internet Explorer 8 did this first.
I see nothing wrong with Google writing their own web browser, and I wish them luck in their endeavors, but I don’t understand the uproar over this event. It seems to me the only truly new piece of their browser may be their JavaScript engine, V8; the rest is reuse-and-recycle (probably as it should be).
Update 2008-09-02 7:40 PM: After playing with Chrome for a while, a thought occurred to me — maybe Chrome’s strength isn’t in its technology but in its execution. Chrome is fast, attractive, and minimalist.
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