initial thoughts on google chrome

by Christopher Blizzard

Google chrome is public and I thought I would write up some initial thinking on it as it affects the world that I live in.

I love what google chrome represents. The work that we’ve been doing inside of the Mozilla project over the last ten years has really paid off. The fact that Google believes that they can launch a browser based on new technology means that the market is alive.

Apple is making releases, Mozilla is making releases, even big slow Microsoft is making releases. The rate of browser releases is getting faster, not slower. Google’s browser beta is a sign of health. JavaScript is evolving and being seen as a general purpose language. People are already embedding SpiderMonkey into a lot of other apps. The work that Mozilla has been doing on JavaScript performance with TraceMonkey and Google has been doing with V8 means that it can reach more and more use cases.

It’s also great to see the end user features flowing from browser to browser. The malware/phishing stuff mentioned in the comic is already shipping in Firefox 3. JS performance is something that everyone is working on. Inside of Mozilla we’ve been talking about the multi-process model that they have decided to use in order to get proper rights mgmt on the mac and windows. IE is including some of these random features in IE8 and we’ll be including a lot of them as well in Firefox 3.x. Two items that come to mind are worker threads and geolocation, features that are already undergoing testing as part of the Firefox 3.1 work. The fact that everyone is sharing ideas and moving along the same lines is great for users and great for the web. It’s starting to feel like a healthy economy of ideas.

We haven’t seen the browser itself yet. So I’ll wait until they actually get code and downloads up to comment on any of that. Given some of the features that are featured in the comic book, it will be interesting to see what the role of data and privacy will be in the product. But more on that once they actually put up something for people to play with.

As a side note, the comic is a great piece of storytelling and outbound marketing. Tells you everything you need to know to re-tell the Google Chrome story to other people without any of the drudgery of a spec or product sheet. For those of us who are interested in how things are sold and marketed, it’s a great piece of work.