Appletell

By now, Google’s latest announcement is old news: there is a new browser in town. Joining Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer is a new guy, by the name of Chrome. Sporting a WebKit foundation (same as the platform Apple built Safari on), as well as a few other enhancements, Chrome promises to be a speed demon.  Buried in all the hype, however, are a few interesting bits that point to something bigger than just another browser.  Chrome may, in fact, be more revolutionary than it first appears…

Tabbed Browsing:  Not revolutionary.  Not even new.  Tabs predate Web 2.0, and with the release of IE 7, they became the standard browser interface paradigm.  Chrome does the UI a bit differently, with each tab containing its own address bar, back/forward buttons, etc., but that hardly qualifies as major innovation.  What Chrome does differently, however, is something called “sandboxing”.  Each tab is treated as a separate process in memory, meaning if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it.  If Apple Mail crashes, it doesn’t take iChat with it…by extension, if GMail crashes in one tab, your conversation in Google Talk in another tab continues uninterrupted.

V8 - a Javascript Engine: Again, nothing new.  But V8 is being spun as a platform designed to “power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers”.  Given the jury rigging required to make Google Apps available offline, this is tantalizing.  Rather than building an external Gears-style utility, what if the Javascript engine natively supported offline work?  The cloud may not be available 100% of the time, but if your web apps can keep track of themselves without the help of an active internet connection, then cloud computing may truly be a viable alternative to today’s desktop model.

Neither tabbed browsing nor a speedier Javascript engine are particularly exciting news.  Even the prospect of better tie-ins with Google Apps doesn’t really warrant excitement - you can do just fine with Firefox and Google Docs. What does warrant consideration is the possibility of thin client/kiosk style machines running nothing but Chrome and a few tabs.  Desktop applications need not apply in this world: a web app, residing comfortably in a Chrome tab, provides the same functionality that its bulky, early 90’s-era cousin does today.  Apple tried a similar tactic with development for the original iPhone, which was ultimately unsuccessful.  A UMPC with minimal RAM, a low-power processor, and virtually no built-in storage can comfortably run a browser.  SSDs may finally be truly useful, despite their size limitations.

If constant cloud connectivity is not required, mobile devices can eek out hours of work on battery power without the bloat of an OS.  Apple has done an admirable job of paring OS X to its core components for the iPhone, but a microkernel Linux OS to boot and then web apps loaded from the cloud would still likely shame the iPhone’s OS footprint.  Does Chrome merely expand the range of Google’s activities into browsers?  Or is it the interface to a new era of computing in the cloud?  If so, what devices are you most excited to see running Chrome - anything from a tiny PDA to your refrigerator could run it!

Via [Official Google Blog Entry]

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