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mssever
September 2nd, 2008, 11:43 PM
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-01-n47.html
http://gears.google.com/chrome/intl/en/why.html?hl=en

It will be interesting to see if their new JavaScript is actually as much of an improvement as these articles suggest.

Sinkingships7
September 3rd, 2008, 12:07 AM
There has been quite the uproar about it. However, I don't think it's nearly as much of a highlight as their "sandboxed" tabs. That's just genius.

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 12:28 AM
Oh no: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=170

Since this is referencing the ECMAScript engine, I won't move it (but if it turns into a Google Chrome thread, a Windows only program for now, it will be)

pmasiar
September 3rd, 2008, 12:33 AM
I enjoyed reading Chrome comics (http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover). Not only tabs are sandboxed: they run as separate processes, so even if plugins leaks RAM, memory can be reclaimed as soon as tab is closed. Browser is like OS! And Javascript is **compiled** to binary! That's exactly what Google needed to make Google Office apps viable online.

happysmileman
September 3rd, 2008, 12:41 AM
From using it for a couple of hours earlier I can say that it truly is much faster (I'm talking about the browser in general, not specifically the JS engine, I haven't really used much script intensive pages, but the JS engine probably plays a good part).

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 12:41 AM
I enjoyed reading Chrome comics (http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover). Not only tabs are sandboxed: they run as separate processes, so even if plugins leaks RAM, memory can be reclaimed as soon as tab is closed. Browser is like OS! And Javascript is **compiled** to binary! That's exactly what Google needed to make Google Office apps viable online.

Now all we need is it available for Linux...

happysmileman
September 3rd, 2008, 12:46 AM
Now all we need is it available for Linux...

They seem to be working on it here (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-linux) already, of course that build just runs some command line tests, there's no UI developed for it yet so you can't USE it, but it's good to know that large parts of it can be built already on Linux?

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 12:55 AM
They seem to be working on it here (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-linux) already, of course that build just runs some command line tests, there's no UI developed for it yet so you can't USE it, but it's good to know that large parts of it can be built already on Linux?

I am not interested in theory. I can't use it no matter how great it is in theory.

jimi_hendrix
September 3rd, 2008, 01:50 AM
i thought i saw someone in another post do a wget "some webpage" command in terminal and he installed it...i could be wrong though

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 02:09 AM
i thought i saw someone in another post do a wget "some webpage" command in terminal and he installed it...i could be wrong though

Yes, that was using wget from Linux to get the Windows version (the page wouldn't let him download from Linux)

slavik
September 3rd, 2008, 02:18 AM
When google docs came out, everyone started pondering about having a browser as an OS and everyone said that for a full office thing javascript would need to be faster. This is just a logical step for google.

What do most people use a computer for?
E-mail? gmail/yahoo mail/hotmail check
news? there's a crapload of sites tailored to every niche. check
(on-demand) videos? flash. check

the only usage of a computer that is required that would not fit a browser is gaming. although ID is working on livearena (Quake3 Arena in Javascript or some such).

BTW: something like this was the original idea behind Oracle ... that and a database thing ... :)

jbaerbock
September 3rd, 2008, 04:07 AM
The entire browser is a piece of genious! It has already replaced FF as my browser of choice and that takes talent since I've been a FF fanboy for awhile.

tim1980
September 3rd, 2008, 05:34 AM
I love this Google Chrome, its awesome.

Problems so far include:


No Linux / Ubuntu version available yet
NO Firefox Extention / plug-ins support yet
Missing Google Bookmark intergration
unable to install Google Toolbar or get all functionality it has
other than that its way better that Firefox, Opera, Safari, and does anyone with half a brain think IE is any good? LOL

-grubby
September 3rd, 2008, 05:44 AM
NO Firefox Extention / plug-ins support yet


Why does google chrome need to support another browser's plugin system?

Breakar
September 3rd, 2008, 10:04 AM
how is everyone installing it on linux? virtual machine, wine?

pmasiar
September 3rd, 2008, 05:38 PM
Here are my thoughts about what Google is aiming to with Chrome: commoditization of application hosting (operating system+browser) market.

Excellent strategy for a business is to make your product the deciding factor, and turn what competitor is doing into commodity.

Commodity is just that: you do not care about the brand of sugar or gas you buy, you check the price and maybe packaging. In commodity business, competition is fierce and margins are narrow.

This commoditization trick is exactly what MSFT did to IBM's PC: all clones were running one true OS, and IBM, the hardware giant 25 years ago (who always provided software for free) exited desktop hardware market. Dell commoditized PCs further, eating HP and Compaq's lunch. And Dell has no illusion about being in commodity business: does little or no own research, and if, it's in more efficient production, to keep margins razor-thin and starve competitors.

Linux is dangerous for MSFT because it commoditizes operating system, but many people use the one preinstalled by manufacturer -- and manufacturer were blackmailed (as DOJ trial proved) to install Windows.

But after victory in "browser wars" over Netscape, MSFT ignored browsers for way too long -- but nature abhors vacuum, so Firefox, and now Chrome. For Google makes perfect sense to create free browser and give it away, unlike Netscape (or MSFT) Google does not need income from OS or browsers, and free is just fine for them. Google is more interested in web independent of it's main competitor, MSFT.

So first hardware was commoditized, now OS and browser. Interesting, what will be the killer application to commoditize search - and who will start it. :-)

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 06:05 PM
Breaking news: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5719944#post5719944

Wybiral
September 3rd, 2008, 06:42 PM
Breaking news: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5719944#post5719944

BTW, They're going to support Mac and Linux later, it's google. Google Earth was the same way if I remember correctly. And, us programmers deserve to have our own thread because being a web developer, getting a heads-up on new browser technology is important and very relevant... It supporting google gears natively, for instance, is very relevant information.

Or how about it's neat Javascript optimization that finds patterns in object attributes in order to create a common "class" between them (since Javascript lacks the concept of class) in order to optimally generate machine code...

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 07:52 PM
BTW, They're going to support Mac and Linux later, it's google. Google Earth was the same way if I remember correctly. And, us programmers deserve to have our own thread because being a web developer, getting a heads-up on new browser technology is important and very relevant... It supporting google gears natively, for instance, is very relevant information.
Yes I know. I am not interested in theory though. I am going to die later, but you don't see me acting like it already happened. I am not dead. Chrome is Windows only. Who knows what tomorrow brings? Who cares?



Or how about it's neat Javascript optimization that finds patterns in object attributes in order to create a common "class" between them (since Javascript lacks the concept of class) in order to optimally generate machine code...
I think its ECMAScript implementation is scary. There isn't a reason for having machine code for that, unless they are planning on some heavy duty scripting in browsers. I fear (well, sort of) they will try to make their browser the target for all their apps, and it will exclude other browsers. They could easily justify it just like Microsoft has their ActiveX. "If you are going to use google services, use their browser".

mssever
September 3rd, 2008, 08:02 PM
Interesting, what will be the killer application to commoditize search - and who will start it. :-)And what will it look like? I've often wondered about this, because the web seems to work different from the desktop--and open source seems to not work so well on the web.

A while back, Jakob Nielsen stated that he believes that Google is taking the value of web-based business and getting it itself. Whether that's true, I don't know, but it's interesting to consider. On the other hand, it seems to me that it's much harder to establish a true monopoly on the web than it is on the desktop.


BTW, They're going to support Mac and Linux later, it's google. Google Earth was the same way if I remember correctly.Furthermore, Google Earth is closed source, while Chrome is open source. So if Chrome lives up to the hype, it's only a matter of time before it runs on Linux, even if Google never officialy supports Linux (which I doubt).


And, us programmers deserve to have our own thread because being a web developer, getting a heads-up on new browser technology is important and very relevant... It supporting google gears natively, for instance, is very relevant information.

Or how about it's neat Javascript optimization that finds patterns in object attributes in order to create a common "class" between them (since Javascript lacks the concept of class) in order to optimally generate machine code...
+1. Besides, I don't read the Windows subforum. This is the first interesting thing to happen in the Windows world for a long time.

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 08:05 PM
+1. Besides, I don't read the Windows subforum. This is the first interesting thing to happen in the Windows world for a long time.
What about the exciting introduction of WGA to protect users to Windows XP?

mssever
September 3rd, 2008, 08:07 PM
Yes I know. I am not interested in theory though. I am going to die later, but you don't see me acting like it already happened. I am not dead. Chrome is Windows only. Who knows what tomorrow brings? Who cares?I do.


I think its ECMAScript implementation is scary. There isn't a reason for having machine code for that, unless they are planning on some heavy duty scripting in browsers.Which is the whole point. Gmail is awesome. Google Maps is awesome. There are lots of cool things you can do with a good scripting engine. If Google ends up making scripting harder for everyone, it's a Bad Thing, but if it's really an improvement, it's a Very Good Thing.

I fear (well, sort of) they will try to make their browser the target for all their apps, and it will exclude other browsers. They could easily justify it just like Microsoft has their ActiveX. "If you are going to use google services, use their browser".
There are two problems with that reasoning:


It's open source, so other browsers can integrate it if they want.
Google is an advertizing company. If they limit who can use their products, they limit their own revenue.

mssever
September 3rd, 2008, 08:09 PM
What about the exciting introduction of WGA to protect users to Windows XP?
What's exciting about that? It's quite predictable, actually. Microsoft is fighting a losing battle against piracy. I disagree with piracy, but still... Ho hum.

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 08:11 PM
What's exciting about that? It's quite predictable, actually. Microsoft is fighting a losing battle against piracy. I disagree with piracy, but still... Ho hum.

It was a joke :-)

I should have used a ':-)' but I wanted to sound serious like I believed WGA is a good thing.

pmasiar
September 3rd, 2008, 09:38 PM
I think its ECMAScript implementation is scary. There isn't a reason for having machine code for that, unless they are planning on some heavy duty scripting in browsers.

Like Google Documents? Text editor comparable with Word, Spreadsheet, email client - they need all the performance they can get to be competitive, and also JS has not that stellar performance, so improvement should be easy.


I fear (well, sort of) they will try to make their browser the target for all their apps, and it will exclude other browsers. They could easily justify it just like Microsoft has their ActiveX. "If you are going to use google services, use their browser".

No, they cannot - Chrome's source is open. 15 minutes after such announcement people would fork it.

I think that Google wanted to move in different direction than Firefox (browser as OS, tabs as process), and instead of forcing FF, they created Chrome. Good ideas would merge. Or they will friendly compete like Gnome and KDE - each having slightly different audience. Time will show. Code is open, take any feature you want, and run with it.

Wybiral
September 3rd, 2008, 11:29 PM
No, they cannot - Chrome's source is open. 15 minutes after such announcement people would fork it.

And that's the exciting thing about this project. Google has most of the web indexed, and they mentioned how easy that makes it to run tests for Chrome (they can run massive distributed test over all of the popular content on the internet). They can do all this testing and profiling using their infrastructure, and then other browsers like FF can benefit from that research / development, to help browsers, in general, reach an optimal performance level.

LaRoza
September 3rd, 2008, 11:32 PM
Try to keep the discussion programming oriented, because of: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5721755#post5721755

slavik
September 4th, 2008, 12:54 AM
google says that for each tab, it starts a new process so that javascript and html rendering and everything is all isolated like and such.

this poses a problem. communicating back to the process that is actually displaying things ...

this should be simple to test. anyone with the browser should open a bunch of tabs and see if there are extra processes running on the system. if there aren't, they are using threads.

Sinkingships7
September 4th, 2008, 01:03 AM
this should be simple to test. anyone with the browser should open a bunch of tabs and see if there are extra processes running on the system. if there aren't, they are using threads.

Of course it will. That's the idea. Though I think that the shown system processes (from the task manager) will only be one. To view the individually spawned processes, you use Google's built-in process manager.

slavik
September 4th, 2008, 02:26 AM
Of course it will. That's the idea. Though I think that the shown system processes (from the task manager) will only be one. To view the individually spawned processes, you use Google's built-in process manager.
which means that it is using threads and each tab is not a separate process (from their comic, I understood that they are using a separate system process for each tab, implying an MVC type architecture of the browser).

Then there is the negative thing about it. Firefox (most likely) uses a single cache for pages, so if you close a tab and open a new one, it will use the page from the cache. If Google's browser doesn't do it, you have to load the page all over again. Once again, this is one of those tradeoff areas ...

Sinkingships7
September 4th, 2008, 02:53 AM
Then there is the negative thing about it. Firefox (most likely) uses a single cache for pages, so if you close a tab and open a new one, it will use the page from the cache. If Google's browser doesn't do it, you have to load the page all over again. Once again, this is one of those tradeoff areas ...

Why couldn't Chrome use one cache as well? Why would each tab having a separate process disallow this?

mssever
September 4th, 2008, 03:36 AM
Then there is the negative thing about it. Firefox (most likely) uses a single cache for pages, so if you close a tab and open a new one, it will use the page from the cache. If Google's browser doesn't do it, you have to load the page all over again. Once again, this is one of those tradeoff areas ...
I think that this is only relevant in the case of the memory cache. If an efficient disk cache exists, than there's no reason that couldn't be shared.

slavik
September 4th, 2008, 08:07 AM
@sinkingships7: read mssever's post, are implying a disk cache? a unified memory cache is not so simple since processes have their own address space (this is oneof the major differences between a process and a thread).
EDIT: making processes talk to each other while not difficult, it is not the same as having multiple threads in a single process (address space) use global variables to communicate (which is much easier).

@mssever: a unified disk cache would work, then there wouldn't be memory usage complaints as there were with firefox2. on the other hand, most if not all consumer hard drives spin down while not in use, spinning them up takes some time. this would be the time added to the latency of looking up a page in the cache.

Kadrus
September 4th, 2008, 08:10 AM
Google Chrome crashing exploit : http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2008-September/064203.html
Carpet Bomb exploit (WebKit) : http://raffon.net/research/google/chrome/carpet.html