Looks like Google is planning on releasing an open-source web browser called Chrome. Among other features is a high degree of standards compliance, running every tab as a separate process, a high-speed JS engine and integrated Google Gears for web persistence.

Sounds neat. I'm only afraid that it may hurt FF more than IE.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... hrome.html

I'll guess that's just an optional feature. I see no advantage in running each tab in a separate process in most of cases, since we have threads.

I think the idea is security and stability. That way a process can crash and not take out the whole browser, just that tab.

Here's a comic book that Google published explaining their browser.
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

It actually goes into a (simplified) explanation of why they're using separate processes. Basically it boils down to stability and speed.

It's a pretty good explanation for laymen (such as myself). Some things stand out though:

- wtf did it take so long for a developer to come up with a browser that bypasses the whole "one tab won't load so your browser crashes in its entirety" problem? I mean, seriously. I'm no software engineer but what they came up with hardly sounds like relativity theory. Satis could have come up with that at work.

-they're glossing over the fact that their browser will use a lot of memory pretty quickly. Instead they start pointing out how efficient it will be for longer sessions with many tabs closing/opening. They're gambling on vista's monstrous RAM usage sparking a generation of 4G ram machines, it seems.


Rest of the comic was interesting but let's face it, the only really important features for users like us are stability, security and speed.

I don't remember FF2 or FF3 crashed here... ever. And most of tabs I open do not mean THAT much to me to run them in separate processes. Why can't I run just some tabs as separate processes and have the rest threaded as kids of 'parent' processes? (yes, that is what I'd possibly state as ideal although I said what I think of it) So there is still the question if there will be a magic button to disable this... *feature*. That button would be wise to build in.

Imho they are not discovering anything new. They are just running away from multithreading bound problems instead of accepting the challenge.

I liked the comic, im willing to give it a chance.

Its down to the screenshots for me.

Man... now I gone deeper into reading that comics. Well, I had to stop. It presents many facts in light only a laymen could grasp them i.e. tries to manipulate reader by presenting correct things in an improper context. AND without giving exact numbers or references. Sat, do you really fall for that one (the comics)? That would be a true disappointment for me.

Not to mention that the most of the stuff (if not all) would work with the same redesign costs in a multithreaded environment. But yeah, with massive infrastructure, law, campaign and other apparatus, you can push any idea, no matter how morbid it is. Vista was the first example. Enjoy the ride.

take it easy Freeman , its just a browser. On my importance scale its right between calculator and paint. The difference between other browsers is that google has the green to make it work.

heh... I think Gfree is easily excitable.

Anyway, yes, I have browsers crash on me. Even FF3 blows up on me, especially if I do something silly in JS. I do a great deal of very concurrent AJAX operations in my more recent AJAX apps and, as a result, I lose a decent amount of memory to JS memory leaks. I also have my browser open with 6+ tabs at all times, with one of those tabs auto-reloading every 3 minutes. With FF2 that translated to 800MB of memory usage within a day... FF3 is much better, but it still leaks.

The multi-threaded thing is kinda cool, but it's not actually my main attraction. A new browser from people that understand the importance of CSS and standards compliance is more interesting. And the integration of Google Gears is interesting. It sounds like a browser built specifically with the idea of web apps in mind. Since that's a big part of what I do, that's very interesting to me. I'd like to see how we get around the biggest problems with web apps, like data persistence and, as always, security.

Dunno how it sounds there, but I'm totally relaxed. My blood pressure is 80/120!


Well that's what's all about. Solving this by getting a higher ground (equal to throwing a nuke on a band of scamps) is running away from the problem instead of facing it - just because the hardware will turn it all into gold (not mine if you ask me). Particularly here is JS what leaks, not multithreaded design.

*appendix*
/me wonders why does Sat need a tab turned on for a whole day? From some reason /me thinks he'd write his own and independent application for that kind of work.

You remember the "one ring to rule em all" from LotR. Well substitute the ring for laziness and you have the general picture.

I hope you read this Sat. It might cause you LOL. LYAO maybe?

Dev's laziness is the worst thing to be led by when creating a software infrastructure. It is what caused all problems we see today and the problems that led to the problems we talk about today in the first place. It is just like I said once, several years ago:

"Garbage collecting is invented so that `tards finally can feel like programmers, while programmers will start feeling like `tards."

A perfect illustration of having memory leaking in JS out of your control, and being conscious of that btw*... so that you have to let a Google's Chrome fix it (since nobody fixed JS in the first place). So, yes, I am a cretin so I need someone (rather than something - somebody has written that GC your app uses) else to manage the memory for me. "Erh", "no", "mistake", "my bad"... it's just the trends that will really make one be a cretin trying to right the things that were very wrong in their very beginning.

Apply the same pattern to the rest and enjoy the reality, if you've got stomach for that.

______________________________________
* - which isn't a small thing.

p.s.
My 5 cents to be gathered in all the chit-chat from above:
1) Let me choose when I want to open a tab in a separate process and I will be happy.
2) Let me choose if I want to use garbage collector and I will be happy.

And it is much to ask for.

meh, yea, I'd be happy if garbage collection in JS worked properly. Hell, it works in php, why not in javascript and c#? However, manually allocating memory in a program doesn't get me all excited, either. Sure, it may give you ultimate control of every aspect of your machine, but it can turn into a lot of piddly funking around with stuff that may not be so important. If you're writing something to handle a large memory or processor load, yes, manually controlling memory allocation and whatnot is probably a great idea. But for just throwing together a quick web page, I think it's overkill and would just needlessly lengthen the dev process.

Anyway, I can see why you would want to be able to control the process model, so yes, it'd be neat if they allowed you to flip a switch or something. On a positive note, it's being released as open source, so even if they don't release it like that, you can always add the feature yourself if you're so inclined.

For the sake of it... making (just because you like the idea) multiple processes just yet-another-feature on the architecture built to support multiple processes only is equal to stopping Earth's rotation because you want to take shot of a sunset. But I will have look on the source because of other things I would like to see.

The executable is accessible on the Google's homepage since today, btw. Out of curiosity I downloaded it and already noticed some CSS stuff hasn't been implemented. On the other side, it run the hell much faster than FF in the first hours of use. Over the time it started to slow down. Chrome is also very greedy of my RAM in comparison to FF, for the things I use.