You’ve read that title right.  Google plans to enter the browser wars (currently between Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 with Internet Explorer 8 playing catch up) with project aptly named as Google Browser.

While there’s nothing descriptive written on www.google.com/chrome (site is back up.. download now) about the project, Google Chrome announces itself to be.  Images and information are all available on Blogscoped.

• Chrome is Google’s Open Source browser project. The project as a whole will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit and will include Google’s Gears project.  Below is a screenshot of Google Gears on Google Chrome via gears.google.com/chrome/



• The browser will include V8, an Open Source, JavaScript Virtual Machine, built from scratch by a team in Denmark. V8 aims to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser.  How it fares to Firefox 3’s optimization with Jscript remains to be seen.
• A multi-process design is mentioned (by Google) to be powering the browser which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.”  In layman’s terms, that’s more overhead but less memory wasted.
• Chrome has a built in task manager for web pages or plug-ins.  An interesting feature that allows you to place the blame where blame belongs.
• Google Chrome take tabs to a new level. New level is right.  Interesting how this comes out.



• The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Much like IE 8’s Smart Address Bar and Firefox 3’s Awesome Bar the ’omnibox’ will offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular, etc.  How it differs from the mentioned technologies will be revealed when the browser is actually released.
• Speed dials are your default homepage. Aside from the one click thumbnails, you will also see a couple of your recent searches, recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.  IE 8 offers something similar although not the Speed dial but the intuitive links.
• Privacy mode galoreChrome has a privacy mode. InPrivate for IE8, an Incognito window does not record anything that happens within that window  I wonder how it’ll do crash reports.
• Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. Mozilla has a project called Prism that aims to do similar.
• Chrome is kept up-to-date against malware and phishing attempts. Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins you install are another matter though.

Over all, Google Chrome is a very interesting project.  With the monopoly of the Big 3 in the browsing world, a new face is always welcome.  However, until Chrome is released in a testable version, all of those mentioned above are still subject to change and remains in theory.

You can view the full set of the comics on Google Chrome.

UPDATE: Google announces that a Windows version of the browser will be launched tomorrow. “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build. (…) By keeping each tab in an isolated sandbox, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.”

Update 2: Google Chrome has been released: http://www.google.com/chrome