Assessing Google Chrome
September 2, 2008
Google finally played out the first step of its display platform strategy by introducing Chrome to the world. I like the name, in the sense that Google clearly sees it as a much needed patina of presentation to the vast amount of content it has accumulated.
This is emphatic proof that Mozilla’s FireFox was simply a drug distribution network for Google’s search engine vs. being the eventual “preferred platform” for web content. I don’t think Google could ever trust Mozilla to be a reliable fountain of innovation. One has to wonder if Mozilla Lab projects like Ubiquity etc. were attempts at winning Google’s trust.
In hindsight, the Mozilla relationship is simply a business transaction – it should be no surprise to anybody who has seen Google’s fiercely independent infrastructure platform evolve. Whatever they have liked about FireFox, they are incorporating into Chrome, along with a multi-threaded JavaScript engine from the V8 boys and Apple’s WebKit. I wonder how the V8 JS engine compares with TraceMonkey, which is insanely quick.
All in all, I find this move fascinating. I am a big advocate on content equity and the inherent user loyalty one builds by fostering it. Google is the King when it comes to content discovery, analysis & delivery. They may not be the biggest single producer of content on the web, but that’s not the goal. The goal is for them to being the “exchange” on which all content based transactions flow.
What Google has realized, is that their vanilla search engine page and current browser technologies are rapidly becoming inadequate delivery channels for the vast amount of content it needs to deliver to its user base. The simple reality is that the browser promotes a fragmented environment for the GUser. They are constantly hopping around on different properties but experiencing the same Google Content Firehose. Google wants to correct that with Chrome.
What they want to do with Chrome is supercharge the client and take advantage of the multi-core wave hitting consumer machines. Today the average number of cores probably stands @ 1.4-1.6… in a year we are likely to see it hit 2… in 3 years it is likely to hit 4 and by the 5th, 8. I am included new and existing machines as part of the averaging and this is just a rapid mental extrapolation. So please Math divas, keep yer abacus wrapped in parchment.
Chrome is a VERY clear indicator to me that Google has had promising results from its voice, video & image recognition algorithms. There’s a whole bunch of engineers probably demonstrating crazy prototypes to Miss Mayer and showing her how awesome this experience can be IF FireFox or IE could take advantage of desktop horsepower available on most broadband machines.
Chrome, with its one-process-per-Tab, multi-threaded engine clearly allows for some interesting use-cases when it comes to background threads crunching video/audio/image submissions on the client to decipher & autotag prior to upload for example. The same goes for use-cases where rich UIs with heavy 3-D needs to run in the browser.
They are probably working to go away from the approach PicLens had to take where they build IE/FF plug-ins with C/C++/OpenGL to give users an immersive experience. Why should a developer have to do that? Why not push the limits inside the browser itself. For those who have built prototypes with VRML2.0 (moi), we all know the promise is there, but there is much work to be done.
In case it isn’t obvious, I love this play from Google. For the first time, the company has made it very clear to Microsoft & others that it is going to compete as a technology company as well as a new media force. Google has embarked on two clear fronts here: Technology & Media.
And while the media war is pretty much won with Yahoo a pawn, Microsoft a minnow and others just a footnote – the Technology war is far from over with Microsoft remaining a force. No matter what Google does with the browser, the OS it will likely run on will be Microsoft. A majority of the web traffic to Google’s content properties comes from IE. So this is far from over.
Google can attain a strong position here with Chrome if they leverage their considerable content equity & mindshare to offers users a superb experience on the web. As good as it is now, it can be way better. I look forward to a world were the topic of discussion isn’t retarded bandwidth caps by Comcast but truly immersive worlds delivered inside the browser. Making the browser the OS. I don’t really care if MS or Google or Intel or Cisco or IBM delivers that to me – I just want it in the next decade.
I’ve waited since 2000, for this. Back then in my honors thesis @ Pace University I predicted a world that went back to the cloud. A world where bandwidth, pervasive devices & rich content offered the user community a superior experience to the boxed-in world of the standalone OS.
It’s about bloody time – bring it on Chrome. Make it real, comic books and all.
Filed under: Innovation | Comments (10)
A few corrections…
Each tab spawns it’s own process. Threads are pseudo processes, but share the same memory space and so forth of the parent process.
It’s a small, but important distinction. Spawning it’s own process separates memory – making everything more secure and stable, albeit a little slower. (they address this though.)
The V8 JS engine is supposedly at least as fast as tracemonkey, and in general I’d suspect it was much faster, as this was a key focus of the browser, enabling more complex web applications.
I also think you have a somewhat odd view of google and mozilla. Google recently renewed their support of mozilla through 2011, and both projects are expressly open source. Google can attempt to bundle their services into the product, but all it takes is a relatively small number of individuals to disagree with what google does and offer the same browser sans google’s meddling. It’s all attempting to be standards compliant, so it’s got about as much chance of being corrupted as linux does. It’s one of the strengths of open source software.
[...] searching for a place to download Chrome I stumbled on a post at zwadia.com – Assessing Google Chrome – that I found [...]
Mr. Jones,
Thank you for making that important distinction. I certainly know the difference between processes and threads – I must have misinterpreted Om Malik’s report on Chrome.
I agree my perspective on the GOOG-MOZ relationship is odd, but I see no point in sharing my perspective if it was cookie cutter. I am sure you will agree however, that my distillation of the relationship into a distribution/business channel for Google is quite plausible.
Yes, anarchic collaboration is one of the strengths of Open Source software. Or atleast successful OSS. The point I am trying to make though is that content is King and Google is the gatekeeper.
That makes it very difficult for the general consumer to wean off of. Maybe there will be a select minority that will refrain from all Google properties but that won’t change history.
The challenge will be for Google to do it responsibly and be a gracious no. 1 player in the content game. That’s a bigger challenge than even the technology infrastructure.
I’m rather sure Google have no intention of competing as a technology company with Chrome, though it will be competition to companies like Microsoft, that do. Quickening the pace of the web’s evolution and infusing it with the tools they want to use themselves is in all likelihood quite enough, and when Mozilla didn’t go there on its own, it was more well spent time and effort showing how to do it, giving the results back to the OSS scene.
I don’t expect Chrome to become another contender in the browser wars, competing for its own take on web standards, for instance; the agenda they set is to move browser tech to the next maturity level, where web apps compete with desktop apps on more equal terms, taking advantage of OS support for resource allocation, debugging, et cetera.
Just wanted to say that I think your assessment is spot on, and as a web developer I couldn’t be happier that Google has taken the first HUGE step in making the browser a better client for application development.
Thank you for reading, John. Appreciate the feedback!
Several cliche comments in your post. Did you know IE8 had already tab-per-process feature. Agreed IE’s UI remains cluttered when compared with FF or Chrome, but it has F11 key to bring unluttered, out-of-way UX ? Predicting of world going back to the cloud (or Network as in Sun’s Network is the computer) are rather ancient and cyclical, unoriginal but still true. Remember the days of thin clients working off the mainframe for all the user needs. The dinosaur ruled the computing usage until IBM/DOS gave the power back the user. Same will happen with browsers – the user’s desires keep vacillating between friction-less, integrated, streamlined UX and personal control. Unfortunately these are incompatible long term trends, even if cyclical. That said, I do admire the chrome UX
Thanks Sameer. Your attempt to conceal the fact that you work for Microsoft hasn’t been lost on me just because you use your gmail address and the fact that you use Google Groups.
You are just another Microsoft fanboi feeling threatened. Perhaps you should move to Mountainview just like your friend Munjal Doshi from the Desi Spartans @ MSU.
Thanks for the F11 key tip. Who doesn’t know that? And it’s great that IE8 also has a per-process architecture -> the point of the post was to assess WHY Google made this move not compare it with FF & IE8. Ignorance is bliss.
As for unoriginal thought -> your comparison between Sun’s vision for cloud computing is vastly different from the cloud we actually interact with today. This version actually allows for personalization, autonomy & a friction-less experience.
Before Sun’s vision there was the Mainframe. I assume in your book, all three generations of the cloud drive the same ideals. Ignorance is bliss.
I am glad you like the Chrome UX -> now go apply to Google if you haven’t already.
After i read the EULA i decided not to install it. First tests reveal, that evvery URL is sent to Google – thnx, but no
should be interesting to see if Chrome works more efficiently than FireFox and IE… if it’s faster than Firefox, since isn’t IE, then i’ll use it