Why is Google building a web browser?
“For how much the web has evolved, browsers as a platform haven‟t evolved that much. What we are trying to do with Chrome is to make sure the browsers are really evolving along with the web so the web can evolve to the next level.” “Browsers need to get better because they were designed for an era where web pages were doing completely different things.” “Today most of what we use on a day-to-day basis are applications and not web pages.” “Wouldn‟t it be great to start from scratch and design something based on the needs of today‟s applications and today‟s webmasters?”
Speed (V8 and Webkit)
“When we set off to build Google Chrome we wanted to make sure that we improved browsers along the lines of speed, stability, and security.” “We started a project called, „V8„ which was designed to allow Javascript to execute extremely fast. Javascript is the language that is used everywhere on the web. It was performing too slow, so we decided to make faster.” e.d. I love it. So Google. “WebKit is something we spent a long time evaluating. Webkit is the underlying rendering engine for Chrome because it‟s fery fast, it‟s very lightweight, it‟s very small, and [it's an] easy-to-maintain codebase.”
Stability
“We came up with this system whereby each web app would be run in its own environment isolated from the others and this allowed us to make them more robust.” “Other browsers what might happen is the entire browser would crash, so you lose your online banking session, you lose that document that you‟re editing, you lose everything. In Google chrome if one tab goes down the other tabs will stay up.”
Security
“One of the things that gives us a lot of mileage is the multi-process architecture of chrome, so each renderer runs in a separate process on your computer and that
means that they‟re isolated from each other so that one can‟t talk to the other and steal information.” “We essentially give each web page its own little playground, its own sandbox. So you‟ve got your online banking running in one tab, you‟ve got your search results, your Gmail, in another tab — the two can‟t talk to each other and if something bad happens in one sandbox [...] your tab is going to be isolated from the other tabs.”
The Invisible Browser
“… design philosophy that we took which was we wanted to maximize content and minimize chrome.” “People shouldn‟t have to think about Google chrome, people should have to think about their applications.” “And in this process we have taken a very minimalistic approach, just like Google.com, you know if you think of the white page in Google.com we‟ve tried to do the same with the browser.”
The Code is Yours
“So Google Chrome is a fully open-source browser, right, and so we want to release this in a way in which others adopt good ideas from us … and help the browser get better. We really want the work that we do to sort of raise the bar for browsers, we want to push browsers further, we want to make the capabilities better, we want to be able to allow for better web applications to be delivered.” “Even if Google Chrome itself isn‟t used by everyone on the web, as long as it makes the web better, we‟ve achieved our goal.