Show of hands. Who thinks Chrome is an amazing new browser?
If you had your hand up, you’re wrong.

While Google is spinning Chrome as a revolutionary new browser, built from the ground up, by a company who has no baggage in the space, I’m not buying what they’re selling. Sorry for yooo, Google.

Building a browser like Google has, is a monumental undertaking, even for a company with their resources and clout. It took them about two and a half years, and they’ve only shipped the Windows version. The Mac version is ‘do-able’ in around six months, according to the dev-lead. WTF? My BS-alarm is off the scale!

Chrome is built on the underpinnings of another open-source project, WebKit. And what else is WebKit famous for? That’s right, Apple’s Safari browser is based on WebKit. Apple donates generously of time and money and smarts, up-stream to the WebKit team. In fact, you can download nightly builds of WebKit, for Windows and Mac, from their site. The builds are very stable as a rule, and blindingly fast.

Note.
Chrome uses a slightly older branch of WebKit. The new, in-progress branch uses SquirrelFish, a Java interpreter which is significantly better (1.6 times faster) than the previous interpreter.
Google decided to use a yet another interpreter, V8, from a team in Denmark, so the trunk was forked before the SquirrelFish inclusion, and V8 was wired in.

So, what’s this nonsense about two and a half years, and then another six months for a Mac version?? If the rendering engine is done (WebKit) the UI is done (the tough part would have been what-where-how), what are we missing?

Here’s the answer.
Chrome is not another browser.
Chrome is an early prototype of a Web OS, which Google believes will change the way we understand computers and computing. It’s a ramp-up to their doctrine of cloud computing, with off-shore floating data-centres and high-speed internet *everywhere*. It’s the beginning of everything that everyone else has been frantically spinning buzz-words about. WebOS, Cloud Computing, Mobile.Me, Mesh. Except, they’re doing it. Google is really, really doing it.

All of this might just be the ramblings of some old Delphi dev-coot, except for the ‘tell’. Top poker players know that everyone has a ‘tell’. It’s a involuntary gesture, a posture, a … something, that ‘tells’ the opponent that you’re bluffing, or that you have four Aces… Top players will play small hands for ages against opponents, searching for the tell. Cos that’s the key to seeing what’s really going on. Past the bluff and bullshit. Past the spin.
So, what’s the ‘tell’ in Google Chrome? Ready?

Tabs run in separate processes. With strongly bounded memory allocation.
Read that line again. Slowly. It’s going to change how you work with a computer.
Tabs run in separate processes. With strongly bounded memory allocation.

That behavior is a defense against runaway/rogue code. It’s Operating System kung-fu. A tab(application) dies or runs away, the browser(OS) kills that container, and recovers the memory it was using. Completely. Without crashing the browser(OS).

That’s the ‘tell’.
That’s why it took two and a half years.
It’s an Operating System.
More precisely, it’s the beginning of an Operating System.

It is, for damn sure, not just another cool browser. Not even a little bit.