Chrome shine for Google

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: Google Chrome is the new browser developed by Google. It’s an Open Source browser; the entire source-code for this browser is available for download under the project named ‘Chromium’. Chrome is based on a JavaScript engine called V8. You may wonder why a new browser, didn’t we already have enough of them? Well, that’s what made me give Google Chrome a test drive.

There are three major reasons why I see Google felt the need to develop a new Internet browser.

First—the reason mentioned by Google—the desire and the passion to solve problems. There are some very well known problems that every person browsing the Internet would have seen—the apparent slowness of browsing experience as you open more tabs, and the subsequent browser crash taking all of your tabs down; and the slowness of webpages especially webpages that are JavaScript heavy, which take forever to load. Google Chrome has addressed these problems in a phenomenal way.

Second—Google’s goal to move software from the desktop into the Web (also popularly called cloud-computing- applications now a days), such as Google docs. A browser is like an OS for such applications, and therefore Google needs to have marketshare in the browser market.

Third—eventually Google will be doing what they are best at—capturing data and analysing it to deliver more precisely targeted online advertisements. These ads will perform much better since Google knows your browsing pattern and your habits.

Web applications are becoming more main-stream recently. Applications such as Google Docs, Yahoo’s Zimbra email site, and Zoho’s online application suite are some of the popular services in this space. These services use JavaScript heavily on the frontend, which processes data and renders it appropriately on the screen.

Also, today even normal webpages have heavy JavaScript content that is required to render Internet advertisements and widgets on the webpage. Internet ads rely on JavaScript for determining which ad to display, to display the ad, and then to track which user sees the ad and which user clicks on the ad, and which user makes a purchase subsequently. Similarly for widgets—several widgets are like machups, which pull data from various sources in XML or JSON formats and then render them on the webpage using JavaScript, CSS and DOM manipulation.

Making JavaScript run faster is like hitting the nail on the head. That’s the key problem required to be solved to make ‘Internet faster’. And Chrome has done that.