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.

With the threading architecture for JavaScript execution in Chrome, they made it 2-3 times faster than other browsers (based on benchmarks mentioned later in this article).

I initially downloaded with a little bit of scepticism, since browsers are now almost like electricity. How good a new browser can be? I was wrong. Google Chrome downloads and installs swiftly. On the click of a button it smoothly imports my bookmarks and passwords from FireFox, thereby making every Web application that I use on FireFox, immediately usable on Chrome. I tested Chrome with the most popular sites that I visit, everything was working fine. I noticed how much I have got ?used to? with Chrome with just about an hour of browsing, and the webpage occupies so much space on the screen, the controls take so little space. Awesome!

Next, I went to some of the JavaScript heavy pages that I use. I was delighted to see that a webpage that used to hang on FireFox, actually rendered in less than 33% the time it would take normally to render that page (FireFox would usually give ?stop-script, continue, cancel? kind of dialog-box). This Chrome experience was out of the world for me!

I tested Chrome with some of the popular JavaScript frameworks such as DOJO, jQuery, mootools and Prototype, and everything seems to be working just fine. Note that in the browser world, that is pretty uncommon. If something works on one browser, it may not work on some other browser. Chrome seems to have beaten that trend, something that would come with very precise product design and tens of thousands of hours of testing.

Chrome comes with some really great usability improvements?the tabs at top makes browsing very easy, the smaller size of the control-buttons at the top make the entire space available for the webpage, and the ?Omnibox? makes life much simpler, while again saving space on the control panel. The omnibox lets you input a Web address or search the Web in the address bar; it also has your Web history and provides suggestions as you type.

Chrome?s Incognito mode also seems useful. Pages you view in this window don?t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won?t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Useful, if you are ordering a surprise gift for your spouse or your son, and you don?t want them to find out.

Chrome?s tabs are really independent processes?so unlike FireFox, when one tab crashes or hangs, other tabs work just fine. So, if you are filling your billing details for an Internet purchase on one tab, and browsing some JavaScript-heavy webpage on some other tab, if the latter crashes?you don?t lose all the data you entered in the billing-tab. Phew! What a big relief. Chrome?s address bar (omnibox) also comes with some cool treats?type ?25.4 cm in inches? into the omnibox, and you will immediately see the results. Type ?100 f in c??converts 100 Fahrenheit to centigrade. Type ?11.5*36+22*35?, and you will see the results. All this without pressing enter key. Very cool!

Several browser speed tests were run on Chrome in the past week. In the most popular test ?SunSpider??Chrome was faster than every other browser. Google?s own V8 tests?Richards, DeltaBlue, Crypto, RayTrace and EarleyBoyer reveal that Chrome beats Firefox, IE and Safari by a good margin.

Mozilla countered Chrome?s benchmark numbers on SunSpider. Firefox 3.1, which Mozilla hopes to release by the end of the year, comes with JavaScript acceleration technology called TraceMonkey. In Mozilla?s test that pitted TraceMonkey-enhanced Firefox against the Chrome beta, Google?s browser was 28% slower on Windows XP and 16% slower on Windows Vista.

John Resig, a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, describes JavaScript performance benchmarks in much more detail with specifics on Chrome on the following webpage?http://ejohn.org/blog/ javascript-performance-rundown/.

With Web applications becoming popular and JavaScript becoming common on every webpage, Chrome comes as a breath of fresh air. It is fast, sleek and addicting. With a few changes such as making it available for Mac OS X and Linux users, an easy method for organising bookmarks, a way to quickly email links, support of addons, and a few bug fixes?it?s marketshare is going to zoom up.

?The author is vice-president, engineering, Komli Media

Will India click on?

India has a few unique characteristics not seen in the western countries, or even some of the South Asian nations. These differences are?broadband penetration has been pretty low in India, there are still good number of people who access Internet over dial-up; two third of the people accessing Internet access it through cybercaf?s. The latter is also related to the low penetration of PCs into people?s homes and relatively very high percentage of people owning mobile phones. And, India being a secular nation the population is spread over several regional languages, support of regional-language- rendering becomes important for India.

Google Chrome fares well on the rendering of Hindi fonts on some of the popular news portals.

Chrome?s rendering of some of the other popular Indian languages such as Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malyalam and Bengali doesn?t seem to work (and on FireFox), but works great on Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.

For example I looked at http://gujaratonline.com/ , http://www.saamana.com/ (for Marathi news), http://www.kannadaprabha.com/ (for Kannada news), http://www.manoramaonline.com/ (for Malyalam news) and http://www.aajkaal.net/ (for Bengali news).

My guess is that IE7 has access to some Microsoft internal font rendering technology that allows it to show these regional fonts properly, and also that these websites haven?t used proper techniques for font rendering. In either case, what that means is people reading regional sites will continue to browse them through IE.

Google Chrome?s speed is definitely going to help people browse faster, especially with slow Internet connections. The basic HTTP protocol may not have changed, but advanced threading techniques and JavaScript speed enhancements, will make browsing experience in India equally fast.