The Google internet browser has been rumored for so long that a few commentators were starting to think that the folks at Mountain View were becoming content to let Firefox gradually take the market, but that was perhaps just wishful thinking. Today's announcement of the new Google Chrome not just tops Internet Explorer (hardly difficult) but answers many, if not most, of the problems that us Foxophiles currently have with our own particular favorite.

At the time of writing we've only got a single screen shot, and the Chrome comic, to show us what to expect, but what we can see looks fantastic. The screen shot doesn't show much but then, as with all things Google, that's not particularly surprising. In a Vista/OS X world, Google has always kept it's offerings looking very minimalistic and that seems to be what people want - "forget how it looks - just look at what it does!".

Google have made their pre-announcement in a surprisingly effective way - the Google Chrome comic does a very visual and easy to understand job of explaining all the key new features and how and why they do what they do. It's both nerd and newbie friendly and is a format I'm sure will be used again in the future.

Having gone through the full 38 pages of geekzine the main points for me are:-


* Multithreading - this is going to make a huge difference to page load speed. The loading of page elements in browsers is currently sequential and that can really slow things down, especially when there's a lot of script on the page (like, er, Adsense). It's a bit like comparing an old cassette tape with a CD - with the tape you have to start right at the beginning and fast forward to find what you want; with the CD you just go there. Multithreading is a really big step forward (like the first time I used GoFTP after a life time with Cute, but that's a whole other story) and I think is going to be the single biggest USP of this new browser.

* Multiple Sessions and Process Isolation - you know that horrible feeling when you've got 20 Firefox tabs going and then you open THAT page, the one that never finishes loading, that just sits there and locks up the whole app. Well, say goodbye to those crap page blues with Chrome's new process isolation which means that each site loads in its own unique Chrome session - if one particular page gives you a problem you can just shut it down without affecting the others. No more hard crashes.

One other advantage of Process Isolation is that you no longer see the gradual memory bloat of Firefox the longer you leave it open. Keep Firefox open with a couple dozen tabs running for a few days and you'll see the memory usage inexorably rise over the period, to the point where the app will frequently lock up. That's due to memory fragmentation and is a direct result of having all the tabs running in a single session. Multiple Session processing means that as you close a tab, the whole of that particular session finishes, giving up the full amount of memory to the next process. The new Chrome Task Manager even shows you which tabs are the worst offenders, meaning you can ditch the real memory hogs as quickly as possible.

* Javascript Virtual Machines - without going into uber geek, the new Chrome Javascript Virtual Machines (using a technology brought in from the V8 Team in Denmark) take the javascript code on a page and directly compile it into machine code which any computer processor will handle at lightning speed, as opposed to the looped interpretation model used in other browsers. Yes, those Adsense ads will now appear faster than ever before!

* Privacy Mode - a.k.a Read Only Mode, a.k.a "porn mode". Individual session windows can be set to a Privacy Mode, meaning that none of the history or cookies for that session are saved after the window is closed.

* Permission Based Sandboxing - a major advance on the existing Windows privacy zone settings and something like the protection that Mac users expect as standard on their beloved machines. It's not perfect - the inevitable external plugins are an obvious exploit waiting to happen - but it's light years ahead of what's currently available with other Windows-based browsers.


There are many other goodies available in this first version, but you get the gist of what Google are releasing here. These are not just minor tweeks to existing functionality - they're proper white sheet advances on every other browser currently available. In fact, it's not hard to see this as a first stage on the way to a full blown Cloud Operating Environment, where everything can be done within a browser window on top of a simple operating system, like Linux (or the upcoming cut spec new version of Windows).

If it wasn't for all the plugins I rely on in Firefox I'd certainly be switching totally over to the new Chrome, in the same way that I ditched MS Outlook when GMail came out. I just hope they have a good bookmark import function!