Todd Mundt

So many people who are far smarter than me have weighed in on Google Chrome, but I still want to say a couple of things about it because it makes me excited.

I have my own list of favorite things about Chrome, and they range from the complete redesign of the browser architecture, the new ultra-fast V8 Javascript engine, and the sandboxing of individual tabs - with the resulting improvements in memory management, stability and malware prevention - to Scott McCloud’s brilliant comic book announcing the release.

That’s an impressive meal for your left brain; what about the other half?

It’s fast, fast, FAST. On some pages, it loads at basically the same speed as the latest nightly builds of Webkit, the open source code upon which it and Safari are based. But when it comes to Javascript, the beast that slows down so many browsers, Chrome screams, thanks to V8. This one attribute deserves its own level of hotness. As Steven Levy has written in the new issue of Wired: Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better — you’ve made something new.

Some of the cool features exist in one form or another on other browsers, often with the help of plugins - yanking on a tab to make it its own window (Safari), unobtrusive handling of downloads, private browsing, and keyword searching (plugins for Firefox). But the integration of these features is, by definition, tighter because they aren’t extensions. Gears, the important goo-gah that hardly anyone pays attention to, is baked in. The new tab page that highlights recent places you’ve been; the location bar that finally acts like the “everything” bar that it should be; and did I mention it’s FAST? And assigning each tab its own memory and process is one of those major advances that us heavy browser users crave. Scott McCloud’s hand-drawn depictions of how browsers eat up memory and how sandboxing slows this down and also throws up a big roadblock to malware is particularly good.

If you take a step back, the release of Chrome ranks next to the development and release of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in 2004. These are browser milestones, like Mosaic, Netscape, and perhaps Internet Explorer 3.0.

And even if Chrome never gets large market share, the innovations of Chrome will fly to other browsers because Chrome is open source.

It’s been a pretty good week, I’d say.

• A couple smarter people on Chrome:
• * Niall Kennedy
• * Om Malik
• * Netscape founder Marc Andreessen
• * Jim Courtney
• * James Fallows