A quick peek at Google's Chrome

You're as surprised as I am, when we heard that Google is entering the tough web browser war with its own; and Google's new web browser is going to be called Chrome!

The blogosphere was shocked when on Monday, Google released 38 page of comic book which describe the forthcoming of Google's open-source browser. And on the next day, Tuesday (today), Google is launching Chrome Beta in more than 100 countries across the world.

Google acts fast, not like its best rival: Microsoft (d'oh, I'm comparing these two giants again ;-p). "When you come at me, you better know. I move quick and when I do, I slice, like a goddamn hammer." quoted from Willy Bank - Ocean Thirteen.

Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, Google engineering director said in the official announcement that appeared late Tuesday afternoon, "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome."

It's a very tight competition in the web browser market out there, but the search giant company believes they can steal our attention with the simplest argument: "So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web. The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better."

Well, looking & judging from the screenshot above; Google's Chrome certainly grabbed my attention. The UI looks to inherit Google's sleek & clean look, and Google has furthermore explain this in its blog post: "On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go."

But for you, who are more into techie things; what are under the hood is more important than the outer beauty look. They've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, JavaScript engine, V8, to power Chrome. "WebKit is the open source rendering engine we used for Google Chrome," the comic depicts Google Software Engineer Darin Fisher as saying. "We were impressed how fast it is.... [The Google Android Team] said it uses memory efficiently, was easily adapted to embedded devices, and it was easy for new browser developers to learn to make the code base work. Browsers are complex. One of the things done well with WebKit is that it's kept simple."

It features a tab-based interface with the tabs on top, above the browser's URL window and control buttons. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", Chrome will be able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites.

So far Google is only offering Chrome for Windows, the comic strips specifically mentioned Windows Vista. But they do plan for expansion: "This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust."

Sources are from:

• First browser screenshots from Google (Valleywag)
• Google Announces Browser via Comic Book (Macworld)
• Google Browser Will Be Available Tuesday (PCW Business Center)
• A fresh take on the browser (Google Blog)

[blogged with my Treo 750v]