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September 3, 2008

Yesterday, Google has finally released its new open source Internet browser called Google Chrome. The new Web browser is supposed to feature a small footprint, to load Web pages faster and hopefully will be stable and fairly secure, Google said.

Google added that the new browser is available to download now.

Overall, navigation tabs will be central to Chrome and will be moveable from window to window. The browser will be multi-threaded so that separate tabs will run as separate processes, the company said.

Surprisingly, and without making any fanfare, Google says that Chrome features an "incognito porn mode", a sort of window where none of a person's browsing history can be recorded and where cookies are automatically deleted when any window is closed.

However, that unusual feature is expected to create some controversy among parents concerned about child predators and/or pedophiles.

The browser's URL window will include autocomplete, but only for pages you've actually typed into the address bar before and not to the specific page.

Opening a new window will show you the nine pages you visited the most often, and the four sites you search on most often, rather than just a simple home page.

In terms of security, Chrome certainly appears to do a much better job than Internet Explorer.

In an effort to help prevent or stop malware altogether, processes are sandboxed, meaning that they cannot write files to your hard drive or read your documents in any way.

Additionally, Chrome will get updates of phishing sites and malware attacks so that browsers will get a warning if they go to a flagged site.

Chrome's development team has thanked Mozilla and Web Kit for their help and contribution of the whole project. Chrome will include a task manager for each tab so you can see what resources are being used by individual pages. That feature will be appreciated by many, Google hopes.

Chrome's Windows version launched in over one-hundred countries yesterday. Mac and Linux versions will follow soon, Google said. It is also expected that Chrome will be launched in another fifty or so countries in the next few weeks.

Some beta users have already posted their comments and observations on various forums. Security-wise, one comment said that threads and processes are two separate things. Processes can contain multiple threads. If something goes wrong in a thread, your process dies with it.

If Chrome used only threads rather than separate processes, the entire browser could be crashed by one bad piece of code, the post suggested.

With separate browser processes, a crash only kills that one single process, so a tab whose work is done in a process can be marked as bad.

The operating system has the responsibility of ensuring the process doesn't cause instability outside of itself. Most operating systems are generally quite good at this, especially Linux.

It will be interesting to see and hear of comments coming from Windows users.

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Source: Google.