Google is releasing a new browser. Here are some of the new features and things that caught my eye from the comic book they’ve launched about it:
Isolated Tabs
Each tab is a separate process. If a tab crashes you don’t loose the whole browser. Better garbagge collection because when a tab is closed a whole process is cleared from memory.
Testing
“Within each 20-30 minutes of each new browser build, we can test it on tens of thousands of different web pages.”
Speed: Webkit and V8
Based on Webkit, memory efficient and easy to adapt to embedded devices, and based on V8 that only interprets Javascript once and then compiles it to machine code. Better garbage collection by keeping a reference of where all the pointers are on the stack.
Search and User Experience
Tabs are on top instead of being below the URL bar. Tabs can be detached. Each tab has its own controls. Autocomplete works only on sites you’ve typed already and points only to the root site, not the whole address.
The initial page presents the nine most visited sites by you on the last days.
Privacy mode lets you create tabs where nothing that happens on that window will be logged.
Pop-ups are scoped to the tab where they were created.
Security, Sandboxing and Safe-browsing
Each tab, which is a process, is jailed. No writing to disk occurs. Blacklisting for harmful sites and phishing attempts.
Gears, Standars and Open-Source
Has Gears built into. All of it open-source.
Update: So this guy is saying Chrome is over twice as fast compared to Firefox 3, and not far from being twice as fast as Safari 4/WebKit nightly.
Since it is Webkit based it will have the same implementation for CSS as Safari does for example. And Webkit scores 100/100 in the Acid3, a test to check how well a web browser follows certain web standards.
Seems Chrome is planned to launch at 18:00 GMT.
It's just a slower multithreaded stripped down version of Opera really :)