im having trouble explain chrome's advantages to the gf - multi-threaded javascript engine? - its def geared towards developers..
Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
91–100 of 112 posts
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're probably right, but there are so many other potential catchy names that aren't the same as Mozilla's interface layer, so I don't know why they couldn't have just gone with one of those and made it easier on everyone.
it's the interface layer in Flex/AIR too. i don't think it's that unique to Mozilla.
Chrome has been called chrome since time immemorial. I remember that's what it was called in the IE-vs-Netscape days. You know, the days that drove me to become a Flash developer.
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#93[deleted]
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
They seem to be using their own javascript engine, so it might need separate testing because of that. Although if it becomes popular enough, most javascript libraries and frameworks will surely support it.
You can bet they will. The V8 engine is unlikely to present much of an obstacle. We have a large JS codebase and the Opera, WebKit (Safari), Spidermonkey (Gecko/Firebird), Rhino (Spidermonkey port to Java) and JScript (IE6/7) engines are no hassle to support. The hard part is DOM interaction and styling. But as they're using WebKit and are putting a lot of effort into compatibility - this should be a breeze. The real…
I know the portion of IE6 on the web is still around 25%.. but do you know what portion of your customers is actually using IE6 still?
I wonder at what point it is justified to return a 'please update your browser, preferrably to one of these: [list of reasonable browsers]', just because of the effort it takes you to keep IE6 compatibility.
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#95All I am seeing is a lot of material about Chrome, but has anyone here actually tried it out? It is supposed to be available today (September 2); has anyone been able to download it?
*edit: fixed grammar error
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#96That presentation is amazing. Everyone else (adobe, microsoft, sun, ibm, w3c) must be shi*%@ng themselves! I can't wait to use it. I'm sick of FF's crap memory footprint and single processes. Bring it.
Agreed on the presentation. What struck me is how technical it was (for a comic book quick overview). It's obviously geared towards developers--they really wanted to plant their flag in the sand and say "we're doing this: here is why it is good."
I liked that the actual developers were giving the presentation in comic book form, instead of showing anonymous people. Or worse: imagine it Google had hired Marvel or DC to do the comic. We would be seeing Batman or Reed Richards trying to explain how multiple processes are more efficient.
The term "rock star" is way overused in the software field. It's nice to see some developers actually being treated as stars.
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#97I think Google is pretty threatened by Microsoft and Firefox, they are afraid platforms will one-up them in the future and they know it very well.
It's hard to believe that Google feels threatened by Firefox when they are directly paying the lion's share of Firefox's development/operating expenses -- a deal which they just extended by three years (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrati...).
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#98Have you guys SEEN the respective code bases for Mozilla and WebKit? Really, this was inevitable. Their whole tabs-as-process thing is too, when you think about it. Just imagine the potential for a browser-as-OS-with-processes-and-everything and how much they must be salivating to get it on devices and desktops NOT running Windows. It's a hell of a trojan horse in their winning battle to make Microsoft irrelevant...…
> Their whole tabs-as-process thing is too, when you think about it. Could you please explain this too? I like being able to identify and kill individual tab and plugin processes. But I don't understand why you can't garbage collect a thread like the presentation seems to say.
You can't kill a single thread safely because threads of the same process have shared memory. For example, a thread might be in the middle of some operation that's destructive if it's aborted when only half finished.
If this seems unlikely, think of adding an element to a hash table used by many threads and having to resize it, copying all the old elements to the new one. If you kill the thread in the middle of the resize (which might take a while if it's allocating a lot of memory) then all the other threads that use that hash table will get screwed up.
There's also no good way to tell which memory is being used by which thread. Often the whole point of threads is that they use shared memory; in this case the memory bloat might be _caused_ by a single thread but end up bloating a data structure that is _shared_ by all threads.
By giving each tab its own process, Chrome uses more memory to start out with - each process must have its own data structures for some things which in normal browsers are in shared memory - but hopefully in the long run it will avoid memory leaks.
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than the faster javascript, I don't see a lot of "game changing" innovations in this browser. These seem like mostly incremental improvements and small features. If the java engine is significantly faster this could really push things forward. Otherwise this is less than world beating.
You missed a massive one: multithreading. I've wanted this for ages with firefox. Each tab runs on it's own?! It's exactly what I've been wanting.
Mozilla is supposed to implement the same concept "soon."
Re: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project
#100Wow! What an amazing explanation - I learned a lot about browser technologies just from reading this.