Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project

This is tremendously exciting. There are tons of comments here that are insinuating that Google is doing this to screw over Mozilla somehow. I think this is bogus:

1) I know the comic was long, but they explicitly cover their agenda -- they're taking the time and money to make some hard decisions about the browser that really need to be made (or at least investigated), like separate processes per tab / embedded-object, aggressive javascript revisions and embedding features that are relevant to the new world of applications design.

2) Mozilla sending impressions to Google is still money in Google's pocket. Judging from Mozilla's $millions cut, it's handsome change, too. They have no incentive to kill this golden goose.

3) With all due respect to the (tens of?) thousands of people that have contributed to Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox, why should we even care about Mozilla/FF? When the Mozilla codebase was open sourced, it was roughly equivalent to NS6, which was a dog compared to IE (remember why even the majority of geeks was using IE5/5.5? NS4 was an ancient PoS and NS6 was glacially slow and horrendously unpolished). A lot of us only cared about NS because it ran on the open source OSes we preferred to use, and it represented an alternative to the MS-only world we saw coming our way otherwise. I don't see how Webkit isn't better than the Mozilla codebase in any metric you can throw at it.

Conspiracy theorists: Stand down. Sure, a monopolistic Google would be as bad as any other monopoly, but I don't think this is the keystone piece to the formation of the new evil empire.

Well, this can't be anything but good for (us) users.

It's a bit peculiar though, how both the recently published IE8 and now "Chrome" both have tabs isolated.

I hope Opera will be able to keep up with all the competition!

The inventors of Mouse Gestures & Speed Dial etc deserve quite a bit of respect.

That 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.

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 really hard work is support for IE6. 1990s JS assumptions, very bad and inconsistent DOM behaviour, etc.

New, open JS engines with a different take on executing JS (Tamarin, V8) are wonderful news for JS developers everywhere. And consumers too, of course.

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."