Google launches web browser

Friday, 21 November 2008

Driving value through a business process platform

The challenges facing the public sector today are greater than ever, writes Vivek Puthucode, Industry ...

Next generation data centres

Pankaj Sharma, vice president, sales and marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan, explains how APC meets ...

The perpetual collaboration mandate

Globalisation, ecological issues, technological impact and other modern challenges are driving the need for streamlined ...

Shaping governments of the future

Leong Peng Kiong talks about pioneering new ways of building, implementing and operating e-government services.

SPOTLIGHT Archive

Print this article

Technology

By Jianggan Li | 2 September 2008

A new internet browser is entering the market, expected to heat up the already fierce competition between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox.

View photos

Related Categories

From this Section

NEWS

Chrome, as the open source application is called, is designed to be “lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia”.

Explaining the rationale behind this launch, Sunda Pichai, Google’s VP for Product management wrote on the company’s blog: “We believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”

Releasing the beta for Windows in more than 100 countries on Tuesday (2nd September), Google is also working on Linux and Mac versions, which will be introduced at a later stage, according to Pichai.

Google Chrome has a combined search and address bar; and it offers snapshots of the user’s most-visited sites, recent searches and bookmarks, “making it even easier to navigate the web.”

At core of Google Chrome is a multi-process platform where each browser tab operates as a separate process. By isolating tabs, should one tab crash or misbehave, others remain stable and responsive, allowing user to continue working without having to restart the application.

A new JavaScript engine, V8, is built in to speed up today’s web applications, and enable more web applications that couldn’t exist on today’s browsers.

The new browser is expected to help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programmes.

“We realised that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser,” Pichai says. “What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

Over the past decade, Google has developed a suite of web applications which offer functionality that might replace offline software in document management, photo sharing, instant messaging, personal medical record and many other areas.

Currently, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer holds 80 per cent of the market.

Top of page