For many, Google Chrome’s arrival in the already competitive browser market was a real bolt from the blue, but for software engineer Lars Bak it was the end product of years of work.
Bak heads up the development of the v8 JavaScript engine in Chrome, one of the key features of Google’s browser and also one of the most innovative.
In the past few months, the importance of browsers coping with JavaScript and the web apps that are built on it have become increasingly obvious, and its something that Bak has been delighted to see.
"It’s fantastic," he tells TechRadar. "This is exactly why we started two-and-a-half years ago.
"When we started we were facing no competition; all browsers had the same speed in terms of JavaScript and it turned out to be bit of a bottle neck for web applications.
Release of the native Linux version of the Google Chrome browser is still planned for June 2009. Unfortunately, more problems than first anticipated keep cropping up. According to recent OSnews, they mainly have to do with the graphical interface.
Google uses an internal views library for Chrome’s user interface that enables, for example, placement of tabs in the title bar with the idea of adhering to the Chrome principles "simple, unobtrusive, fast." Because Chrome was never from the start conceived as multi-platform software (how would it otherwise have come to the idea of using WinHTTP), the views were never ported to Linux or Mac. Google had already decided a long time ago not to use views for the Mac version, but to rely instead on a completely native version of Chrome based on Cocoa. For Linux, Chrome hacker Evan Martin suggests three possible options:
1) As close to Windows as possible, porting views. 2) As close to native as possible, avoiding views. 3) Something in the middle, hacking views.
Martin eliminates 1 right from the get-go, calls 2 "insane, becoming more tempting," but prefers option 3. Meanwhile, Chrome project lead Ben Goodger has slipped into the discussion to explain why Chrome decided against Qt as a cross-platform solution and chose Gtk+ instead. More details on Goodger’s views here.
For those Google Chrome users who need access to one or two Silverlight sites, a Microsoft developer offers a file-tweaking work-around to get access to certain sites.
The Chrome/Silverlight hack requires grabbing a few .js files normally intended for Silverlight developers and tweaking them to have Silverlight sites accept and provide content to Chrome. By downloading the .js files and modifying them a bit, you should be able to access, as the developer rates it, "most" Silverlight apps, but your mileage will certainly vary.
A major complaint about Google’s Chrome web browser has been that so far, it is still not available on anything other than Windows. Google promised to deliver Chrome to Mac OS X and Linux as well, but as it turns out, this is a little harder than they anticipated, Ben Goodger, Google’s Chrome interface lead, has explained in an email. It has also been revealed what toolkit the Linux version of Chrome will use: Gtk+.
Google’s Mike Pinkerton just posted the first screenshots from the Mac build of Google’s Chrome web browser.
This week, everything came together and we can now load web pages in the renderer processes and display them in tabs. Here’s a screenshot of the very first time I ran Mac Chromium and loaded a webpage:
He warns there’s still a "very very long way to go" and he can’t predict a possible date, but it does show some substantial progress on the project. Google announced Chrome for Windows back in September and stated that they believe they "can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web." One of the features described for the Windows version has been the isolation of processes within each tab. This means that a misbehaving website can only potentially crash the tab that its running and not the whole browser. Also offered is a screenshot for when this might happen on the Mac version of the browser:
Chrome, Google’s foray into the war for browser supremacy, has yet to be widely adopted in Japan. In an attempt to bolster the market share, and appeal to the playful culture, Google has released a cute little advertisement which hopes to capture the spirit of the browser.
The time-lapse animation is clear and carefully rendered with precise audio and fantastic artistic direction. It is impressive to see how labor intensive such a short simple ad is. To understand the process of creating this ad be sure to check out the Picasa gallery of the work behind the scenes. Google Chrome Japan is hoping to encourage more use of the recently patched browser that now holds about a 1% share of the market. Check out the link to view the ad in HD:
Google has already indicated that it plans to offer a platform for Chrome browser extensions, but now we finally have what looks like a firm date on when that will arrive. Apparently, a Google developer conference scheduled for May 27th will include a session on developing extensions for Chrome, which leads Google Operating System to conclude that we’ll see the extensions platform go live on or before that date.
The Chrome team has already published documentation outlining general goals and principles for how they believe the extension system should operate. High on the list of reasons that adding extensions to Chrome is important is that it will make the browser more attractive to “users coming from other browsers who are used to certain extensions that they can’t live without.”
While extensions will certainly make the browser more attractive to a certain subset of users, the bigger fish to fry for Google is adding a Mac version. That too is in the works (see documentation here), but if Chrome wants to draw in a lot more users of its browser, Mac support will be key, as these users have so far been completely shutout of experiencing the benefits of Chrome.
Researchers have discovered a flaw that exposes Google’s Chrome web browser to clickjacking. Clickjacking is a relatively new attack vector in which a legitimate link is substituted without the user’s awareness. Clicking a photo that appears to be hosted on Flickr, for example, could actually direct the user to a malicious site set up as a drive-by-download server. The severity of the problem becomes compounded when trusted sites are hacked into and surreptitiously modified.
Google is working on a fix. In the meantime, though a spokesperson pointed out that clickjacking is a problem that can affect all browsers. Indeed Firefox 3.0.5 appears to suffer from this same flaw; however, the first release candidate of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Opera are not affected.
Google Chrome was built from the ground up to be a more secure Web browser, and Google and its Chromium developers should be applauded for the attention they have brought to browser security. Google deserves much credit for the wealth of security information posted on the Internet and on the Google Chrome blog, and for making Chrome’s source code available for anyone to examine.
The security model Chrome follows is excellent. Chrome separates the main browser program, called the browser kernel, from the rendering processes, which are based upon the open source WebKit engine, also used by Apple’s Safari. The browser kernel starts with all privileges removed, the null SID (a security identifier in Windows Vista that denotes the user as untrusted), and multiple "restrict" and "deny" SIDs enabled. On Windows Vista, Chrome runs as a medium-integrity process.
The issue was that Hotmail barred the competitor’s browser from entering by checking the user agent. Some sites do so, often without merit and a lot of backfiring, because they think certain browsers can’t cope with their HTML/JavaScript/stylesheets. Not the case with Chrome here, apparently, which now pretends it’s a Safari browser when encountering *.mail.live.com.
If we weren’t the types who give folks the benefit of the doubt, we might suggest that Microsoft’s playing a touch dirty to fend off Google’s competing browser. Then again, as one Microsoft employee says, Hotmail services millions of users—and Chrome is used by such a small percentage of those users—that the bug will be addressed. It’s just not a high priority.
Regardless, the Google, Microsoft, and Apple power struggle via Chrome, Hotmail, and Safari is a saucy one.
