Google has presented, during a media event lasting nearly an hour, its latest, highly acclaimed product. Probably anyone on the planet with an Internet connection is already familiar with Google Chrome, the first open source web browser.
During the conference, Google officials presented the capabilities of the product that has already generated a lot of stir, along with some behind-the-scenes development stories. The main “lecturer” was Sundar Pichai, Google product management vice president, who started by saying that the team working on Chrome tried to emulate the technologies and the user experience from behind Google's most successful product, the search engine used by nearly two thirds of the planet.
Pichai underscored that the main aspect that differentiated the browser from its competitors was that it didn’t stand out, and was as unobtrusive as possible. “The motto in the whole team was how do we minimize Chrome. We used to call it “content, not Chrome” [...]. Our view is that the browser is just an application, is just a tool for people to interact with the sites and applications they care about. So browsers should not be self important.”
“In Chrome, we do not interrupt users at all. There are no dialogs which pop-up in front of you and ask you to do something. So our goal is that the user should enjoy surfing the web and the browser should stay out of the way.” added the Google official.
The Google rep highlighted the three significant features that actually distinguished Chrome from anything else on the market – the rendering engine, the multiprocess technology and V8, a JavaScript engine that developers have built from scratch. Rendering is based on the same engine that powers Safari, which enables at least some of the web developers to easily adapt their webpages to fit the browser. Multiprocessing has the main function of increasing the speed of the browser, but also of avoiding the crashing of the entire browser when a tab malfunctions. The V8 JavaScript engine speeds up even more the reactions of Chrome, whenever users employ it to do something in particular.
While Sundar Pichai held a speech focused mostly on technical facts, Larry Page, one of Google's co-founders, joked about the fact that he usually ruled over his team with an iron fist, but that the people who worked on Chrome did a really good job. “I've been using Chrome for quite a while actually and I've really enjoyed using it. I used it on a slow, old computer on purpose to really force them to make it fast without a lot of memory and on slower computer.” said Page.
Meanwhile, Software Engineer at the company Amanda Walker announced that the Mac and Linux versions were under development, although no one could estimate the exact date of release. Pichai also tackled this topic for the journalists gathered at the official release event, saying that the internal need for the two versions of the browser (since many Googlers - the company staff - also use Linux and Mac OS X platforms) should make development pick up the pace.
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