“In an uncharacteristic burst of modesty, Google co-founder Sergey Brin says we should think of the company’s new Chrome Web browser simply as a worthy challenger to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. ‘What we want is a diverse and vibrant ecosystem,’ Brin said at the Sept. 2 Chrome launch. ‘We want several browsers that are viable and substantial choices,'” Stephen H. Wildstrom writes for BusinessWeek.
“Don’t believe it for a second,” Wildstrom writes. “Although the first version of Chrome has a half-finished feel and runs only on Windows, a close look at its features and underlying design reveals a far more dramatic goal. Chrome aims to take on not just Internet Explorer’s 75% share of the browser market but Windows’ dominance of the desktop itself.”
Google “didn’t expend much effort on what traditionally has been the heart of a browser, the rendering engine, which creates viewable pages from the text, images, and instructions supplied by Web servers. Google just adapted the open-source WebKit browser engine used by Safari,” Wildstrom writes. “So where did Google engineers really hunker down? The browser’s Task Manager… task management is a core component of operating systems, such as Windows or Mac OS X. And that’s my point: Chrome offers many of the features of an operating system.”
Full article here.
Jeff Cogswell reports for eWeek, “Google made the right [rendering engine] choice: Instead of starting from scratch, they picked an existing open-source rendering engine that’s mature and packed with several great features such as speed. The one they chose is WebKit, which, interestingly enough, was developed by Apple (which in turn based its work on an early code base called KDE HTML Layout Engine). Apple’s own development led to the engine that is the basis of their Safari Web browser; they then made the engine open source (WebKit), and now Google is basing its engine off that.”
Cogswell reports, “This means the rendering in Chrome isn’t buggy and slow. It’s fast, and it works.”
Much more in the full article here.