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Google to launch own web browser today

by on02 September 2008

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Say hello to Google Chrome

Although the rumour about Google working on a web browser has been going on for quite some time, the company has finally owed up and the new open source browser will be known as Google Chrome.

At the time of writing, Chrome is as yet unavailable, but a beta version will be launching sometime today in more than 100 countries. Google Chrome is based on the open source WebKit renderer which is both used in Apple's Safari browser and by Symbian's S60 browser among others. The Android mobile phone OS from Google is also using WebKit, although the Android development team was using it before the Chrome team.

Google has integrated the V8 JavaScript virtual machine into Chrome as well and this is said to be significantly faster than current implementations in any competing web browser. Furthermore Chrome is using a multiple-process design, which means that each tab you open gets its own process, so no longer will a dodgy website or malfunctioning code cause your entire browser to crash, as it will only crash that tab.

Google has also implemented a task manager into Chrome which allows you to monitor both web pages and plug-ins to see which ones are really bad memory hogs and allowing you to close them down. But it doesn't stop there, as Google has also implemented features such as Icognito which is a privacy mode, Omnibox is the address bar which offers auto-completion and then there's the integration of Gears into the browser which is a caching utility which helps speed up things like website admin pages etc.

Chrome will also feature a phishing filter and malware blacklists and a special web application view which will remove the address bar and tool bar to give you full screen access to web applications such as Google Docs.

We'd expect much more to follow, but the one thing that makes us really excited about Chrome is that Google has been working on making it the most stable browser out there. Time will tell if this really is the case, but one can always hope.

You can find a comic that explains in more details of how the various Google Chrome features work here and you can find more information on the official Google Blog here
Last modified on 02 September 2008
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