Well the big news in the computing world recently is that Google have announced a new web browser which is available as a beta download from their website.  Google’s surprise new web browser is called Google Chrome and is according to Google built from scratch to meet the demands of todays Internet.

Re use and open source

Actually built from scratch is not entirely accurate as it reuses a number of existing open source technologies, including Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox. In fact the new browser is also going to be open source,  but why a new browser? Well as Google’s blog explains:

We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. 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.

So what are the new things that have resulted from this complete rethink?  Well probably the main thing is that it allows for a multi-threaded approach which will allows each tab to run as a separate process. This will mean it is more memory efficient, should make it more stable and limits any problem to a specific tab only and not the whole browser.  The same split by tab approach is applied to security as well.

So one big question is of course why a new browser? Why not just continue or build on its current support for Firefox? Well presumably Google will optimise their new browser to work well with Gmail and Google Docs and their other web based products and they felt that the rewrite was needed to deliver this.

Of course browsers mean computers so I thought I would finish this post by pointing out the Sony VAIO VGN-AR71M Notebook a featured laptop on PriceGrabber at present.