From a technological perspective, Google has broken the browser mold with Chrome. Setting out explicitly to resolve the common browser issues of stability and speed, the company has arrived at a pragmatic multi-process solution. Until now, browsers have been single-threaded, meaning that whenever any single component - JavaScript, for example - hangs, the whole browser comes crashing down with it. Inevitably, given the number of components at work in a typical browsing session, such crashes have been all too common. Single threading was a problem for operating systems such as early versions of Microsoft Windows, which has been largely solved by the introduction of multi-processing.
Google has adopted the same approach for Chrome, implementing separate processes for not only each browser tab but for individual JavaScript threads and plugins. The stability gains of this approach have the potential to revolutionize the way people use web browsers. Until now, only the extremely brave would have risked working on a valuable document in a browser-hosted word processor or webmail client while the same application was performing standard Internet tasks such as running unknown scripts downloaded from unknown web sites. But the promise of multiple processes is that if one tab dies, the browser as a whole will keep running, protecting your other work from these occupational hazards.
Giving each tab and process its own memory space has another big advantage: efficiency. When you close a tab in Chrome you end the entire process, freeing up all the memory the tab was using. Other browsers are typically less polite, holding on to bits of memory when tabs are closed, resulting in eventual memory bloat and possible premature death.
Chrome also breaks boundaries with its approach to JavaScript. The previous generation of browsers tended to approach JavaScript from the perspective that it was only necessary to be able to run the simple scripts behind superficial bells and whistles such as expanding menus and the like. The Chrome development team have taken a more expansive view, understanding that full scale applications are now the order of the day and developing an entirely new virtual JavaScript machine to suit. The primary advantage of this is extraordinary speed, which is achieved primarily by compiling the JavaScript code before it is run.
This means that Chrome has the potential to overcome the sluggish performance typical of browser-based productivity applications -- a development that threatens to make web-based applications genuinely usable for the first time. This is all obviously very much in Google's interests. Its online application suite has long been respected, and Gmail has set new standards for web mail. Nonetheless, relatively few people have seriously considered entirely abandoning their desktop applications in favor of web-based alternatives. This could all be about to change.
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