The Digital Movement

On Wednesday, Mike and myself had the honour of attending the Google Chrome press conference at their Singapore office where we were given a live demo of Chrome followed by a Q&A session. We took this opportunity to query Andrew McClinchey, Product Manager of Google Southeast Asia and Dickson Seow, Head of Communications & Public Affairs, Google Southeast Asia with pressing questions most of you might have relating to the rational behind the development of Chrome.

Among some of the questions asked (by both press and TDM’ers):
 

Why did Google develop a web browser?

Google felt that there wasn’t enough competition in this field and current web browsers were limiting developers on how far and advanced they could take their web apps. They wanted to make a great new innovation that will make everyone else pick up their game. Their long-term vision is to improve the internet and make it easier for people to write better and more powerful web apps.
 

How are current web browsers limiting web developers?

This was tied down to  a demo of Google’s brand new V8 Javascript engine which showed the speed of a rotating 3D space shuttle in Javascript. When compared with Firefox, the rotation of the space shuttle is much faster in Chrome. This is an example of the possibilities opened up by the emergence of Chrome for web app developers where processing speed of the browser is no longer a limiting factor.

If you would like to do the comparison on your own, the Javascript shuttle can be found here.
 

Google and Mozilla have been working together for the past few years. Why didn’t Google improve Firefox instead of developing a whole new browser?

As Firefox has been around for a while and is quite developed, it would be easier to develop a browser from scratch to make it more lightweight and put in all the new features like the new v8 engine and memory management system. Google is not competing with Firefox but instead am hoping that with the release of Chrome, Mozilla will strive to improve Firefox further. Everything in Google Chrome including the V8 engine is open source so everyone is free to collaborate and share the technology.

Side note: The open-source platform which Chrome uses is called Chromium.
 

Chrome looks like it has many little features that improves usability quite a bit but these might not be obvious to most users especially those who are just trying it out for a short while. How do you see people getting to know about these features?

We are hoping that the early adopters who try the product out discover that the speed and usability that comes with all these features improve their web-surfing experience and hence tell their friends about it. Firefox used to have a market share of only 5% when it was first launched and now it is close to 20%. We’re hoping that Chrome will grow its market share as well as more users finds the benefits that come with it.
 

What do Mike and I think of Chrome so far?

We are definitely enjoying the clean, responsive interface and the higher performance of the browser despite a couple of bugs relating to Javascript happening here and there. Chrome is after all still in beta. One of the features we really enjoy is the memory management system where every tab is a process on its own. This means that if you opened 5 tabs and one of the sites causes your browser to crash, you can just end that process and the other 4 tabs would still work. And oh yes! Before I end off, no more irritating and obstructive pop-up windows appearing when downloading files. :D