Lessons learnt about google chrome today

Itz been whole one day since I started using chrome. I must say  that I find it very attractive basically beacause of the features I mentioned in my last blog today. It being higly responsive. high reading space that it offers and low memory footprint. 

One thing I noticed and I am pretty sure a lot of others must have had is, while chrome is running if you check the windows task manager you can see quiet a few processes running with the name chrome. My first reaction was, WOW, smart startegy from google. So this is the way they prevent the browser from crashing even if a single tab crashes. From what I have understood and have convinced myself to be the fact is, that each tab in crome runs as a separate process. Now this has  a lot of obvious and not so obvious advantages. 

a) As stated earlier each tab is a separate process and hence it crashing of one tab dowsn't affect the browser itself. 

b) With each process having itz own memory footprint and being independent of other,  one chrome process getting slow or getting stuck doesn't affect teh other. So a person will never notice the browser getting slo though there might be a few tabs that might be using a lot of memory and being not responsive. This is all my interpretation of multiple chrome processes running. I am not sure if it is true or not. 

c) Now considering that I am right, it means the amount of memory used by chrome will keep increasing with the number of tabs, which is true for firefox too. So ultimately firefox and chrome will show similar results when stree tested. 

d)One nice feature of chrome that I noticed today is, in case the page is not available any more in the current location, chrome offers you to see the last cached shot of the page as taken by google.

I am still not sure if the multiple processes represent no of tabs open in chrome, but there is s.th the way google is handling the load on chrome by using separate processes. 

Thats it for now. Will keep posting in case I am able to find s.th new. 

Google Chrome - Is it really a killer browser??

I read about chrome 2 days back in tech crunch and my first reaction was - Do we need another browser. I am a die hard fan of firefox and felt really sad on reading about chrome. a) Because google is main fund provider for firefox R&D , so now obviously with chrome the amount of money pumped into firefox will be cut b) as it is a product from google so I am expecting quality, which means serious competition to firefox, and that saddens me. Still I hope firefox to come out with flying colors and make itself better as we have some serious competition now. 

I gave chrome a try and here are some features I liked :

1) Pretty light. I guess primarily because it lacks add ons. But even if I keep the add ons out of picture this definitely is the browser with the fastest response time. 

2) No non-sense browser. Few things you note when you start the browser is the amout of space that is taken by all the bars (menu, task and bla bla). It is minimal. I guess this will change with add ons but right now the browser oftens so much viewing space,though some of it is taken away when you start a download. But still it is very pleasing to the eye.

3) Giving prime importance to the tabs. Loved this feature. Guess firefox should adopt this feature. 

Besides there are many other features which I am sure have been reviewed in many other forums. But I guess the above  3 are the ones that are pretty evident as soon as you start chrome. 

I think chrome is in very early stages and a lot of development needs to happen for it to get seriously adopted. People using IE might just switch over to chrome but trust me it will take much more than just speed for firefox users. And for that matter I guess firefox needs to srsly decrease the memory footprint in case it wants to take on chrome.

I will try to review more of chrome, but I am still not convinced that we needed another browser. I guess it is just going to be a nightmare for web developers now, trying to develop browser compatible apps. 

Anyways I am pretty sure chrome is first step from google in its startegy to integrate its various apps. I am sure in near future we can expect integaration of google docs, picasa, you tube, orkut, calendar and various such google apps with this browser.