Google Chrome, or Chrome, is a web browser software that tries to
compete with major players, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer,
Safari, and even the Opera web browser. It is available for the Linux,
Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. But
Google Chrome is more than a web browser, as it combines sophisticated
open source technology, borrowed from the Chromium application, into a
minimal design, all in order to help users surf the web much faster, a
lot easier, and safer than ever before.
Every tab in Chrome is sandboxed, so that a tab can display contents of
a web page and accept user input, but it will not be able to read the
user’s desktop or personal files.
Google say they have “taken the existing process boundary and made it
into a jail”. There is an exception to this rule; browser plugins such
as Adobe Flash Player do not run within the boundaries of the tab jail,
and so users will still be vulnerable to cross-browser exploits based on
plugins, until plugins have been updated to work with the new Chrome
security. Google has also developed a new phishing blacklist, which will
be built into Chrome, as well as made available via a separate public
API.
• Privacy. Google announces a
so-called incognito mode claiming that it “lets you browse the web in
complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity”. No
features of this, and no implications of the default mode with respect
to Google’s database are given.
A unique functionality of the Google Chrome
application is its ability to search the web directly from the address
bar. Just type one or more words in the address bar and immediately get
suggestions for popular web pages. The application displays thumbnails
of your top websites on the new tab page, a function that is popularly
called Speed Dial. This functionality is also available on other
similar products, and it allows you to easily access your favorite web
pages instantly, with lightning speed, from any new tab.
• Multiprocessing. The Gears team were
considering a multithreaded browser (noting that a problem with existing
web browser implementations was that they are inherently
single-threaded) and Chrome implemented this concept with a
multiprocessing architecture. A separate process is allocated to each
task (eg tabs, plugins), as is the case with modern operating systems.
This prevents tasks from interfering with each other which is good for
both security and stability; an attacker successfully gaining access to
one application does not give them access to all and failure in one
application results in a “Sad Tab” screen of death. This strategy exacts
a fixed per-process cost up front but results in less memory bloat
overall as fragmentation is confined to each process and no longer
results in further memory allocations. To complement this, Chrome will
also feature a process manager which will allow the user to see how much
memory and CPU each tab is using, as well as kill unresponsive tabs.
Private browsing is also a strong point of the
Google Chrome web browser, enabling users to surf the Internet in an
incognito window, when they don't want to save their browsing history,
or if they’re hiding from NSA (National Security Agency). Just like
Mozilla Firefox, the Chrome web browser includes a handy cloud service,
which allows you to safely and securely sync all of your passwords,
browsing history, bookmarks, apps, extensions, autofill, themes, and
opened tabs across multiple devices.
• Features. Chrome has added some commonly
used plugin-specific features of other browsers into the default
package, such as an Incognito tab mode, where no logs of the user
activity are stored, and all cookies from the session are discarded. As a
part of Chrome’s javascript virtual machine, pop-up javascript windows
will not be shown by default, and will instead appear as a small bar at
the bottom of the interface until the user wishes to display or hide the
window. Chrome will include support for web applications running
alongside other local applications on the computer. Tabs can be put in a
web-app mode, where the omnibar and controls will be hidden with the
goal of allowing the user to use the web-app without the browser “in the
way”.
• Rendering Engine. Chrome uses the
WebKit rendering engine on advice from the Gears team because it is
simple, memory efficient, useful on embedded devices and easy to learn
for new developers.
• Tabs. While all of
the major tabbed web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox) have
been designed with the window as the primary container, Chrome will put
tabs first (similar to Opera). The most immediate way this will show is
in the user interface: tabs will be at the top of the window, instead of
below the controls, as in the other major tabbed browsers. In Chrome,
each tab will be an individual process, and each will have its own
browser controls and address bar (dubbed omnibox), a design that adds
stability to the browser. If one tab fails only one process dies; the
browser can still be used as normal with the exception of the dead tab.
Chrome will also implement a New Tab Page which shows the nine most
visited pages in thumbnails, along with the most searched on sites, most
recently bookmarked sites, and most recently closed tabs, upon opening a
new tab, similar to Opera’s “Speed Dial” page.
