The browser wars heat up: Google Chrome

[Durandal]

So far, no one's mentioned what is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of Chrome. It loads a separate renderer process instance for every window and tab. Each page is rendered in its own address space, meaning that a crash in a plug-in won't take down the entire browser. Nor will a poorly- or maliciously-written piece of JavaScript. So Google is trading some overhead in the overall browser's performance (and also some complexity trade-offs) for better robustness.

This is probably the future of web browsers if they are to continue supporting plug-ins. If you want to know what I'm talking about, check out your Safari crash logs sometime. Their stack traces will most likely be dominated by calls into the Flash plug-in.

[Drooling Iguana]

I find that to be a bit over-kill. Why not just have the plugins run in their own sandboxes?

[Losonti Tokash]

Problem I've had come up that didn't occur the first couple times I used Chrome: it now seems to be "always on top" and I have to minimize it to get to any other programs I have running. I also autohide my task bar and when Chrome is maximized the task bar doesn't reappear when I move the mouse to the bottom of the screen.

I'd like to mention that this went away as soon as I rebooted.

[Durandal]

I find that to be a bit over-kill. Why not just have the plugins run in their own sandboxes?

Because that's not how plug-ins are typically implemented. If you load the plug-in in its own address space ... then what? The browser can't call into it; it's a separate address space. The plug-in can't draw in the browser's window; it's a separate address space. Unless you do it with shared memory or IPC, in which case you end up taking lots of round trips through the kernel to get your work done, and you take a performance hit.

This would require a recompile (at the very least) of plug-ins, since they're basically run-time libraries, not actual processes. They don't have a starting point of execution. What you're asking for is a complete re-architecting of how browser plug-ins are made. I'm not saying it's impossible, just very difficult to do in a way that would be binary-compatible with existing plug-ins. I guess you could use a proxy process to execute, load the plug-in into its address space and then listen for messages from the browser, dispatch them to the proper functions in the plug-in and then send the data back. But the proxy still has to be able to draw into another process' address space -- you don't want to send individual frames of animation over IPC, for example. That'd be slower than shit.

And, if you want to do this in a binary-compatible way, you'd run into potential symbolication problems as well as issues with properly marshaling arguments for transport and then un-marshaling them for the call.

So yeah. Not an easy problem.

[phongn]

According to page 31 of the introductory comic, plugins actually are running in a separate process.

EDIT: Also, this appears to be what nspluginwrapper does on *nix platforms to allow AMD64-compiled browsers run IA32 plugin binaries.

[Zed Snardbody]

Anyone run into trouble installing it? I accepted the terms and the bloody little circle just keep rotating no other prompt and nothing happens.

[General Zod]

This is probably the future of web browsers if they are to continue supporting plug-ins. If you want to know what I'm talking about, check out your Safari crash logs sometime. Their stack traces will most likely be dominated by calls into the Flash plug-in.

Isn't Flash rather problematic regardless of the browser it's on anyway? From what I understand it's a rather massive CPU hog.

[phongn]

Isn't Flash rather problematic regardless of the browser it's on anyway? From what I understand it's a rather massive CPU hog.

Part of it is that Flash is being asked to a do a lot more than it was originally architected for (which was simple vector animation), part of it is that a great deal of flash applications are incompetently programmed.

[Phantasee]

So apparently the German gubmint doesn't want its citizens to use Chrome...wonder what's up with that?

[Dahak]

So apparently the German gubmint doesn't want its citizens to use Chrome...wonder what's up with that?

The federal office for security in information technology is of the opinion that Chrome is not yet fit for general usage.
For one, being Beta and maybe published prematurely due to the leakage, they have some doubts about the amount of bugs it still might contain, as well as security holes (and under the consideration that it's mostly not tech-savy people using it). Another big concern is data protection, as Chrome is, like other Google apps, collecting a lot of personal data without much control.

[Zed Snardbody]

Holy fuck this thing flies! I feel like I've gone from a damn four banger to a fucking vette.

[Battlehymn Republic]

Google is a Microsoft wolf in the skin of Apple. Nice.

A wolf in a slightly better-groomed wolf's clothing?

A hipster wolf who knows he's cool yet pretends he's not evil.

[Phantasee]

Holy fuck this thing flies! I feel like I've gone from a damn four banger to a fucking vette.

It starts up faster than Firefox, hell, it beats most of the applications I usually start right after log-in by quite a bit, but once you start using it on more than one website that requires more than HTML it starts to lag quite a bit. The whole window freezes up all the time on me, even on Facebook. And of course Google isn't going to release any sort of adblocking plug-in itself...

[Sarevok]

So apparently the German gubmint doesn't want its citizens to use Chrome...wonder what's up with that?

The federal office for security in information technology is of the opinion that Chrome is not yet fit for general usage.
For one, being Beta and maybe published prematurely due to the leakage, they have some doubts about the amount of bugs it still might contain, as well as security holes (and under the consideration that it's mostly not tech-savy people using it). Another big concern is data protection, as Chrome is, like other Google apps, collecting a lot of personal data without much control.

Yes. Hacker sites like milw0rm already has automatic file download and other exploits for chrome published.

No one should do important work in a beta browser. But a lot of people are just too ignorant to know and will use whatever looks shiny and kewl.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Is that also why Gmail is still in beta? LOL, it's only been around since, what, 2004?