Chrome - a few things to think about

Firstly, I think Google lobbed Chrome at Mozilla like a grenade because they had presumably already asked for improved Javascript runtime performance and been told that was low on the priority list.

In addition, the Mozilla/Firefox people seem to have an almost irrational aversion to implementing what they see as 'non-standard' extensions to the W3C DOM object model, like "document.all", whereas WebKit incorporates most of the Microsoft DOM extensions, which makes life a lot easier for developers.

I'm betting therefore that within the Firefox team 'minds have been focussed' and would be surprised if they don't either incorporate the V8 Javascript engine or get their engine to bench up to the same level of performance. And incidentally, it's not just Javascript performance that's exceptional in Chrome; DOM manipulation is MUCH faster, meaning that UI performance approaches native applications in speed.

So Chrome is Google cracking the whip at Firefox by saying 'ok, we can't force you to do x,y and z (even though we pay you money), but in that case we'll do it ourselves.

Secondly, Chrome is an exceptionally well documented open source project (look at the Chromium web site). You can download a complete Visual Studio 2005 project ready to compile 'out of the box'. An auto-build process runs regularly and there's web visibility of builds and what broke.

This makes it very easy to download and fiddle with, not to mention contribute code back - and I'll bet right now our friends at Novell are doing just that. Because if Silverlight doesn't work with Chrome, why not get Moonlight/Mono working with it?. Suppose you plug in a different script engine, say, a JIT compiler for .NET, which Novell could easily do. Now how does that look as a development platform?.

Note the BSD license which avoids all those awkward viral GPL intellectual property issues.

Because the Chrome sourcecode base has good documentation including technical documentation (incredibly rare in open source projects), it's much easier for third parties to contribute to it.

Firefox/Gecko is a complex and rather messy codebase that unfortunately means only a dedicated bunch of people (many paid by Google) are willing to mess with it. Whereas WebKit and Chrome are carefully constructed to tight standards (see the style guide for code, for example).

So consider Chrome six months from now. All the initial bugs are fixed and there are now a dozen script engines to choose from including Java, Python, Ruby, Mono and of course Javascript. Google Gears offers offline storage so you can build apps that still work when the PC is disconnected. An external Gears/filesystem bridge allows you to safely migrate information in and out of the browser sandbox e.g by opening up just one folder on your PC.

NOW do you still see Chrome as 'just a browser'???