codedread

Alp Toker, one of those graphics heavy hitters, has woken up to give us a nice summary about the ’skia’ graphics library which Google uses for the Chrome browser. I like that it has animation and SVG awareness ‘out of the box’, but it probably won’t be a major player until it’s fully ported to all the major desktop platforms and has matured a little.

Things I Learned:

• They borrowed some UI concepts from Opera and IE (controls and address bar inside the tabs, speed dial, paste-and-go) but I think they’ve done some things better. For instance: the default home page requires zero user interaction, the status bar is only present when you hover over a link, tab cycling makes sense and requires zero thought.
• They really didn’t want to introduce another rendering engine for developers - so Google is simply using WebKit, it won’t be a fork
• No tie-ins to Google Services installed by default
• They’ve been working on it for two years
• V8 will eventually make its way into Android
• They haven’t made very many contributions to Webkit, but are fully committed to doing so. Their plan is to build Chrome off the WebKit tip
• Extensibility - though they obviously support traditional browser plugins and they have plans for a richer extension API - it won’t be in the Beta.
• UA String is: “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″ =>Google, please work to shorten the UA string, not lengthen it (is there really any valid reason for “Safari/…” to be there?)
• The browser is fast. Transition is seemless. I like that the default home page requires no user interaction to generate. Ctrl+L, Ctrl+K, Alt+D, Ctrl+T all work as I expected.
• They are using an older version of WebKit (older than Safari 3.1 it looks like) as there are two SVG-related rendering problems with my site that I thought were long gone
• They have a sense of humour (open up the Chrome Task manager and see the link at the bottom)

Further Exploration:

1. I’m curious how browsers like IE and Chrome are ensuring that access to the browser cache is shared efficiently across all processes?
2. I’d like to learn more about the ‘cross-platform’ graphics library that they are using, does it support hardware acceleration?
3. Are other browser vendors worried that the editor of the HTML5 spec is now an employee of a browser vendor?
4. What are Google Chrome’s plans for feeds? At the moment, there isn’t even any auto-discovery

Google is going to release a new open-source web browser tomorrow (Sept 2nd, 2008) called Google Chrome. Lots of information contained in forty pages of this comic book. The rendering engine is WebKit, but it has its own JavaScript engine (V8) that compiles the JS into bytemachine code and uses more efficient garbage collection. It also follows the thoughts of the Internet Explorer team of putting the tab at the root of the UI and letting each tab be its own process (not just thread). Oh, it comes with Google Gears pre-installed too.

This all sounds good: security, stability, anti-phishing, sandboxing, ’superfast’ JS. Of course there’s only one true test though.

At first I was wondering if this was a fork of WebKit, but I think the only thing that would make sense would be for Google to work in parallel with WebKit (continually updating Chrome’s rendering engine with new versions of WebKit). Everything else would be part of the Chrome open source project. If you’re in the know, drop a line below.

Ok, I’m happy. A completely open source browser that supports SVG and is (sort of) co-sponsored by two big companies with lots of cash (Google and Apple).

I had the idea within the SVG IG to use Google Doctype to build up SVG reference documentation (better than what is currently at wiki.svg.org), since DocType is supposed to be all about the “open web stack”. Since the articles are copyright Google but licensed under the Creative Commons license, I figure this can’t hurt if Google turns all evil on us one day.

However, any time I’ve experimented with Doctype has shown that the project isn’t quite ready yet for primetime. I base this on the fact that every time I try to submit a change, I get a long delay and then a 502 error. Mark has assured me they are working on both short term and long term solutions to this problem. He also offered to give me offline commit access to add SVG articles (and even tests) en masse to Doctype. That was a couple weeks ago, maybe now that holidays are over this can become reality?

Poor WebDevout. All that time and effort into resource sites like that and Google comes along with Google Doctype - with an aim to be the definitive, community-driven source for all documentation about the open web development. As long as the “open web” doesn’t include things like XHTML or SVG or SMIL, that is. Oh, and as long as you don’t care about the Opera web browser.

It will be interesting to see how the web development community at large reacts to this - I’m guessing mostly positive (as opposed to the backlash I saw regarding Google Knol). I like the test-driven aspect, but since all the pages are text/html, this makes it problematic for some of the technologies that I care about. It will be interesting to see how the project evolves over time as more technologies graduate and make it into Google’s view of the ‘open web’ stack (perhaps when those technologies shed some Draconian pounds). For now, I’ll just hope that SVG makes its way back into HTML5…

Anyway, congratulations to Mark Pilgrim for giving it its legs and pushing it out the door.