Google Chrome Browser

While most of us spent our Labor Day weekend camping, barbecuing, or in my case, moving into a new home, the marketing team at Google was laboring away releasing marketing materials on what seems to be the next evolution of the web!

Google Chrome, a fully open source multi-process web browser, addresses many of the woes that most web surfers encounter on a daily basis. Instead of being concerned with browser lock ups and ensuring that we don't go over 35 to 40 tabs in Firefox for fear of the dreaded browser crash, we can rest assured knowing that the most we will ever have to worry about is a "tab crash".

What is a tab crash? According to the Google Chrome Comic book, each tab is launched as a separate process. What this means is that if there are N tabs open, there will be N JavaScript threads running, N copies of the global data structures, and a significantly reduced chance that a rogue JavaScript function will bring a user's web experience to a grinding halt.

Both Firefox and IE run as a single process. While IE does tout the advantage of running each tab in a different thread, the memory is still shared; and all tabs are still susceptible to crashes. In either case, the result is the same.

However, I am very interested to see this new browser in action. How impervious to crashes is it going to be? What is this going to mean for web development? Will we need more CSS and HTML magicians to step forward and deal with yet another browser hack? Or will Google Chrome follow web standards and allow the same ease of web application development as Firefox and Safari do?

One question that I have is in regards to add-ons. Will this new browser be as extensible as Firefox? Is there or will there eventually be a market for Google Chrome add-ons?

More importantly, is this the first step towards the Google Operating System?

I guess tomorrow we will find out.