Why I'm anxiously awaiting Google's Chrome browser
I have no loyalty to a browser. On Windows I use Firefox because it doesn’t screw up like IE does, and on the Mac I use Safari because I like how it works on the Mac vs. Firefox which seems clumsy on the Mac.
However, as good as these browsers are, they have a few common problems which annoy me to no end. For one thing, if something in one of my Firefox tabs screws up, the entire browser goes down. Most of the time Firefox will restore my session, but there are times when it doesn’t and I find myself trying to remember which sites I had open before the app crashed. I don’t like how I have to cripple new sites with the NoScript plugin for Firefox because I’m worried about malware.
Google seems to be changing that with their Chrome browser. Every tab will have self-contained processes. If the process of one tab crashes, it doesn’t take the entire browser with it, it will just close out the one tab. This also means that malware won’t be able to affect other tabs. Google also dealt with malware by not allowing it to write to the hard drive!
Chrome is also supposed to be faster. I wrote an HTML parser/browser a few years back for work just before CSS became popular and I can tell you that although object placement for a web site can be tricky, it can be done if you work it out on a whiteboard. Adding in all of today’s CSS, XHTML, and other items are far beyond what I did a few years back and I hope that they optimized their object placement code.
The entire project is open source. That’s classy on Google’s part because rather than keep all their code to themselves, they give it away so people can learn from it and hopefully improve it over time.
As of the time I’m writing this, they haven’t released it yet, but I’m anxiously awaiting in. In the meantime, you can click here to read Google’s comic book about how they came to build Chrome and how it works inside.
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And this is good from a convenience standpoint, even if Firefox’s Session Restore is almost as much convenient.
All the browsers around are designed to prevent “malware” from messing with other tabs or writing to your hard drive! Well, until a vulnerability allowing that is discovered: something that GChrome has not reason for being “magically” immune from
Also, for explicit admission of the GChrome team, plugins like Flash are just as much vulnerable as in any other browser (wonder why NoScript blocks them by default?).
Finally, one important reason for using NoScript which GChrome does not address at all is the danger of cross-site attacks, like XSS and CSRF, which are due to lack of web application isolation, rather than tab isolation.