Google Chrome’s architecture explained in comics

URL at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html

Since today’s browser environment is rapidly becoming the equivalent of an OS, the innovations in Chrome seem to be ideas whose time has come.  One of the central ideas behind Chrome’s architecture is to assign a different process (not thread) to each tab and the strip explains why.  The section on how they test the browser is also great propaganda that pretty much portrays Google as omnipotent in terms of technical resources. 😉  Even though it is in comics format, the pages on Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine can get technical (and thus fun to read…).

One interesting revelation found in http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_28.html is how existing plugins have to be allowed to get around the sandbox security restrictions built into Chrome, and how Chrome’s architecture still tries to minimize the ill effects of such a requirement. All in all the comic strip has sold me to the idea of adopting Chrome (one day, when it gets out of beta I suppose). We just have to remember to watch out for the privacy issues,  as Google has far greater potential to own us in this regard than Microsoft ever could. See http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php

UPDATE: I tried Chrome out using the portable build from SRware and I have to say I’m impressed.  It really does seem to be crash-proof!  The acid test in my case is to view dozens and dozens of Youtube videos in a single session.  Firefox v3 in fact was more crash prone than v2 in this case, although v2 would also crash eventually.  Chrome was completely stable all the way up to the end of my session.