Ben Goodger, who leads the UI team of Google Chrome, presented today at the Webstock conference about browsers. He said that Google decided to build Chrome simply because “browsers suck”. Existing browsers were too slow (especially with javascript heavy apps), there are too many crashes, too easy to get pwned (security issues), and UIs were becoming more and more bloated. He said that Google has a history of improving on browsers and creating add-ons – including contributing to Mozilla’s Firefox, where Goodger used to work before Google. But Google wanted to re-architect the browser and do something more ambitious than current browsers, including Firefox.
One of Chrome’s innovations is to isolate and “pre-emptively multi-task” applications, just like operating systems do. This provides high performance, stability and security. So Google created the feature which has perhaps been Chrome’s distinguishing one so far – enabling tab processes to function independently, so if one tab crashes the rest stay operational. Plugins also have their own processes, so that too provides more stability. Goodger referred to this as a “jail cell for web content”, preventing people from exploiting security issues in the browser.
Google also found that this independence of processes resulted in less “jank”, which is Google’s term for unresponsiveness in the browser. Google wanted Chrome to be the “fastest and least janky browser around.” 200 miliseconds is their baseline for performance in startup speed, page load time, javascript execution. Responsiveness matters, said Goodger. He said that the user must always be in control of their browsing experience. As a sidenote, Goodger mentioned that the latest version of Internet Explorer 8 also now has the separate processing for different tabs feature.
Goodger talked about the user interface that Chrome has, which he said is a bit different from other browsers. He said they “stripped down the UI” and focused on the mantra “content not chrome”, which he acknowledged was ironic given the browser’s name. He showed the following video, from Japan, to illustrate this approach:
There are obvious differences in the UI in Chrome, for example the lack of menu buttons. There are also other subtle differences, such as fewer “attention-grabbing” popups. Goodger also noted that Chrome has “fewer options, better defaults”. His rule is that “options are never an excuse for bad design”.
Goodger talked a little about Chrome’s release cycle. Google uses channels to release versions of Chrome: stable, beta and dev (bleeding edge). Google aims to treat Chrome just like any web app, that releases early and often and in an automated method. So users get automated updates to the latest stable version, without having to manually update anything.
Finally Goodger reiterated that Google Chrome is open source, with community discussions happening at dev.chromium.org.
