Innovative browser not yet ready for prime time

Rick Merritt EE Times (09/03/2008 9:02 AM EST)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — My short trip to Google headquarters for the launch of its new browser left me charged up about how this company has become a magnet for fresh thinking in computer science. My even shorter test drive of the Chrome beta made it equally clear this application is not ready for mainstream computing.

Chrome does indeed load pages quickly, albeit in a somewhat crazy jerky fashion. But attempts to load video from my own site and CNN.com failed due to lack of an Adobe flash plug-in. What's worse, browser tabs repeatedly froze trying to download the plug-in, a simple task the app was not able to complete despite several tries.

Indeed, the lack of any plug-in architecture in the initial beta of Chrome is one of its most glaring omissions. Developers said they are working on it.

As an initial look at Chrome shows, the browser reflects Google's legendary and Zen-like simplicity, eliminating the forest of pull down menus proliferated in the Microsoft universe.

Unfortunately, I am a child of that universe, weaned on Microsoft apps since before Windows 3.1 took off. Using Chrome, I groped anxiously unable to find my bookmarks and other often-used features.

I don't pretend to be a professional reviewer, and those who are will write a more complete tail of the strengths and weaknesses of this application in coming weeks. But I know enough to be able to tell that this code has a loooong way to go before it is a viable alternative to Firefox and Safari, let alone Internet Explorer.

Even co-founder Sergey Brin seemed to be telegraphing his awareness of this fact at the press conference here Tuesday (Sept. 2).

"This is just an initial beta," Brin cautioned the press. "But there is a lot of deep thinking about computer science here, and we and the open source community can develop it further."

Indeed, what Chrome lacks in its initial execution, Google makes up for in its ambition and youthful energy. A walk across the Mountain View campus after the launch made that clear.

I bumped into Vint Cerf, developer of the Internet Protocol, striding past the caf in his signature three-piece suit despite the near 90-degree heat. Then I saw the chief executive of startup Crossbow, a leader in the drive to sensor network. And everywhere young, bright people were engaged in animated conversations amid tours of visitors cranked up about whatever projects brought them here. The Microsoft campus in Redmond felt like this, a decade ago.

The Chrome team reflects that youthful energy. One member in particular strands out for me—Lars Bak, the technical lead of V8, the Javascript virtual machine inside Chrome. Bak was also the technical lead for Sun Microsystems Hotspot, the VM inside the mainstream version of Java Sun ships today, as well as a prime author of a Sun VM for cellphones.

When Google was kicking off the Chrome project two years ago, Lars got a call at his Denmark university office asking if he would join. In between projects, he jumped at the chance to be part of the ambitious effort.

I suspect the V8 engine designed by Bak and the new Google team he assembled near Denmark will have plenty of legs. Its speed could be very useful beyond Chrome to drive interactive features in Blu-ray disks or future Tru2Way cable services.

V8 compiles Javascript code directly to the machine language of the CPU. To date, it has been ported to single-threaded, 32-bit x86 processors and an ARM7.

It supports so-called hidden class transactions to better group and manage objects. And it has improved garbage collection that can make a round trip of the memory heap in "a few milliseconds."

"I have been working on virtual machines for 20 years and I have never been this excited," said Bak, speaking of his current work.

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