So What’s Up with Chrome?
October 1st, 2008
With the release of Google Chrome last week many of our (and your) clients are starting to wonder exactly what Google’s entry into the browser market means. The release of any new software package, especially by a powerhouse like Google, can often have broad and far reaching impact, and everyone wants to be forewarned about what’s coming down the pike.
How will this impact Web Development?
This largely depends on what kind of web development you do. In most cases you and your enterprise won’t be affected in the slightest. Chrome has a very fast and robust rendering and JavaScript engine, and much like any newly released browser (remember Firefox 1.0?) loads up in no time flat. The rule of thumb is that if you’re already supporting Safari, you can safely assume you’re supporting Chrome.
Why is this? What you may not know is that the underlying engine that Safari runs on is a package called WebKit, which is the same engine which powers Google Chrome. There are some revision based incompatibilities (Since Safari’s already a few versions ahead), but practically speaking they’re identical. The downside of this is that if your agency is one of the rare islands left that only support the “Two Major Browsers” (Firefox and Internet Explorer), you no longer have an excuse to not support them.
If you’re doing Rich Internet Application development, you’ve just been presented with a very interesting way of taking your application to the desktop. You might not have heard of Google Gears before now, or might not have considered it to be a viable option. Gears is a browser extension framework that allows desktop-application like interaction between your RIA and the client’s computer. Sounds neat, right? It is, and it’s directly integrated into Chrome and is available as a plugin for both IE and Firefox. Unfortunately, the major restriction of Gears up to this point was that you were still restricted to the browser’s UI, but as I point out later in this article this is no longer entirely the case.
What about Mobile?
If you’re doing Mobile Web Development, you may be able to target WebKit directly from this point forward. See, Safari is the exclusive browser on the iPhone, and with the upcoming release of the T-Mobile HTC Dream, you can bet that Chrome will be the default browser for Android. What this means is that WebKit will become the de-facto web development standard for mobile devices. While mobile UI patterns and application frameworks will shake themselves out over the next few years, the writing’s on the wall: If you want to take RIA’s to mobile devices without bothering with a native application, WebKit is the platform to build for.
So What’s The Big Deal™?
At this point you’re probably asking yourself: "What’s the big deal"? If Chrome behaves much like the other major browsers out there, why is there so much buzz about it? Is this just Google Hype?
Without going into a lot of gritty detail about it (The Comic Book published by Google does that really well), the major big deal is that Chrome is not just a Browser: Chrome is an Application Platform.
Much like AIR, Chrome attempts to blur the lines between the desktop and the web by creating a wrapper for previously developed content. They even do it in very similar ways: AIR allows the execution of JavaScript RIA’s in an integrated WebKit Browser running within the ActionScript Virtual Machine, while Chrome allows the execution of Flash RIA’s running in the Flash Player. The difference is simply the technology stack used- Chrome is based around JavaScript and HTML, while AIR is based on ActionScript and MXML.
The Google Engineers are quite explicit about this. The Comic Book talks about it, and one of the primary features is "Create Application Shortcut". While functionally this really just creates a direct link to a specific website, the integration of Google Gears allows some websites to move almost entirely to your desktop. It even goes so far as to use the favicon for your application icon, giving you a Desktop Application experience for any website you choose (try it with Google Calendar or Gmail).
So what’s the Big Deal? It’s a concept change, a different way of looking at the Web. It’s not particularly new- Microsoft tried to do this with the close Windows/Internet Explorer integration in the late 90’s and .chm/.hta applications, but it is the first time that the browser’s been turned into a (soon to be) platform agnostic application wrapper.
A Future Vision
Not to be a crazy futurist or anything, but consider the following possibility: Both Google and Adobe have now firmly cast their lot in with an ECMAScript/DOM-like technology stack, and we already know that there is a close relationship between the two companies both from YouTube and from the indexable headless player. Personally, I think it’d be pretty interesting if the future held a technological convergence of all ECMAScript languages. Compiling HTML to a desktop application? Converging JavaScript and ActionScript into a single ECMAScript language? It’s all possible.
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