Google Chrome: Another Browser Added to the Mix

Earlier today it was leaked and later confirmed that Google is releasing it’s own browser called Google Chrome.

The news has spread like a wild fire today and the source of most of the initial information has been gathered from a comic strip book which details some of the inner workings of the open source browser. The comic strip was produced by Scott McCloud which has since written a brief post about his involvement.

Here are some of the technical highlights of Google Chrome:

• As previously mentioned, Chrome is entirely open source.
• Omnibox - address bar has an auto-complete feature called Omnibox. Omnibox will offer search suggestions, pages you have recently visited, as well as others you have not but are popular around the Internet.
• Webkit - used for rendering the web pages. WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. More recently, Android also uses Webkit.
• V8 JavaScript Engine - built from scratch by a team in Denmark, promises performance improvements, real garbage collection, and browser independent.
• Google Gears - I'm guessing will be used to provide offline capability for applications running on Chrome.
• One process per tab - prevents the entire browser from crashing from a single web page. This also will be a new and welcomed way of determining what pages have memory leaks.
• Incognito privacy mode - which is a window where nothing that occurs in there will ever be logged on your computer
• The default home page will show your last nine visited websites as thumbnails, as well as your recent searches and bookmarks

The disappointment for many (mac and linux users) will be that the initial release will be windows only.

Update 1: Get your Google Chrome screenshots here.