I last wrote about Google Chrome, the web browser from Google, in Tech Tails #626. A beta of the browser had just been released to the Windows community, and finally the Mac community can join in. Chrome was praised back then for its JavaScript performance, but big improvements were made both to Safari and to Firefox in the intervening months.
Chrome is unique in that each tab runs as its own process. If you’ve ever had Safari quit unexpectedly because one of your windows or tabs encountered a situation it couldn’t handle, you’ll appreciate this feature of Chrome. If one tab encounters a situation it doesn’t know how to handle, only that tab will quit. The other open tabs will be unaffected. This leap is is similar to the protected memory in Mac OS X vs. the shared memory of the classic OS. Remember the day when one application crashing meant you had to restart the whole computer?
While developer previews were available some time ago, this is the first public beta of Chrome. It is quite fast, and I haven’t been able to make it crash yet. There are plenty of benchmarking articles out there, but I’m not prepared to declare any browser fastest until Chrome is no longer a beta. With Google’s tendency to keep products in perpetual beta, when or if that happens is uncertain.