5 Things You Don’t Know About Google Chrome

Google released their own internet browser known as Google Chrome and here are just a cople of interesting points about it.

1. A Gentle Introduction to Google Chrome
Google released a fairly detailed explanation of what Google Chrome is all about with a comic. Computer Science, software engineering students and web developers are certainly interested in knowing the philosophy behind the architecture and design of the new browser.

All the new features can be found here.

2. Rendering Engine
Google Chrome uses Webkit as the rendering engine for the browser. It’s the same engine used on the infamous Safari and Konqueror web browser. Windows users might not know what Safari and Konqueror are, but they are the default web browser on Apple’s Macintosh and KDE based Linux respectively, just like how Internet Explorer is the default internet browser for Windows.

3. Google Chrome’s Birth Date
A Google backdated web search shows that Google Chrome was never ever mentioned anyway on the web before September 1 2008. This should really be the dirth date of the Google browser. I’m seriously impressed of how Google kept such a low profile of it all this while.

4. Open Source
Google Chrome is open source. Their core took quite a lot from Mozilla and WebKit and that’s why they are keeping it open.

5. Memory and Process Management
The most singnificant improvement in web browsers design would probably be the fact that Google Crome manages memory in a new way (read the comic!) which has always been a major concern for browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Each tab is opened as a new entity containing its own processes. When something goes wrong and crashes while browsing a site, only a tab will be shut down instead of the whole browser. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 also boast about having this same feature.

Extra Tips!
6. Google Chrome’s User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

7. Javascript Engine
Google chrome uses a custom javascript engine known as the V8.

8. Default Installation Path
Surprise, surprise! While most of us would have thougt that Google Chrome would install itself to C:\Program Files (for windows that is), it installs to C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application instead. In fact, there wsn’t even a choice as the installation didn’t even ask where you would want to install it to.

As a conclusion, the google chrome comic is really awesome and you should really read it to know more about it. Google Chrome can be downloaded here.

If you learnt someting new by reading this, let me know 🙂