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What's under the bonnet?

Posted on 14 Nov 2008 at 12:13

Taken together, these upgrades make Chrome by far the fastest browser on the market when it comes to JavaScript. As you'll see from our tests it's more than 20 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 in this respect.

Grinding Google's Gears

The other big new technology in Chrome is Gears. Except that Gears isn't new: it's been available for more than a year as a plug-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari on the Mac and even IE Mobile on Windows Mobile.

But Gears is still very much a work in progress (right now it's only at version 0.4), and Google is barely pushing it, describing it vaguely as "a plug-in that extends your browser to create a richer platform for web applications". In practice, its most high-profile use to date has been enabling online services, such as Google Docs, to run offline.

But the latest version of Gears also includes a Desktop API that lets web applications carry out file-handling tasks on the user's desktop, such as creating shortcuts and opening files. The Gears plug-in handles the translation between the Gears code received from the remote web server and the client OS, offering web developers a true "write once, run anywhere" environment.

By eroding the importance of the underlying operating system, Gears fits perfectly with Google's larger strategy. For now there are only a handful of non-Google sites that use Gears, but by bundling it with Chrome, Google clearly hopes to encourage web developers to make use of it. As the developers continue to add features, that's likely to lead to more professional, consistent and platform-agnostic applications.

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Author: Barry Collins, Tim Danton & Darien Graham-Smith