http://www.google.com/chrome

11:08am
Sundar comes on to talk about user experience and core

11:09am
History lessons starts with Amazon.com ala 1995

11:10am
Google maps with streetview = example of an interactive website
Browsers should evolve past Ajax. Everything that Sundar uses is in a browser.
Google Chrome was heavily influenced by Google search.

11:12am
First screenshot of Chrome. Explains the meaning of ‘Chrome’ in a browser.
“Browsers should not be self-important.” No dialogs that pop-up in the browser. The browser should stay out of the way.

11:14am
Chrome is based on Webkit (used by Safari, as well). “Webkit is fast. Simple codebase. Familiar to Google engineers. Android is based on Webkit, too.”

11:16am
Explains ‘multi-process’ design. More stable. Faster. Crashes don’t affect the other tabs. It’s more secure.

11:18am
V8 – the javascript engine. Javascript -> Machine code.

11:19am – Mac and Linux not available yet, but designed for multiple platforms. Today, XP and Vista versions will be available. It’s being released under BSD open source license. To be released at noon today.

11:21am – Open source project: Chromium

11:21am
Speaker changes. Another tech lead

Streamlined user interface, focused on tabbed browsing. Spent a lot of time trying to get tabs right. You can drag/drop into a new window, or drag back into another window. Subtle UI experience in tabs is demonstrated.

11:25am
Searchbox and addressbox is combined in Chrome. ‘Omnibox’. Demo’d omnibox. It ‘learns’ what sites you go to. (Isn’t that called history? I wonder if they’re doing something more.) Omnibox also handles specialized searches ‘magically’. I have a feeling we’ll see a lot more specialized features that Google would like to see in a browser in Chrome.

11:30am
Default homepage in Chrome will help you remember sites you’ve been to before in a ‘portal-like’ interface that the browser automagically manages.

11:32am
‘Incognito window’ will not store any information (cache / cookies) on the local computer. It’s Chrome’s ‘privacy mode’. The window actually looks different from the normal browser window. Speakers demo this feature with ‘toe fungus’ search. ;-)

11:36am
‘Application shortcut’ will create a browser window without url bar, etc. Just a single application (like Gmail).

11:41am
‘Multi-process’ design means better performance and better security. Demo’d Chrome task manager (the browser now has a task manager built-in! As a developer this is sweet). Plugins (like Flash) run in a seperate process space – also sounds like tighter security for those, too!

11:43am
Demo of a ’sad tab’. (A simulated hang) Used the task manager to pull the tab out. He can still use the other tabs – and he can just hit ‘refresh’ to recover the original page. Also demo’d a sad plugin (a misbehaving plugin). The cool thing is — only the plugin is hosed in the page — the rest of the page is still OK. and you just need to refresh the page to reload the plugin.

11:36am
Performance numbers (live demo)
Avg time to load a single page in IE: 226ms
Avg time to load a single page in Webkit: 76ms
Loaded several pages from disk to show these numbers (purposefully removed network IO from this test)

11:50am
Javascript is compiled, not evaluated in Chrome.

11:55am
Chrome will preserve any search preferences you have when you install it. (It won’t take-over and automatically use Google if you don’t want it to)

11:58am
Larry Page is now up giving closing remarks. This seems like it’s a big deal – in the works for 2+ years. He’s been using it (internally) for a while now. They have “a ton of people using it internally that are happy” so they decided to release it.

11:59am
Question / Answer time has started.