Niall Kennedy tells us the story behind Google Chrome. A facinating read and interesting karma behind staff hires and acquisitions that made Chrome possible. Whether by chance or calculation it is a Win win situation for all of us!

As you may have heard Google Chrome (Chrome) went live yesterday. The Chrome team also released a comic explaining some of the innovations and ideas around Chrome.

After installing Chrome the first impression I got was it's a very slim-line and compact browser. The UI reflects this totally. There isn't the usual File menu above (personally I don't think it's needed in a browser anyway) and tabbing is at the very top. The Omnibox, Chrome's address bar, is very dominant and a very powerful. Much like Vista start search feature you don't have to remember where things are — just search for it. The default search engine of the Omnibox does not have to be Google either, use "Options -> Basics -> Default search" to change it.

I really like the Application shortcuts feature. Many a time I have wanted a shortcut on my desktop which opens up a web application much like a desktop app does. I know you could create a lnk file and place that on the deskopt but somehow it doesn't feel good. When you create an application shortcut however it creates for you a special shortcut which opens up Chrome in an even slimmer interface that looks just like a standard desktop application. It is excellent when used in twine with GMail.

Chrome is a muti-threaded browser, that means each instance (new tab, new window, plugin, javascript etc) runs a separate process, it sounds like a wasteful approach but quite a fascinating concept as explained in the comic. It uses the tried and tested WebKit engine for rendering web pages and the V8 JavaScript engine. V8 is a high performance engine written in C++ which compiles and executes JavaScript code. All are open source projects so not an inch of propreitary code inside!

I think Google is on to a winner, if not, they have once again set the bar higher for others to compete against.