 Terobosan terbaru Google dalam pencapaiannya untuk mengukuhkan eksitensinya di ranah internet dirilisnya browser baru yang diberi nama Google Chrome.
Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.
Dalam blog resmi yang ditulis pejabat Google, Chrome diklaim menawarkan fasilitas mengakses web lebih baik.Web broser ini menyediakan akses ke berbagai materi multimedia lebih cepat dan nyaman karena telah dilengkapi JavaScript virtual machine yang multiproses. Untuk mencegah phising dan pencurian data web, Chrome juga memiliki fitur membuka aplikasi berbasisi web tanpa toolbar dan address bar yang juga dikembangkan Mozilla dalam proyek yang disebut Prism. Informasi lebih lengkap tentang Google Chrome seperti yang ditulis di Wikipedia :
Design Primary design goals were improvements in security, speed and stability compared to existing browsers. There were also extensive changes in the user interface.
Security - Blacklists
- Chrome periodically downloads updates of two blacklists (one for phishing and one for malware) and warns users when they attempt to visit a harmful site. This service is also made available for use by others via a free public API called "Google Safe Browsing API". In the process of maintaining these blacklists, Google also notifies the owners of listed sites who may not be aware of the presence of the harmful software.
- Sandboxing
- Each tab in Chrome is sandboxed to "prevent malware from installing itself" or "using what happens in one tab to affect what happens in another". Following the principle of least privilege, each process is stripped of its rights and can compute but can not write files or read from sensitive areas (e.g. documents, desktop)—this is similar to "Protected Mode" that is used by Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista. The Sandbox Team is said to have "taken this existing process boundary and made it into a jail"; for example malicious software running in one tab is unable to sniff credit card numbers, interact with the mouse or tell "Windows to run an executable on start-up" and will be terminated when the tab is closed. This enforces a simple computer security model whereby there are two levels of multilevel security (user and sandbox) and the sandbox can only respond to communication requests initiated by the user.
- Plugins
- Plugins such as Adobe Flash Player are typically not standardised and as such cannot be sandboxed like tabs. These often need to run at or above the security level of the browser itself. To reduce exposure to attack, plugins are run in separate processes that communicate with the renderer, itself operating at "very low privileges" in dedicated per-tab processes. Plugins will need to be modified to operate within this software architecture while following the principle of least privilege.
Speed - JavaScript
- The Javascript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split off (like Adobe/Mozilla's Tamarin) and handled by a separate team in Denmark. Existing implementations were designed "for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren't that important" but web applications like Gmail "are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and Javascript". The resulting V8 JavaScript engine has features such as hidden class transitions, dynamic code generation, and precise garbage collection. Tests by Google show that V8 is about twice as fast as Firefox 3 and the Safari 4 beta.
- Several websites have performed benchmark tests using the Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark tool as well as Google's own set of computationally intense benchmarks, which includes ray tracing and constraint solving. They unanimously report that it performs much faster than all competitors, including Safari, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8. While Opera has not been compared to Chrome yet, in previous tests, it has been shown to perform a bit slower than Firefox 3, which in turn is slower than Chrome.
Stability - Multiprocessing
- The Gears team were considering a multithreaded browser (noting that a problem with existing web browser implementations was that they are inherently single-threaded) and Chrome implemented this concept with a multiprocessing architecture similar to the one developed by Opera in 1994, or that recently implemented by Internet Explorer 8. A separate process is allocated to each task (tabs, plugins, etc.), as is the case with modern operating systems. This prevents tasks from interfering with each other, which is good for both security and stability; an attacker successfully gaining access to one application does not gain access to all, and failure in one application results in a Sad Tab screen of death, similar to the well-known Sad Mac. This strategy exacts a fixed per-process cost up front but results in less memory bloat overall as fragmentation is confined to each process and no longer results in further memory allocations.
- Task Manager
- Chrome features a process management utility called the Task Manager which allows the user to "see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing [their] CPU" (as well as the plugins which run in separate processes) and terminate them.
User interface The main user interface includes back, forward, refresh, bookmark, go and cancel options. The options are similar to Safari, while the settings location is similar to Internet Explorer 7/8. The minimize, maximize and close window buttons are based on Windows Vista. - Gears
- Chrome includes Gears which adds developer features that may or may not become web standards, typically relating to the building of web applications (including offline support).
- New Tab Page
- Chrome replaces the browser home page which is displayed when a new tab is created with a New Tab Page. This shows thumbnails of the nine most visited web sites along with the sites most often searched, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs.This concept appeared first with Opera's Speed Dial.
- Omnibox
- The Omnibox is the URL box at the top of each tab, based on the one in Opera. It includes autocomplete functionality but will only autocomplete URLs that were manually entered (rather than all links), search suggestions, top pages (previously visited), popular pages (unvisited) and text search over history. Search engines can also be captured by the browser when used via the native user interface by pressing Tab.
- Popups
- Popup windows "are scoped to the tab they came from" and will not appear outside the tab unless the user explicitly drags them out. It is not clear whether they also run in their own process.
- Rendering engine
- Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine on advice from the Android team.
- Tabs
- Tabs are the primary component of Chrome's user interface and as such have been moved to the top of the window rather than below the controls (similar to Opera). This subtle change is in contrast to many existing tabbed browsers which are based on windows containing tabs. Tabs (including their state) can be seamlessly transferred between window containers by dragging. Each tab has its own set of controls, including the Omnibox URL box.
- Web applications
- Web applications can be launched in their own streamlined window without the Omnibox URL box and browser toolbar. This limits the browser chrome so as not to "interrupt anything the user is trying to do", allowing web applications to run alongside local software (similar to Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR and Fluid).
Reaction Microsoft "played down the threat from Chrome" and "predicted that most people will embrace Internet Explorer 8". Opera said that "Chrome will strengthen the Web as the biggest application platform in the world". Mozilla said that Chrome's introduction into the web browser market comes as "no real surprise" and that "Chrome is not aimed at competing with Firefox" -- and furthermore should not affect Google's financing of Firefox. Peter Svensson of AP said that Chrome "lacks polish".
Testing Like most browsers, Chrome was extensively tested internally before release with unit testing, "automated user interface testing of scripted user actions" and fuzz testing, as well as WebKit's layout tests (99% of which Chrome is claimed to pass). New browser builds are automatically tested against tens of thousands of commonly accessed sites within 20-30 minutes.
Security flaws Aviv Raff located a flaw in Google Chrome that can "trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser." The flaw involves bugs in WebKit and Java, the latter bug having been discussed at the 2008 Black Hat conference. Apple's Safari is unaffected by this flaw, as it uses a version of WebKit that has patched the flaw; Google Chrome uses an older version that does not contain the patch.
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