The Brains Behind Google Chrome

Last week the giant search engine Google launched the new browser named Chrome. Google has developed this software by making a team that has a large cast of characters.

Lars Bak

Lars Bak led the team behind V8, the engine that runs JavaScript programs often found on Web pages. "We wanted to design an engine that would work with future Web applications," he said, so Google "decided to do a brand-new one, one that really makes JavaScript run many times faster than what you're seeing in other browsers."

With faster JavaScript, "You can include more code in the browser. It really opens up the creativity of the Web application developer," he said.

Sergey Brin

Co-founder Sergey Brin believes Chrome has enough advantages to get people to switch browsers. "You want a faster, safer, more robust Web experience," he said.

Why create Chrome now, though? In an interview, he said the task isn't easy. "We're still a pretty small company, but we were even smaller a couple years earlier," Brin said.

Also, Mozilla's Firefox project showed what could be done in taking on Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer, he said. "We were inspired by the success of Firefox...We do not want to reduce Firefox market share at all." Rather, Google hopes to "to get more adoption of alternative browsers."

Ben Goodger

Ben Goodger, who previously worked on Firefox, is the technical lead for Chrome's user interface. He talked about Chrome's Omnibox, a field into which people can type either search terms or Web site addresses. For a time it was called the Psychic Omnibox internally because Google wanted it to anticipate automatically what to do.


With two boxes, as in Firefox, "it's easy to confuse the two. As a user, you had to decide what it was you wanted to do before you were going to do it. What if we were going to create one box that was always the right place to type, and it would generate good results? We smashed the two together."

Sundar Picha

Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, led off the show with Google's grand aspirations for Chrome: "Our intent here is to drive the Web platform forward," he said. In other words, Google wants the Internet to be a more powerful foundation for online applications.

Brian Rakowski

Brian Rakowski, a group product manager, demonstrated several Chrome features. Among them was the Incognito mode that makes sure no traces of a person's browsing habits are left on a computer. Google found that people often totally eliminated their browser history when trying to erase such tracks, but that history was valuable to Omnibox and other functions, so Google wanted another way to handle history.

Rakowski studiously avoided any reference to pornography, one obvious use for private browsing modes, but did cite an example of investigating toe fungus. "Maybe I want to do a little research for a friend," he said.

Darin Fisher

Darin Fisher described security features in Chrome, which isolates each browser tab into its own domain, called a sandbox. That means one misbehaving Web site won't bring down the entire browser--important as more work gets done in Web applications--and also that a Web-based attack will have a harder time taking over the machine.

"For a bad guy to get malware onto your computer, ordinarily he'd have to find a bug in your rendering engine," Fisher said. "Not in Google Chrome. In Chrome he also has to find a way out of the sandbox."

Larry Page

Google's co-founders actively supported Chrome since the project was launched two years ago. Chrome is Larry Page's primary browser, he said, and he makes sure the Chrome team tunes the project for slow computers.

"I use it on a slow, old computer on purpose to force them to make it fast without a lot of memory," Page said. "That's one of the main issues of the Web today."

And he wants other browsers to benefit from Chrome's open-source nature. "Other projects like Mozilla can take some of the advancements we've made and choose to incorporate those things," he said.


Photo by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks

Caption by Stephen Shankland

(source:cnet.com)