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Template:Beta software

Google Chrome
Developer(s)Google
Stable release
Windows, macOS, Linux127.0.6533.119/120[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 13 August 2024; 1 day ago (13 August 2024)
Windows Server 2012/2012 R2109.0.5414.165[2] / 13 September 2023; 11 months ago (2023-09-13)
Android127.0.6533.103[3] Edit this on Wikidata / 6 August 2024; 8 days ago (6 August 2024)
iOS127.0.6533.107[4] Edit this on Wikidata / 6 August 2024; 8 days ago (6 August 2024)
Extended Support Release126.0.6478.234[5] Edit this on Wikidata / 6 August 2024; 8 days ago (6 August 2024)
Preview release
Windows, macOS, Linux128.0.6613.27[6] Edit this on Wikidata / 7 August 2024; 7 days ago (7 August 2024)
Android128.0.6613.25[7] Edit this on Wikidata / 7 August 2024; 7 days ago (7 August 2024)
iOS128.0.6613.27[8] Edit this on Wikidata / 7 August 2024; 7 days ago (7 August 2024)
Engine
  • Blink
  • V8
  • WebKit
Edit this at Wikidata
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows (XP and Vista)
Size60MB
Available in43 languages
TypeWeb browser
LicenseBSD license (source code),
Google Chrome Terms of Service (exe)
Websitewww.google.com/chrome

Google Chrome is a free and open source web browser developed by Google. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers.[9] The open source project behind Google Chrome is known as Chromium,[10] and its source code is released under a BSD licence.

A beta version for Microsoft Windows was released on 2 September 2008 in 43 languages. Mac OS X and Linux versions are under development and are scheduled to be released sometime in the future.[11][12][13]

Announcement and launch

The release announcement was originally scheduled for 3 September 2008, and a comic by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and motivations for the new browser.[14] Copies intended for Europe were shipped early and German blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped[15] made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic available on his website after receiving it on 1 September 2008.[16] Google subsequently made the comic available on Google Books and their site[17] and mentioned it on its official blog along with an explanation for the early release.[18]

Design

Primary design goals were improvements in security, speed and stability compared to existing browsers. There were also extensive changes in the user interface.[17]

Security

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.[17]

Each tab in Chrome is sandboxed into its own process 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";[19] 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.[17]

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.[17]

Chrome supports the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI),[20][21] but does not support the embedding of ActiveX controls.[21] Also, Chrome does not have an extension system such as Mozilla-compatible *.xpi cross-platform extension architecture[22] and thus XPI-based extensions such as AdBlock and GreaseMonkey can not be adapted to Chrome.[23]

Speed

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.[17] Tests by Google show that V8 is about twice as fast as Firefox 3 and the Safari 4 beta.[24]

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.[25] They unanimously report that it performs much faster than all competitors, including Safari, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8.[26][27][28][29] 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.[30][31] Another blog post by a Mozilla developer comparing the Javascript engines in Firefox 3.1 & Chrome using the Sunspider test results states that some tests are faster in one engine and some are faster in the other.[32]

Stability

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[citation needed], or that was recently implemented by Internet Explorer 8[citation needed]. 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.[citation needed]

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.[17]

User interface

When Chrome is maximized, the title bar becomes hidden and instead, the tab bar is displayed at the top. Also, when the mouse is moved over a link, the URI of the link is displayed in a status bar at the bottom left. The status bar is otherwise invisible.
File:Google chrome Normal screen vista.png
When Chrome is not maximized, the title bar is shown on top of the tab bar.

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.

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).[17]

Chrome replaces the browser home page which is displayed when a new tab is created with a New Tab Page. This shows[33] thumbnails of the nine most visited web sites along with the sites most often searched, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs.[17] This concept appeared first with Opera's Speed Dial.

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.[17]

Popup windows "are scoped to the tab they came from" and will not appear outside the tab unless the user explicitly drags them out.[17] Popup windows do not run in their own process.

Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine on advice from the Android team.[17] 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 inside of the Google index within 20-30 minutes.[17]

Despite being based on WebKit, it does not support embedded fonts declared using @font-face in CSS. The browser will download the referenced font file but will not display it.[citation needed]

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.[17]

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).[17]

By default, there is no status bar displayed unlike other browsers which display one at the bottom of the screen. However, when the mouse cursor is moved over a link, the address of the link is displayed at the bottom left of the screen.

When the window is not maximized, the tab bar appears directly under the standard Windows title bar. When maximized, the title bar disappears and instead the tab bar is shown at the very top of the screen. Unlike other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox which also have a full-screen mode that hides the operating system's interface completely, Chrome can only be maximized like a standard Windows applications. Therefore, the Windows task bar, system tray and start menu link still take space at all times unless they have been configured to always hide.

As opposed to the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer which allow the user to adjust the display dimensions of a web page completely, Chrome allows the resizing of the text only. Therefore, a web page 800 pixels wide, for example, will still be 800 pixel wide even if the user resizes it. Only the text will be affected by the resizing.

Reception and criticism

Reactions

Peter Svensson of the Associated Press said that Chrome "lacks polish," and although he praises a few of its innovative features such as the Task Manager, Svenson ultimately states that the browser "falls short of Google's goals, and is outdone in an important measure by the latest version of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer."[34]

Michael Liedtke of the Associated Press says that Microsoft "played down the threat from Chrome" and "predicted that most people will embrace Internet Explorer 8."[35] Opera Software said that "Chrome will strengthen the Web as the biggest application platform in the world."[35] 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.[36][37]

Terms of service controversy

A Slashdot news item[38] drew attention to a passage in the terms of service for the initial beta release, which read:

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services."[39]

The passage in question was inherited from the general Google terms of service.[40] The Register summarized the passage as "Your copyright goes up in smoke."[41] Google responded to this criticism by stating that the language used was borrowed from other products, and would be removed. They also stated that the change would "apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."[42]

Security flaws

Aviv Raff criticized[43] the automatic file download feature that comes enabled by default in Google Chrome. He argued that it could be used by an attacker to easily trick a user into opening a malicious executable file.

A denial-of-service vulnerability has been found[44] that allows a malicious web page to crash the whole web browser. Google Chrome developers confirmed the flaw, and it has already been fixed in the SVN repository.[45]

Standards

The first release of Google Chrome does not pass the Acid3 test; however, it scores 78/100, which is higher than both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.[46]

References

  1. ^ "Stable Channel Update for Desktop". 13 August 2024. Retrieved 13 August 2024.
  2. ^ "Stable Channel Desktop Update". 13 September 2023. Retrieved 14 September 2023.
  3. ^ "Chrome for Android Update". 6 August 2024. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
  4. ^ "Chrome Stable for iOS Update". 6 August 2024. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
  5. ^ "Extended Stable Channel Update for Desktop". 6 August 2024. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
  6. ^ "Chrome Beta for Desktop Update". 7 August 2024. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
  7. ^ "Chrome Beta for Android Update". 7 August 2024. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
  8. ^ "Chrome Beta for iOS Update". 7 August 2024. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
  9. ^ The Jargon Book, "Chrome": "Showy features added to attract users but contributing little or nothing to the power of a system."
  10. ^ "Chromium". Google Code. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  11. ^ Pichai, Sundar (2008-09-01). "A fresh take on the browser". Google Blog. Retrieved 2008-09-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  12. ^ "Google Chrome update: First screenshot, and live-blog alert". CNet. 2008-09-01. Retrieved 2008-09-02.
  13. ^ Associated Press (2008). "Google launches Chrome web browser". Retrieved 2008-09-02. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  14. ^ Scott McCloud (2008-09-01). "Surprise!". Google Blogoscoped. Retrieved 2008-09-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  15. ^ Philipp Lenssen (2008-09-01). "Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project". Retrieved 2008-09-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. ^ Philipp Lenssen (2008-09-01). "Google on Google Chrome - comic book". Google Blogoscoped. Retrieved 2008-09-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  17. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o "Google Chrome". Google Books. 2008-09-01. Retrieved 2008-09-02.
  18. ^ Scott McCloud and Google Chrome team (2008-09-01). "Google Chrome By the Google Chrome team, comics adaptation by Scott McCloud". Google Books. Retrieved 2008-09-01. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
  19. ^ Google (2008-09-01). "Google Chrome". Retrieved 2008-09-03. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  20. ^ "Chrome Supports NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface)". Wearechrome.com. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  21. ^ a b Google Chrome FAQ for web developers
  22. ^ FAQ (Chromium Developer Documentation)
  23. ^ "Adblock Port for Chrome". Wearechrome.com. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  24. ^ Limi, Alexander (2008-09-02). "Chrome: Benchmarks and more". Retrieved 2008-09-02.
  25. ^ "V8 Benchmark suite". Google code. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  26. ^ Rupert Goodwins (2008-09-02). "Google Chrome - first benchmarks. Summary: wow". Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  27. ^ "Google Chrome Javascript Benchmarks". 2008-09-02. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  28. ^ Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (2008-09-02). "Google Chrome is insanely fast … faster than Firefox 3.0". Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  29. ^ Stephen Shankland (2008-09-02). "Speed test: Google Chrome". CNET Business Tech. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  30. ^ Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (2008-06-16). "SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and ACID 3 compatibility charts - Firefox 3.0 RC 3 and Opera 9.50 added". Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  31. ^ Kai Schmerer (2008-05-29). "Browser faceoff: IE vs Firefox vs Opera vs Safari". Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  32. ^ Brendan Eich (2008-09-03). "TraceMonkey Update". Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  33. ^ Philipp Lenssen. "Google Chrome Screenshots". Google Blogoscoped. Retrieved 2008-09-02.
  34. ^ Svenson, Peter (2008-09-03). "Review: Google Chrome lacks polish under the hood". The Associated Press. Retrieved 2008-09-04.
  35. ^ a b The Associated Press: Google polishes product line with Chrome browser
  36. ^ John's Blog, Thoughts on Chrome & More
  37. ^ PC Pro: News: Mozilla: Google's not trying to kill us
  38. ^ Reading Google Chrome's Fine Print, Slashdot {{citation}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid= ignored (help)
  39. ^ Google's EULA Sucks, tapthehive.com {{citation}}: Text "accessdate-2008-09-03" ignored (help)
  40. ^ Google Terms of Service
  41. ^ Burned by Chrome
  42. ^ Google Amends Chrome License Agreement After Objections, PC World, 2008-09-03, retrieved 2008-09-03
  43. ^ Ryan Naraine (2008-09-02). "Google Chrome vulnerable to carpet-bombing flaw". ZDNet. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  44. ^ Rishi Narang (2008-09-03). "Google Chrome Browser 0.2.149.27 malicious link DoS Vulnerability". Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  45. ^ "Issue 122 - chromium - Google Code". 2008-09-02. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
  46. ^ Hoffman, Harrison (2008-09-02). "Chrome tops IE, Firefox in Acid3 test". CNET News. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
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