The browser wars may just become a little bit more interesting. Apart from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, another player is ready to join the field in what will most probably be released as a beta - you know, company policy - for the upcoming 23 years: Chrome. It's a webkit-based browser from Google. Update: It's out there, folks.Instead of being announced in a normal way, Google had to be all hip about it and leak a web comic (I kid you not) to Blogoscoped. As they explain:
Some features are quite interesting. It will have a new Javascript engine from Denmarkk called V8, which uses a 'multi-process' design, which probably means that you can kill individual pages without bringing down the entire browser - at the expense of slightly more memory usage. In a blog post posted after the leakage, Google explains that each page lives in its own sandbox, so that one rogue website can't take down the entire browser.
It will also have more common features like anti-phishing protection, tabs (no, really?), window-less web applications, porn-mode privacy mode, and much more. The browser will be released for Windows today, Linux and Mac versions will follow later. Screenshots have already leaked, and sadly, it seems as if Google is using their own theme for the application's buttons and window borders, just like Apple did with Safari. Too bad.
