It’s been three weeks since Google released their new browser “Chrome” to windows users. Google’s dominance in web really helped them to push this ‘yet-another-browser’ easily to hundreds of people. Wait! Did I say ‘yet-another-browser’!? No, Google chrome is not a ‘yet-another-browser’, but it’s a new beginning to the world of web 2.0 computing. Yup! Chrome has redefined the way browsers are interacting with users and with the pages.

As more and more web sites are turning into feature-rich web applications, normal browsers are no longer capable of handling these applications. Web applications (using AJAX) are mostly rely on JavaScript execution to complete their operations. But normal browser’s JavaScript engine is not designed to run JavaScript faster. This is where Google Chrome scores. Chrome comes with a brand new JavaScript engine V8, which executes JavaScript code faster than the normal browser does. This helps the web applications to response faster to the user.

Also in Chrome, every tab is a separate process. So, even if one web page hangs, other pages are not affected at all. This ’separate process for each tab’ also improves the JavaScript execution speed, since script is running in its own thread, thus making use of multi-threading.

Other than running faster, Chrome has a slick user interface, to which my full votes are going. No tool bars, no title bars! Now ‘Tabs’ are the main window elements. This is a good usability design. And, it has ’most visited’ pages as home page, similar to Opera’s speed dial. This particular feature got mixed opinions from many of my friends. Some say, they find this is a really cool feature and some say they don’t want this at all. To me, I like this ‘Most visited’ feature, but it would be good if Chrome has an option to turn it off too. User’s don’t want to use this feature should be allowed to turn it off. As far as I know, currently it is not possible to turn it off.

So, what does Chrome means to developers? I am sure most web developers will be not willing to come out of Firefox, because FF has plenty of plug-in-ins to help in web development (Firebug, Web developer to name a few). But Chrome still has the capability to extend it. So, we can expect more and more plug-ins will be written to Chrome, which will make Chrome as a very good alternative to Firefox. (Check out this interesting blog post on what does Google Chrome mean to developers?)

To summarize, Google Chrome has certainly rocked the web world and it has the capability to do it in future too.