Google Chrome 2.0.160.0 Portable | ENG, RUS | 10.11 Mb Google Chrome is a browser that
combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web
faster, safer, and easier. It has one box for everything: Type in the
address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages. Will
give you thumbnails of your top sites; Access your favorite pages
instantly with lightning speed from any new tab.
Google Chrome
is an open source web browser developed by Google. Its software
architecture was engineered from scratch (using components from other
open source software including WebKit and Mozilla Firefox) to cater for
the changing needs of users and acknowledging that today most web sites
aren't web pages but web applications. Design goals include stability,
speed, security and a clean, simple and efficient user interface.
Security • Sandboxing
Every tab in
Chrome is sandboxed, so that a tab can display contents of a web page
and accept user input, but it will not be able to read the user's
desktop or personal files. Google say they have "taken the existing
process boundary- and made it into a jail". There is an exception to
this rule; browser plugins such as Adobe Flash Player do not run within
the boundaries of the tab jail, and so users will still be vulnerable
to cross-browser exploits based on plugins, until plugins have been
updated to work with the new Chrome security. Google has also developed
a new phishing blacklist, which will be built into Chrome, as well as
made available via a separate public API.
• Privacy
Google
announces a so-called incognito mode claiming that it "lets you browse
the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your
activity". No features of this, and no implications of the default mode
with respect to Google's database are given.
• Speed
Speed improvements are a primary design goal.
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. A separate process is allocated to each
task (eg tabs, plugins), 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 give them access to all and failure in one
application results in a "Sad Tab" screen of death. 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. To complement this,
Chrome will also feature a process manager which will allow the user to
see how much memory and CPU each tab is using, as well as kill
unresponsive tabs.
User interface • Features
Chrome has added
some commonly used plugin-specific features of other browsers into the
default package, such as an Incognito tab mode, where no logs of the
user activity are stored, and all cookies from the session are
discarded. As a part of Chrome's V8 javascript virtual machine, pop-up
javascript windows will not be shown by default, and will instead
appear as a small bar at the bottom of the interface until the user
wishes to display or hide the window. Chrome will include support for
web applications running alongside other local applications on the
computer. Tabs can be put in a web-app mode, where the omnibar and
controls will be hidden with the goal of allowing the user to use the
web-app without the browser "in the way".
• Rendering Engine
Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine on advice from the Gears team
because it is simple, memory efficient, useful on embedded devices and
easy to learn for new developers.
• Tabs
While all of the major
tabbed web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox) have been
designed with the window as the primary container, Chrome will put tabs
first (similar to Opera). The most immediate way this will show is in
the user interface: tabs will be at the top of the window, instead of
below the controls, as in the other major tabbed browsers. In Chrome,
each tab will be an individual process, and each will have its own
browser controls and address bar (dubbed omnibox), a design that adds
stability to the browser. If one tab fails only one process dies; the
browser can still be used as normal with the exception of the dead tab.
Chrome will also implement a New Tab Page which shows the nine most
visited pages in thumbnails, along with the most searched on sites,
most recently bookmarked sites, and most recently closed tabs, upon
opening a new tab, similar to Opera's "Speed Dial" page.
