14 DAY TRIAL // Mike Pinkerton, developer at Google, has recently posted the first screenshots from the Mac build of Chrome, Google's own web browser. One of Chrome's main benefits is that it isolates processes within each opened tab. As such, when a site misbehaves, it can only crash the tab it was running in, not the whole browser. The developer also offered a screenshot of such a mishap on the Mac version of Chrome.
“Over the last couple of months, the group working on Mac Chrome (myself included) has shifted gears from layout tests and WebKit compatibility to getting the application user interface up and limping,” Mike says. “That also means getting the separate WebCore renderer processes to communicate over IPC to the browser.”
“Last week, while I was in Cali, the entire team made a tremendous amount of progress getting the cross-platform model and controller classes scaffolded, topped off with a Cocoa UI (with similar strides on Linux using Gtk),” Mike continues. “We were at the point where you could create new windows and tabs (and close them too) using the shared code, which would spawn/quit associated renderer processes. It was pretty exciting to watch them come and go in Activity Monitor, knowing how close we were to getting bits on the screen.”
Mike goes on to explain that last week, they could actually load web pages in the renderer processes and display them in tabs. The first screenshot above depicts that very moment. However, as these are just still early efforts of building up Chrome for Mac, clicking is still non functional, while “the renderers crash like nobody's business,” according to Pinkerton. However, even when crashes did occur, the user interface stayed running, as showed in the second image.
“It's important to point out that's part of what's taken us so long to get to this point,” Mike explains. “The WebKit that ships as part of Mac OS X can't run this way - it took a lot of work to marshall it to do so. In addition, the UI clearly needs much love, but it's an indicator of the clean and simple direction we're heading.”
The developer claims he is ecstatic about the work on Chromium, but does admit there's tons more work to be done on the browser. He also urges readers of his post not to ask for a release date, as he can't possibly predict one, and “won't.” Nevertheless, Mike says, Chrome for Mac is clearly coming along.
