Initial Thoughts on Google Chrome

Cool! One of the things I love about the current tech environment is the amount of competition between all of the big companies. Competition is the only true driver of innovation. Both users and programmers are going to end up with better technology when all is said and done. Those years of browser stagnation seem like a distant memory now.

Another thing I found interesting in the Wikipedia entry on Google Chrome was the following:

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 not unlike 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.

Interesting. What this means (on Windows at least) is that when you start up Google Chrome you get two processes:



I can only assume that one instance is for the Chrome host process and one instance is for the initial tab. When you create a new tab and navigate to a web page you will see at least one new instance of chrome.exe. There may be more than one process for the tab depending on the number of plugins on the page.  

After creating a few additional Chrome tabs my 'Windows Task Manager' looks like this:



For a "process hawk" like me this will take a some getting used to!