Chrome Directory

Charlie Reis explains why using a multi-process architecture can be a big win for browsers on today’s web.

I’ll also talk about which parts of the browser belong in each process and in which situations Google Chrome creates new processes.”

Topics include:

1. Why use multiple processes in a browser?
2. What goes in each process?
3. When should the browser create processes?

Neil McAllister takes a look at Google Chrome “from a developer’s perspective.”

LifeHacker has published a comprehensive power user guide for Chrome including:

• Mousing Around Chrome
• Chrome’s Keyboard Shortcuts
• Tweak Your Options
• Master Chrome’s Startup Switches
• Themes
• Reveal Chrome’s Secret Diagnostic Info
• Get Extras: Bookmarklets, AutoHotkey Scripts, and More Chrome-Related Downloads

Topics from this article include:

1. Webkit’s strengths
2. Why Apple rejected Gecko
3. A revamped Gecko puts the fire in Firefox 3

In summary,

From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go.

Chrome has several “about:” pages which offer a quick way of finding out information such as memory usage and plugins. This post gives a nice overview.

By now it’s no secret that Chrome has combined some of the best features from the existing browsers and some of the future plans Google has will put it over the top. Read about them here.

Here’s a nice enumeration of all of the existing libraries that are used by Chrome.

John Resig, author of the JavaScript library JQuery, has conducted some performance tests of the major browsers (Chrome included) and posted the results.

I followed the instructions here. The only thing I needed to install was Scons but that was very straight forward. Just download the tar.gz file from here and run the following command in the uncompressed directory:

tar -xzf scons-1.0.0.tar.gz
cd scons-1.0.0
sudo python setup.py install

Now you’re ready to download and build V8:

cd ~/projects/thirdparty
svn co http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ v8-readonly
cd v8-readonly
scons
scons sample=shell

Everything should be built and now you can download the benchmarks and run them:

./shell run.js

Here’s the output I got:

You may get this unfamiliar but helpful page if Chrome suspects “an attacker on your network”. I got this when I didn’t type www.google.com but instead typed google.com: