Why Chrome won't rule the world (yet)
I like Google's new Chrome Web browser a lot -- as in, I think it's going to change the desktop world in a way we haven't seen since Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released the first modern Web browser, Mosaic, back in 1993.
What Chrome brings to the table are behind-the-scenes features like V8, a killer multithreaded JavaScript virtual machine. V8 compiles JavaScript code directly into machine code instead of interpreting it as most JVMs do. The result is that Web-based applications written in JavaScript -- like, say, Google Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps -- run much, much faster than they do on other browsers.
How much faster? I put Chrome, Firefox 3 , Safari3.1.2 and Internet Explorer 7 on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark racetrack, and this is what I found: Chrome won, running away with a mark of 1,975.0 milliseconds. Firefox 3.0 came in second, with 3,125.2msec. Safari, which uses WebKit, the same open-source browser engine as Chrome, took third, with 4,006.8 msec. And IE -- oh, the shame! It came in dead last, with a mark of 32,221.4 msec.
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I heard mention that the Chrome OS will have some sort of encryption available a la bitlocker. If it's possible to encrypt personal data using another password or key, then it may have potential for very secure data.... And Ubuntu has an 'encrypt home directory' option, perhaps google should follow suit.
- Dann
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