Welcome to chrome computing, oops! it's cloud computing

Everybody seems to talk about CHROME now! a geek or a novice, whether they understand or not, but everybody is talking about it for the very reason that it is from GOOGLE.

I haven't installed it yet, but my friends Rama & Genie did; they are geeks you know. I am a fan of safari as it does font smoothing and makes reading from webpages a different experience, compared to other browsers. Well it's not free though, safari hangs every now and then. If one tab hangs every other tab and window of safari would hang, pretty bad. This problem also exists in firefox. If you want to move on, you have to start everything afresh.

Recent versions of IE is slightly different in some sense compared to firefox & safari. IE runs every seperate window in a different process, though tabs are just threads. That way even if you have to loose the contents of tabs in a particular window because of its crash, other windows (processes) are still safe.

Having that experience with the other browsers and with whatever Win32 core programming knowledge I have, I was curious about the architecture of chrome and the difference it makes compared to the other browsers. My findings are:

• Chrome is designed and developed from scratch! - obviously means they would have tried to get rid of the problems with other browsers as much as possible and also to add new features. More like Microsoft what tried to do with Windows Vista by writing it from scratch; I know you are saying, "But Vista has lot of bugs!". Well, even chrome, for that matter any software designed and developed from scratch would have lot of bugs. Everything evolves to perfection over a period of time, so you need not worry about that much.


• Everything in chrome is a different process including the plugins. It means, end users would really be happy for the reason that a crash or hang in one window/tab or killing one window won't after other things leading to a fresh start. A process is a completely isolated sandbox which has nothing to do with the other processes of the same application or other applications running in the system.


• Since everything is a process, they can be tuned and controlled explicitly and separately based on the functionalities exposed by the operating system. Another major advantage with separate process is the memory! now every tab in the browser is capable of holding data up to a theoretical limit of 2GB in 32 bit environment. Wow, my entire data in the cloud could be kept in memory then!


• They also have written the java script engine from scratch which allows google to have lot of customization in terms of functionality, specifications, & standards. That essentially means, google webpages running in chrome can have some additional features that aren't available in the other browsers. And google which is trying to be a monopolist in the online apps, email, etc. (I guess they are trying for the end to end monopoly) would use those features in its web pages and force the user to run chrome for better functionality!

Considering these significant design changes in chrome compared to other browsers, I sort of sense that this is a milestone move in their cloud computing strategy.

When Microsoft introduced its windows 1.0 over DOS, it was just a windowing extension, but version by version they improved it and made sure users are making use of the new features by selling cool applications, and as a result of supply, demand & expectaion cycle we are now in windows Vista. DOS is gone altogether as the base operating system! but the windowing which started as a small beta prototype now rules the world. It took quite a while though to achieve perfection. After all, only recently Microsoft is catching up in the server universe where the command line based operating systems used to rule.

Google is trying the same thing with cloud. Now chrome is a customized sandbox from google with most of its major components given out as open source. Developers from every corner of the world is going to use those core components for their future browser projects, and they are also going to improve it.

What google would do then? Google will have a team dedicated for the core components development, with most of the developments related to standard functionalities coming from the open source developers. Google team would only concentrate on those features that they think are important for getting cloud computing applications a reality and invest more time and money in their cloud computing web applications & frameworks. I am sure google need not develop chrome for the other operating systems, they have given an architectural prototype which would encourage the open source guys to do the rest of the things and get the product out.

Ultimately, Google wants their engine sitting in the browsers & make cloud based applications run seamlessly. As a cycle this would one day make the cloud computing so realistic, user can't feel the difference between using Microsoft word & Google Doc! If I can image a situation where people choose games like FIFA in the cloud, pay few cents rent per hour and play it in the browser itself. Or may be free from the game sponsoring company.

Once we reach that stage, Microsoft Windows/Any desktop operating system would become obsolete; developers would be writing software that runs in the browser and once everything runs in the browser google might release a $100 laptop that boots up linux kernel and just starts the future chrome. Since everything is available in the cloud and those user interfaces & applications becomes the standard, who would care about the operating system, etc. I would say 99.99% of the normal users won't.

My bet: long-term strategy behind chrome is to make the future computers/laptops running the browser directly over the kernel and rest everything would come from the cloud; and Google becoming the monopolist in the cloud. But we can't say whether its a double edged knife or a sword for google, as of now! 

Microsoft is a bigger giant than google, it might also turn their focus on cloud computing aggressively. It should be fairly easy if focussed properly with their competence in the day to day computing domain. Who knows they may come up with a hybrid business model that might kill google and still continue as a monopolist even in the cloud computing era. If it is Microsoft with Gates, I would say the probability of this happening would be 0.85, but with Balmer I take a safe bet of 0.5. After all, Microsoft had been a good follower but also a winner in the end, all these years.

Anyhow, we would see the new era of computing in next 4 to 8 years.