Last week Google shook up the hornet's nest that is web developer/designer world by releasing their own pugilistic entry into the bruising boxing match that is the web browser market: Chrome. The preceding statement isn't probably new news to anyone, as it seems every web-related news site, blog, and forum has been talking exclusively about it.
As I most certainly wouldn't want the bandwagon to leave without me, I'll join into the fracas.
There's a lot of certainties involving Chrome. First, it has got a ways to go before it's completely up to speed with the older browsers due to the usual bugs and gaffes that plague any beta (hence the reason betas exist). Of course, considering how Internet Exporer 7 is still filled with flaws, I guess Chrome isn't too far behind the benchmark for what people accept as 'working'.
Secondly, we know it's going to be a force to be reckoned with, since Google's operational budget is larger than that of several nations, and its brand name is so ubiquitous that it is already listed by Merriam-Webster as a transitive verb.
You know you're the big kid in the playground when you've been verbed. It is one of my life goals to meet such a fate.
In fact, according to some sources, Chrome's user share is already surpassing Opera's. Granted, browser usage research is such a spotty science that I'd take that fact with a grain of salt, but the fact that they're already in that zone in under a week shows that they've already got some traction.
Lastly, Chrome's impressive performance in regards to JavaScript with their v8 engine appears to be the first salvo in a browser battle for the fastest JavaScript engines. John Resig discusses how Chrome stacks against other browser JavaScript engines (including Firefox 3.1's upcoming TraceMonkey engine) here, showing that v8's got the jump on current browsers (but TraceMonkey may be poised to retake the lead when Firefox 3.1 is released later this year). Even competitors like Microsoft senior program manager Scott Hanselman discuss how Chrome is starting revolution of how JavaScript processing is going to be accelerated to the point where JavaScript will likely be the competitor against Microsoft's rich interactive applicationns solution for browsers, Silverlight.
That statement seems almost worth getting locked up for, as it's just a hair's breadth away from crazy. After all, JavaScript has been around for years, and is perhaps one of the weirdest, freakiest languages out there, right?
Well, yes... but Hanselman is predicting a 100- to 1,000-fold increase speed increase in JavaScript in the next 18 months. Combine that sort of performance increase with all the crazy things Javascript is capable of now, and I think the truth is that JavaScript is on the verge of being able to compete with Silverlight and friends.
To me, this is great news. I've become fairly addicted to using JavaScript over the past couple of years, and a current project I'm working on involves fairly simple animations for a bobbing pirate ship (made dead simple with jQuery). On IE and Firefox is runs alright, albeit with a bit of notable jitters here and there. On Chrome, it's as smooth as a baby's behind. As JavaScript gets faster, we can put more and more animations and other effects into a page without worrying about locking up pages or killing the browser.
These robot pirates bob much more smoothly in Chrome.
The best part? Developing for JavaScript is free and is focused towards web standards. Tutorials are scattered through the Internet, books are littering library shelves, and incredibly useful libraries like jQuery and prototype are providing cross-browser solutions to easily coding effects, animations, css and html manipulation, etc. Thanks to AJAX and other techniques, Javascript can even dynamically grab information from servers. I suppose the only real gap in JavaScript solutions to rich media on a web page is sound, but there's already wackos out there pushing the borders on that.
Is stating that JavaScript will be a comptetitor to Silverlight and Flash in the near future a bold statement? I don't know for sure. But with Microsoft's people stating as much, I think it's a definite possibility that it may be true.
