The Secret to Making Chrome

Google has released a new browser, "Google Chrome". It features quite a few innovations: some user interface innovations include tabs above the menus and URL bar, a single field combining the URL and search fields, search and status bars that disappear when not in use and a home page showing small versions of your 9 most-visited sites. Perhaps most interestingly, it runs each tab and plug-in in a separate process so errors or slow-downs in one cannot affect the rest. It also features a strikingly fast JavaScript engine (for those fancy "Web 2.0" AJAX pages) and some interesting security innovations like "scoping" pop-ups to remain over the page that generated them. And it supports a porn mode... sorry, "Incognito Mode" where no record is kept of your browsing (is this because Google knows something about our browsing habits?).

But those are just the new innovations -- more impressive is the list of "standard" browser features that Chrome supports. It correctly renders the highly complex HTML and CSS standards, passing the ACID2 test (it fails ACID3, but still manages to attain a higher score than Firefox or Internet Explorer). It supports the HTTP protocol, with all its complexity like content negotiation and compression, as well as HTTPS, FTP, and probably a few others. It has special handling for downloads (showing downloads in progress, locating them, etc. It implements the entire JavaScript language, and can correctly display hundreds of thousands of popular websites. It dynamically generates possible options as you type in the URL bar (like the recently released Firefox 3 "awesome bar"). It comes packaged with abilities or plug-ins for displaying flash, PDF, and all common graphics formats. All in all, it is a full-featured browser, quite capable of competing on features with Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Safari 3, or Opera 9. Whether it will compete in market share is something only time will tell.

If you stop and think about it, this is an astounding accomplishment. A browser of this complexity is a HUGE piece of software -- Google Chrome is 1.6 gigabytes of code (that would take a typical person 20 years just to type in, much less debug!) Now, Google has a lot of extremely smart people working for them, but even so, this is an incredible achievement. Consider: at one point, Netscape was the "king of the internet", the company poised to take on Microsoft for domination of the computer industry. Then Netscape decided that most of their browser needed to be rewritten. Three years later, they released it... and in the meantime, Microsoft had won the first of the browser wars, and Netscape was an irrelevant subdivision of AOL.

Given Google's penchant for secrecy, it is difficult to say just how long they spent developing Chrome, but it is doubtful that it was under development for 3 years (perhaps more like 2). And many of the now "standard" features listed above didn't exist when Netscape 6 was written. So what is Google's secret, that allowed them to build this incredibly complex piece of software in an amazingly short period of time?

The answer is that Chrome is built on open source software. In fact, it uses at least 25 different software libraries! And we're talking about simple little helper utilities, the open source dependencies include "webkit" (the same HTML rendering engine that powers Safari), NSS (which provides all of the encryption needed for SSL and more), pthreads (which supports building a multi-threaded application) and sqllite (an entire database).

This is the new face of software development. Open source is no longer an obscure, pseudo-communist hippie movement dedicated to putting professional programmers out of business (it never was, despite the fact that Microsoft once wanted us to believe it). Instead, it is an essential part of building modern software applications.

Posted Mon 15 September 2008 by mcherm in Programming