The Future of Google Chrome 294
TRNick writes "Lars Bak, who heads up development of Google Chrome's cornerstone javascript engine, talks about why Google is so focused on in-browser javascript performance, the role Chrome has played in driving up javascript performance in other browsers, and why it's taking so long to introduce support for third-party extensions. 'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more,' he says."
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:2, Informative)
good luck using Alert when you get an infinite loop...
Re:How Many People Even Use Chrome? (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome introduced features which IE and FF either have since included as well or are planned for future releases. I am certainly aware that Chrome is quite limited in some areas, but in the end its speed, flexibility, small memory footprint, and physical layout (minimal intrusion into the web page display area) make it my first choice despite its drawbacks. Feel free to correct me where I may be ignorant (seriously, no sarcasm intended).
*Every now and then I find a web app that's just not well coded (mostly due to funky CSS that's poorly formed) that works or at least displays properly in IE but not Chrome. C'est la vie.
I disagree (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is people still fail to grasp the difference between Javascript and DOM and CSS manipulation....
All Javascript engines have been ECMA compliant for 5 years now. Javascript incomparability is not the problem, it is the DOM and CSS incompatabilities.
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:4, Informative)
I'd suggest you check out IntelliJ's IDEA 8.0. I've been developing interfaces for the web for ten years now, and I've come across nothing with such comprehensive and accurate support for js coding. Both your complaints about code completion and syntax checking are handled by IDEA accurately.
Some other developers in my group swear by MyEclipse's js handling, but I haven't had any personal experience with it in the past couple of years. My last impression of it was that its color-coding wasn't as detailed as IDEA's. Still, MyEclipse is open-source, so check it out first and see if it takes care of your needs.
For debugging, Firebug is still your best bet, though I believe IE's debugger has been making huge strides lately, and is better than Firebug for automatically handling breakpoints--in Firebug, you have to search through your .js files in order to manually place a breakpoint, and then that can get weird if you have iframes to deal with.
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:2, Informative)
Try NetBeans, it has javascript autocompletion, support for popular libraries, like jQuery and various other goodies.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Javascript HAS proper, native OO. It just doesn't have class-based OO (though some libraries like Prototype hook onto the prototype-based OO and provide not only class-based OO, but with mixins, too). Yes, there IS a distinction; no, just because you don't use prototype-based OO often or aren't used to thinking in its terms, that doesn't make it `improper'.
Re:As we've seen. (Score:5, Informative)
Too late. Google Docs is already here, a JavaScript word processor with real-time collaboration features.
Re:How about something OTHER than javascript... (Score:3, Informative)
Plasmoids can be programmed in a whole slew of languages, such as Ruby, JS, Python, C++, etc. Someone made a proof-of-concept Firefox extension that ran plasmoids in your browser.
Chrome comes with Gears, and can't Gears widgets be programmed in a variety of languages?
And Java is still around, etc.
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:3, Informative)
Visual Studio has a great javascript IDE. It provides statement completion, syntax checking, and intellisense. It's debugging experience is great too (step over, step into, hover over variables to evaluate them at tooltip, type evaluation expressions interactively while the code is paused, ...)
function f()
{
var x = new MyObject1();
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for MyObject1
x = "hello";
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for strings
}
The intellisense does flow analysis so that even if a variable changes type mid-way through some lines of code, then it still shows the right thing.
The intellisense figures out the types of libraries you throw at it.
Obviously it's impossible to make perfect intellisense. That'd be turing-complete. But in practice, with the code I tend to write and the libraries I tend to use, it does the right thing often enough.
All these features were in Visual Studio 2008, though not before.
Re:Google "are"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe I have been blind, but I have yet to come across a decent IDE for javascript development. All the nice features like code completion and even syntax checking are now no longer a given.
I felt like this for a long time. Finally I discovered , which is Google's own solution to this problem. [google.com]
I now code my dynamic web components in java in my regular (eclipse) IDE, debug it in Eclipse, then deploy (compile) to Javascript. It's robust, full featured, maintainable, and easily debugged.
Re:I know the future... (Score:2, Informative)
Conversely, I couldn't keep the Chrome browser running more than a few minutes without crashing on my Windows box. I didn't even have to browse somewhere. Just opening the Bookmark organizer and trying to import crashed it every time. I wasn't impressed. It was far less stable than the usual Google 'beta'.
The only item of interest with Chrome for me is the tabbed browsing and distinct URL's per tab.