Interview With Google's V8 Author Lars Bak

Dr Pete writes "Financial Times has an interesting piece about Lars Bak and Kasper Lund the authors of the V8 virtual machine in Google's Chrome browser. 'Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that's an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission's antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors such as Google a chance to claim ground.'" Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.

What about Iron?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard so much about Chrome on Slashdot, but nothing about Iron.

According to the Wikipedia page on Google Chrome:

SRWare Iron is a release of Chromium software that explicitly disables the collection and transmission of usage information.[30]

The Wikipedia page further details the information collected by Chrome.

Any comments?

Chrome has much lower market share than Safari

[caffeinejolt]

Over six times less currently [statowl.com]. Of course, the general Slashdot usage trends may be different. I am sure Google can steal market share from others though - especially if they release viable Mac/Linux versions of Chrome.

Linux and osx

[Joe Tie.]

I've been playing around with the ongoing ports to linux and osx and have been really impressed so far. The linux port is now equivelent in speed to 2.0 on windows, tabs are functional by keyboard shortcut if not mouse yet, spellchecking is in, the startup time blows away all the other browsers on my system, and in general it's looking like a first class port instead of the afterthought I'd initially taken it to be. Obviously there's still a ton more to do on it, but the foundation's looking really solid.

GoogleUpdate

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I'd be a lot more inclined to use Chrome if I could do so without it installing the GoogleUpdate service and then turning it back on after I've explicitly disabled it. Windows is bloated enough without me being "tricked" into running additional services that I don't want or need.

Re:Chrome as the built in?

[moniker127]

I'd like to note that google chrome on windows 7 is a ridiculously fast browser. Even faster than it is on xp or vista for some reason.

Re:Chrome as the built in?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it interesting that the key developer is show with a Macintosh but chrome does not run on Macintosh (yet).