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Главная Статьи Google’s Chrome browser gets impromptu launch.
Google’s Chrome browser gets impromptu launch.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Google Inc.'s unofficial company motto is "Launch early and iterate." Yet, it appears that someone at Google didn't get the message that this "launch early" philosophy was not to be taken literally with Chrome, a much-ballyhooed Web browser that the tech giant has been developing over the last few years. Early Sept. 1, select technology journalists and software developers in Europe received an e-mail from Google announcing the imminent launch of Chrome, a long-rumored Web browser that would directly compete with Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.

The announcement, which arrived in the form of a 38-page comic book drawn by acclaimed artist Scott McCloud, was sent out prematurely – a mistake that Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai acknowledged in an afternoon posting on Google's official blog: "At Google, we have a saying: 'launch early and iterate.' While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well. As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome." No matter – the Mountain View-based company issued a press release about Chrome and launched it as an open-source beta program the following day.

According to Google, Chrome was designed to "create a better Web experience for users around the world." Immediately available in more than 40 languages, it is capable of accommodating multiple desktop- and Web-based applications simultaneously, including e-mail, audio and video, word processing and financial-management programs. "We think of the browser as the window to the Web – it's a tool for users to interact with the Web sites and applications they care about, and it's important that we don't get in the way of that experience," Pichai said. "Just like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome has a simple user interface with a sophisticated core to enable the modern Web."

But what does Chrome look like, and how user-friendly is it? The answer is simple – as in, cosmetically simple, and simple to use. With Chrome, Google took the same approach to designing a Web browser as it takes to designing its Web site – stripped-down, functional and very fast. Pichai stressed that this no-frills philosophy is the key to Chrome's design – that it should be so easy to use that people would almost forget that they are using it.

"A lot of what drove the development of Chrome is the realization that most people use a Web browser just to search the World Wide Web – they don't expect their browser to do a lot; they just want it to work," he said.  People don't want their Web browser to be a self-important application. So, we have gone to great lengths to make sure that Chrome is stable and stays our of the way. Because as it is, most people only know that they're using a Web browswer when it is crashing or telling them to do something. We designed Chrome so that people can enjoy the Web.

"We saw an opportunity to come out and do something different, to develop a streamlined choice for people to browse the Web," Pichai added. "Chrome gives you a very streamlined Web-browsing experience, which was our goal at the outset of this project."

Chrome's notable features include: A combined search and address bar that quickly takes users to where they want to go on the Web; and each newly opened tab in Chrome generates a page that includes snapshots of a user's most-visited Web sites, recent searches and bookmarks.

Additionally, the browser has been developed on a multi-process platform that Google says reduces instability while increasing security. For instance, each browser tab operates as a separate process; by isolating tabs, should one of them crash or become unstable, the others will remain unaffected and responsive, allowing the user to continue using Chrome without restarting it. And, in an effort to boost the speed of the browser, Google built a new JavaScript engine, dubbed V8, from the ground up. The company said V8 not only accelerates most Web-based applications, it also enables an entire new class of programs that couldn't exist on the current crop of browsers – namely, Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser.

JavaScript is a technology that many Web sites use to make their pages more interactive and more like desktop software applications. Google Docs -- the tech giant's online word-processing and spreadsheet programs – use this technology, but it's also very widely deployed on Web pages to do less-sophisticated things, like drop-down menus.

"Chrome's speed is due to a combination of several factors," Pichai said. "Fundamentally, we made the browser faster by installing several sophisticated technologies under the hood. Chrome uses an open-source Web kit by Apple and a multi-browser architecture, and it keeps each browser tab in an isolated sandbox, which prevents one from crashing others."

Google has marketed Chrome as a much simpler, faster and more secure Web browser than Internet Explorer – which has long been a favorite target of hackers and cyber attackers worldwide – but already, it appears vulnerable to attacks. Just hours after Google released Chrome on the Web, technology researcher Aviv Raff discovered that he could combine two vulnerabilities — a flaw in Apple Inc.'s Safari WebKit, which Chrome borrows technology from, and a Java bug discussed at length at the Black Hat technology conference in August in Las Vegas -- to trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser that could plant malware onto their desktops.

Within days, technology wonks flooded the blogosphere with reports of newly discovered holes in Chrome's vaunted security framework. These included a report from researchers in the Ukraine that it was possible to drop an executable file in the browser's default download directory without warning, to news that the Vietnamese research outfit SVRT-Bkis uncovered a vulnerability in Chrome that could invite remote code execution attacks.

Google responded to the unflattering reports with an announcement that it was working on the vulnerabilities, and by Sept. 5, it had begun quietly releasing an updated version of Chrome to the original. "We would've liked more time to prepare things, but some of the vulnerabilities were made public without giving us a chance to respond, update and protect our users first," Mark Larson, Google Chrome program manager, wrote in a mass e-mail Sept. 7. "Thanks for being patient as we work out the kinks in all of our processes."

Despite the setbacks, Google is optimistic about the future of Chrome. Linus Upson, Google director of engineering, said the use of open-source technology such as Apple's Safari WebKit to develop Chrome represents a "fundamental shift" in the way that people are thinking about Web browsers. "Google Chrome was built upon other open source projects that are making significant contributions to browser technology and have helped to spur competition and innovation," Upson said.

As such, Google released Chrome as part of an open-source project that it has dubbed Chromium. The intent of this, according to the company, is to "help make future browsers better by contributing the underlying technology in Google Chrome to the market, while continuing to develop additional features."

Interest in Chrome soared in the days following its release, according to Nielsen Online, a division of New York City-based market-research firm A.C. Nielsen Co. The company reported that between Sept. 1 and Sept. 7, more than 1.9 million unique visitors in the United States – 73 percent of them male – visited the "Thank You" Web page for Chrome, which typically indicates a download. Nearly 1.4 percent of all U.S.-based users who went online during the week from home or work visited the page. In addition, consumers immediately – and in great numbers – took to the blogosphere to discuss the new offering.

According to Nielsen Online, men dominated traffic to the Chrome "Thank You" page, with males 35-49 accounting for 39 percent of overall traffic. Female visitors were more likely to be in the 18-34 age group. Buzz about Chrome spiked Sept. 2 and peaked the following day, with 0.92 percent of online consumer discussion, outpacing buzz about competitor browsers. "The interest in all things Google was apparent in the online discussion surrounding the somewhat unexpected Chrome launch," Jon Stewart, Nielsen Online research director for technology and search, said in a statement. "The browser was mentioned in nearly one percent of all online discussions the day after its launch – a respectable slightly-more-than-half of what the highly anticipated iPhone 3G generated when it launched earlier this summer."
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