10 Key Features That Differentiate Google’s Chrome From Firefox & IE

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Google’s has released its own open-source browser, Chrome, in direct competition to Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Yesterday, Danny described his test-drive of Chrome in Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox and Greg speculated on its future in How Bright Is The Outlook For Chrome?. Both compared Google’s new browser to the incumbents, Firefox and Internet Explorer. But Chrome is actually very different from those two browsers, and significantly different from nearly everything else on the market. Here are the 10 major features that truly differentiate Google Chrome from the competition:

1. It’s being built from the ground up. The Google engineers involved understood that modern day web browsing is about applications and rich media, which normal browsers are not built for, so they started from scratch.

2. Well, not entirely. Chrome is being built on WebKit, the basis of Apple’s Safari browser and the browser in the Google Android mobile platform, and using Google Gears, a web applications plug-in/platform.

3. To deal with the new types of demands users make of web browsers, Chrome will use multi-processing to handle all those demands, giving each element of a page (a JavaScript Command, a Flash video) its own memory and process, instead of the single-threading architecture used by today’s browsers. Multi-threading should make Chrome faster and more secure.

4. New tabs, above the address bar, will handle those different processes. So JavaScript threads will be in one tab and a video in another, allowing each to load simultaneously, reducing memory load, and ensuring that one bug in a page doesn’t crash the whole site (or whole browser), just that tab.

5. To make things even faster, Chrome will use a new JavaScript Virtual Machine from Denmark called V8.

6. Still not fast enough? Chrome’s Task Manager will function like Windows Task Manager, and allow you to find processes (even plug-ins) that are hogging resources or crashing, and just kill that process. No more closing tabs when the browser slows down; now you can go straight to the problem.

7. OK, faster? Chrome’s Omnibox can help. When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome offers suggestions to autocomplete your request–and not just based on your history and bookmarks like Firefox does, but also based on the most popular web sites as calculated by Google. You can even search a site from the address bar by typing a site name and hitting tab.

8. This one is on par with IE8 and the newest version of Firefox: a privacy mode, where you can browse without anything from the session being written to your computer–no cache, no history, no cookies, nothing. (Dubbed “porn mode” by most blogs, but with serious applications, such as public browsing, as well.)

9. Convenience is further advanced by a personalized home page with screenshots of the pages you visit most.

10. It’s extra secure; the browser includes Google’s ever-growing list of spyware and malware sites, and every tab is “sandboxed,” which means whatever happens in the tabs can’t affect your computer. (No more need to download Sandboxie). And no more pop-ups, not even JavaScript ones. Every pop-up is contained in the tab in starts in, collected as a small link on the bottom of the page. You can drag it off the page to see it, but it won’t pop up without your permission.

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