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The browser is built on top of Apple's WebKit HTML rendering engine, a lightweight renderer that is known for its clean code base, good performance, and excellent standards-compliance. WebKit's versatility and the ease with which it can be embedded in applications has led to its adoption in numerous contexts, including Google's Android web browser. Alongside WebKit, Google will be using its own JavaScript virtual machine called V8, which was designed for high performance and has some compelling features.

One of the most impressive technical innovations that Google has brought to Chrome is a multiprocess design. Each individual browser tab runs within its own isolated process, much like the way that processes work in an operating system. This will massively increase the robustness of the browser by insulating the application from bugs that cause crashes within individual tabs. The tab will go down, but the rest of the browser will remain unaffected. The multiprocess design also reduces the impact of memory fragmentation by ensuring that the memory used by a tab can be reclaimed completely when the tab is closed.

Another unique advantage of the multiprocess design is that it will allow users to see the distribution of memory between the various tabs and plug-ins used by the browser. Users will be able to use Chrome's built-in process manager to see how much memory is being used by each individual tab so that they can properly identify the real culprit when the browser begins to hog resources. Google has a few other strategies for reducing memory consumption too, like extremely aggressive and heavily-optimized garbage collection.

Security is also clearly an area where Google plans to push forward web innovation. Chrome has a sophisticated sandboxing system that is designed to protect against malware by restricting access to the underlying system functionality. Google will also be leveraging its malware blacklists (the same ones it uses to protect users from clicking through harmful search results) to warn users when they attempt to visit a site that is known to be infected.

There are many other nice features in Chrome too, including a rich autocompletion, tightly integrated Google Gears, a site-specific browser framework like Prism, and a private browsing function called Incognito that resembles Microsoft's recently announced InPrivate functionality.

Google says that an early test version for Windows will be released tomorrow, and support for Linux and Mac OS X will arrive in future releases.

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Stability
Each browser tab will run in its own process. These processes will be completely isolated from each other, will be killable from the operating system's process manager, and will be sandboxed to prevent them from accessing information on the user's computer.

Speed
The browser is being written with WebKit, the open source engine at the core of Apple's Safari and Google's Android. The browser is also getting a new Javascript virtual machine, V8. It's said to be a better solution for complex and rich Web applications: it should yield better performance as well as "smoother drag and drops" in interactive applications.

Search and user experience
In Chrome, browser tabs will take over the interface, becoming the primary navigational element. Each tab will get its own window controls. Users will be able to tear off tabs into standalone windows.

Security
Chrome's architecture lends itself to secure browsing. Each Web page, or tab, runs in its own process, and is blocked from accessing other processes on the computer. "We've taking the existing process boundary," the comic says, "and made it into a jail." Different and more flexible permissions are being developed for plug-ins, however.

A database and API to access phishing and scam sites will be used in Chrome (and made public), which will hopefully reduce "zero-day" scam exploits. The browser will be constantly updated with this information.

Standards
The browser will be released as an open source project. Also, Google will build the open source local runtime Gears into the browser, and is hoping that it is taking up widely to "improve the base functionality of all browsers."

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