Monochrome Blog - Google Chrome and it’s effect on RIA development

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	Google Chrome and it’s effect on RIA development
	by Neil Middleton 11:39 pm Tuesday, 2 September 2008.

Today, Google dropped a bomb onto the internet in the form of a new browser, Chrome. Whilst not initially ground breaking, the big news is in the details.

In summary, Google have created a browser that is suited to the modern internet, the one that is seeing a big shift towards online internet applications as well as traditional sites.

The key elements that Google have introduced, amongst others, are:

The tiny footprint
Built in Google Gears
V8 - the new Javascript VM

So, to cover these in more detail:

1. The tiny footprint

Now, to most this might not seem like a biggy, but for me it’s an interesting angle.

Google have the infrastructure in place to get this browser in front of lots of people a lot quicker than anyone else, after all, nearly everyone on the planet uses Google properties in some way. Bundling the browser, or advertising it everywhere is not a problem for them, so I would expect people to be very aware of it very soon.

At the moment, Google chrome is a 7mb download for Windows (yup, only 7Mb). Whilst not much smaller than the competitors (Firefox 7.2Mb, IE 8 b2 12.4Mb) it does show that adoption for this browser could certainly be rapid. RAM usage is also miniscule compared with the likes of Firefox (which lots of people complain about as being very memory heavy). This suits Chrome to lots of mobile/laptop applications as well as machines that might be getting on a bit.

Therefore, I personally see chrome as getting out there quickly, much more so than Firefox did, mainly due to who is promoting it and their reach. If anyone is able to get a product out, Google have to be one of the best placed people to do so.

2. Built in Google Gears

Another big item is the inclusion of Google Gears. Gears was launched a fair while back and is available as a add-on to your existing browser. In essence, Gears lets you do a lot of the things that Adobe AIR provides, for instance, local data storage, the ability to run offline, as well as a number of other features such as desktop access. This now means that your bog-standard AJAX app can now transition effectively to a desktop app with no need for an additional download (other than Chrome), or any sort of redevelopment at all. All the user needs to do is select what they need and then use the Prism style functionality to migrate it to their desktop as a standalone app (admittedly wrapped in Chrome). Fancy your favourite web app as a desktop app?

3. V8 - the new Javascript VM

But AJAX and Javascript are slow right? Well yes, largely, except that Chrome contains a brand new javascript virtual machine called V8 which is showing itself up to 100 times faster than competitor browsers in benchmark tests. This is a massive thing for AJAX. Historically, Flash’s main selling point for RIA was the performance. With AS3 and Flash Player 9 you can pull data into the player and process it very quickly - javascript just cannot even think about competing, but now, with V8 it will be interesting to see how things change. Without having testing this particular scenario it is now quite possible that we can see performant AJAX apps running inside the browser - almost to the same performance level as modern flash applications. AJAX has always been slightly cheaper to develop than Flash applications so it will be interesting to see if people start to choose AJAX over the superior Flash platform more for new RIA deployments.

So, there we go. But surely all this is reliant on Chrome being the users browser of choice? Well, No. Chrome is an open-source effort, which means that should Mozilla or Opera or anyone else want to make use of the improvements made by Google they can, without issue. Therefore the introduction of chrome can only introduce benefits for all browser manufacturers, after all, competition is a good thing.

At the end of the day, AJAX is firmly here to stay and looks set to do some interesting things in the near future. With the proposed introduction of video in HTML 5, Flash could be looking to have more of a niche for itself. Sure, there will always be times where Flash is suited best but Chrome has definitely put a new perspective on AJAX application development and where it could be headed in the future.

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