Google Chrome and Network Performance – it’s bigger than you think.

When Google Chrome was released, our genuine reaction around the office was something like this:

Okay, so the last thing the world needs is yet another browser. Between IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock, Konqueror, Epiphany, Camino, Galeon, SeaMonkey, OmniWeb, and, of course, Wii Internet Channel, Web applications developers already have their hands full.

However, if you work in IT, you are either in the business of developing applications or delivering applications. And sometimes the bottleneck in application delivery is the browser. You can have the best network in the world, with only a couple hundred milliseconds of overall delay – but if it takes seconds to render the JavaScript on the front-end, it’s almost academic. At any rate, the end-user probably can’t tell the difference between delays on the network to delays on the client-side browser.

There are two things that make Chrome stand out – the first is running each tab, and each plug-in, as a separate process, with protected memory address space. Problems in one tab will not crash the entire browser.

The other is advances in JavaScript execution. By running java scripts in separate process, buggy JavaScript can’t hang the browser, like it would if JavaScript ran in a single-thread in a browser process. The above scenario should come as no surprise to anyone that has used Firefox and watched as a single buggy JavaScript site made you restart all the tabs on your browser.

But Chrome also comes with a JavaScript virtual machine, which speeds up JavaScript-based Web applications by turning the interpreted JavaScript code directly into machine-code for your processor and OS. Again, faster delivery of the application, when the browser is the bottleneck.

There are a few nay-sayers out there that are looking at this from a bottom line point of view – that Google is trying to enter into the browser wars and try to own the space – basically, if you use Google’s browser, even if it’s open-source, you’ll view Google’s advertisements, and make Google money. That’s true enough. But what we really should be taking from this is that even if Google’s code wasn’t open-sourced – and it is – these innovative ideas would eventually make their way into other Web browsers in order to stay competitive. Firefox will likely incorporate changes at least by the next full release, and Microsoft, Apple, and Opera Software will do so if they want to remain competitive.

I’m skeptical that Google Chrome will make it onto enough desktops that Google becomes a key competitor in the Browser Wars. Then again, Mosaic was the first Web browser, and no one uses it today – but we certainly use a lot of the technological ideas behind Mosaic. It really was a quantum leap forward, and though I may be overly optimistic about it, this really is a quantum leap forward in Web application development.

The point is not Google Chrome. The point is the technology behind Google Chrome.