Google and WebKit: a love story?

With a 38 page comic, you can get to know a bit about Google Chrome, the Google browser. Highlights:

• uses WebKit as renderer;
• it has his own JS engine, written by Team V8, and it includes a JIT;
• each tab is a separate "process" running inside a jail or sandbox;
• Gears is built-in;
• allows to run Web-based app in a chrome-less window;
• project completely open-source: I think they mean source available, but maybe I'm a pessimist regarding Google openness.

Questions for the next days:

• When they talk about processes, is it really a new process in the UNIX sense? It seems so, and if yes, it is a good idea;
• When they talk about process jail, are we talking in the BSD sense, or chroot sense, or something more soft?
• The plug-ins are made to be (and probably with a grain of truth) the bad guys. Adobe and the Flash team must be ecstatic.

The big winner seems to be the WebKit project, this is the second time Google chooses WebKit over the competition.

More than a browser, Chrome seems tailor made to run WebApps, like the ones Google has been building in the last years, and therefore another step in their quest of operating system independence.

Update: a blog post about Chrome at the official Google Blog. First beta will be Windows-only unfortunately.