Google Chrome Design Principles

Many of you would have read the Google Chrome comic-strip and also would have test driven the browser. I have been following few blog posts that have been discussing the technical and business impact but let's take a moment and look at some of the fundamental architectural design principles behind this browser and its impact on the ecosystem of web developers.
  • Embrace uncertainty and chaos: Google does not expect people to play nice. There are billions of pages with unique code and rendering all of them perfectly is not what Google is after. Instead Chrome puts people in charge of shutting down pages (applications) that do not behave. Empowering people to pick what they want and allow them to filter out the bad experience is a great design approach.
  • Support the journey from pages to applications to the cloud: Google embraced the fact that the web is transitioning from pages to applications. Google took an application-centric approach to design the core architecture of Chrome and turned it into a gateway to the cloud and yet maintained the tab metaphor to help users transition through this journey.
  • Scale through parallelism: Chrome's architecture makes each application a separate process. This architecture would allow Chrome to better tap into the multi-core architecture if it gets enough help from an underlying operating system. Not choosing a multi-threaded architecture reinforces the fact that parallelism on the multi-core is the only way to scale. I see an opportunity in designing a multi-core adaptation layer for Chrome to improve process-context switching since it still relies on a scheduler to get access to a CPU core.
  • Don't change developers' behavior: JavaScript still dominates the web design. Instead of asking developers to code differently Google actually accelerated Javascript via their V8 virtual machine. One of the major adoption challenges of parallel computing is to compose applications to utilize the multi-core architecture. This composition requires developers to acquire and apply new skill set to write code differently.
  • Practice traditional wisdom: Java introduced a really good garbage collector that was part of the core language from day one and did not require developers to explicitly manage memory. Java also had a sandbox model for the Applets (client-side runtime) that made Applets secured. Google recognized this traditional wisdom and applied the same concepts to Javascript to make Chrome secured and memory-efficient.
  • Growing up as an organization: The Chrome team collaborated with Android to pick up webkit and did not build one on their own (actually this is not a common thing at Google). They used their existing search infrastructure to find the most relevant pages and tested Chrome against them. This makes it a good 80-20 browser (80% of the people always visit the same 20% of the pages). This approach demonstrates a high degree of cross-pollination. Google is growing up as an organization!

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Hacking Into The Indian Education System Reveals Score Tampering

Image
Debarghya Das has a fascinating story on how he managed to bypass a silly web security layer to get access to the results of 150,000 ISCE (10th grade) and 65,000 ISC (12th grade) students in India. While lack of security and total ignorance to safeguard sensitive information is an interesting topic what is more fascinating about this episode is the analysis of the results that unearthed score tampering. The school boards changed the scores of the students to give them "grace" points to bump them up to the passing level. The boards also seem to have tampered some other scores but the motive for that tampering remains unclear (at least to me). I would encourage you to read the entire analysis and the comments , but a tl;dr version is: 32, 33 and 34 were visibly absent. This chain of 3 consecutive numbers is the longest chain of absent numbers. Coincidentally, 35 happens to be the pass mark. Here's a complete list of unattained marks - 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53,...
Lire la suite

Information Service and Cloud Dedicated Hosting

Image
Dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of internet hosting the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. It is more flexible than shared hosting, and organizations have full control over the server (s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc. There is also another level of dedicated or managed hosting managed hosting is called complex. Apply complex managed hosting on physical servers, hybrid server and virtual servers with many companies choose hybrid (a combination of physical and virtual) hosting solution. There are many similarities between the standard and complex managed hosting, but the main difference is the level of administrative support and engineering the customer pays for all because of the growing size and complexity of infrastructure deployment . Steps presented to support most of the administration, including security, memory, storage, and support of information technology. Proactive ser...
Lire la suite

IBM's Blue Cloud Meets Juniper To Alleviate Cloud Computing Adoption Fears

Security and lack of an acceptable SLA are customers' top adoption fears to move to cloud computing . IBM's recent announcements to further advance their cloud computing initiative known as Blue Cloud should help alleviate these fears to some extent. IBM announced their partnership with Juniper for their hybrid cloud initiative to provide secured private cloud with better SLA. IBM also announced new offerings for the cloud - Tivoli storage as service and a new set of cloud management tools to align with what a typical CIO would look for when migrating to the cloud. In addition IBM is pushing some of their existing offerings on the cloud that customers can now use off Amazon's EC2 on pay-as-you-go subscription model . IBM has been experimenting with the concept of a private cloud for a while. One of such experiments included creating a private virtual cloud inside the firewall to deploy some of the regions of SecondLife with seamless navigation in and out of the firewall....
Lire la suite