Thought Garage

Google is really obsessed with "Speed". Google’s browser Chrome is already the fastest browser in the world (2X the nearest competitor) and here is some news that will just blow your mind. Your web could get 2X faster. Wow!!!!

Today we’d like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

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So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance – pages loaded up to 55% faster.

Source:Chromium Blog: A 2x Faster Web

“One surprise I discovered during the process was that IE8 includes a Cross Site Scripting filter which effectively blocked this attack. I’m very impressed with the effort that Microsoft’s taken to mitigate one of the most common web application security issues. Every other browser vendor needs to add this functionality yesterday.”

http://brian.mastenbrook.net/display/36

Google Chrome, the fastest browser in the world was created by one simple thought. How do you design a browser knowing what and how we are using the browser NOW and in the days to come. Unlike improving on a browser that was created at the early stages of web. So, without a doubt, Google Chrome is the fastest of all when it comes to doing what a browser is supposed to do, browse the web.

We have recently watched another amazing web application from Google, called Google Wave. A radically intuitive collaboration system designed with similar line of thought, ‘how do you design an email if you have to design it today’.

Now Google is extending this thought to something big, really BIG. The thought is ‘how do you design an OS knowing what and how people are using it’. Quite unequivocally, the answer is ‘mostly’ web again.  Web is the core of everything we do on a computer. So why not create a OS that just does that. And nothing else. So it could be fastest, most secure and probably comes at a fraction of the cost (read it as FREE). And that will be Google’s next step, called Google Chrome OS. 

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Source: Google Blog

Way to go Google !