A few days ago, Google released its own browser, Google Chrome. As the author of a web browser (Voyager), I think they did it right. Here’s why:
Multithreaded
This is something I always wanted to implement within Voyager but it was too difficult because of GUI issues (the toolkit used was a mess to use from threads). As far as I know, the first browser implementing rendering in its own process was Internet Explorer but when they implemented tabs, they left that out. Apparently they fixed that in IE 8. The advantage to such a design is that the main GUI isn’t locked anymore when rendering CPU hungry website, and you can even switch to other tabs meanwhile. It is tricky to implement such design and I noticed some refresh problems in Chrome when writing in TEXTAREA fields for example. Scrolling speed can also become slow because the refresh is asynchronous then. But overall this is a very good idea.
Fast
Well, I’m impressed by the speed. The browser chews tons of HTML without problems. This is not just a minor speed gain but it’s really noticeable on usage. And most important, the browser launches in less than a second, without preloading files or anything. I was quite getting fed up of MSIE and Firefox taking more than 5 seconds to launch. Their JavaScript engine uses JIT techniques, which is the first time it is in a browser I think. Although I don’t think JavaScript execution speed is really a burden in most common webpages (yet) this is a nice addition.
Nifty features
The tabs drag & drop, search in the address bar (without search words being recognized as URLs or other nonsense), uncluttered GUI, automatic fullscreen mode, URL completion that actually works, all plugins working without hassle.
Stability
Not a single crash as of yet. Perfectly usable as a main browser.
So there, Chrome is now my default browser. I was getting fed up with Firefox’ bloat and MSIE had too many annoyances. Nice job Google. Chrome is how I always wanted to make Voyager like. Now good luck fixing all the quirks 🙂
Have you checked Opera ? If you want speed there’s no need to look elsewhere…
There’s no JIT yet, but overall it’s really fast 🙂
Hi
Please could you release the Amiga voyager sources so ppl can update it ?
cheers, Asy
Possible, but it’s quite some work.
what do you mean with work ?
its enough when you upload the backup of your sources you have.take maybe 15 minutes of your work.
I think there are some guys that can build a version and open a SVN.
voyager is a good base for a amiga common webbrowser, because it use MUI can work on AROS with zune.
A MUI HTML class can build with a modern browser core as OWB or webkit direct and Amiga Users get a good browser.