The Company
Microsoft is a giant software company that holds the monopoly of PC operating systems around the world. Company started in 1975 and come all the way up till 2008 with an unbelievable growth. This giant company started their own graphical web browser in 1995 to compete with Netscape. Name was Internet Explorer Version 1.0 commonly known as IE. IE’s first release was an additional software piece bundled to the add-on package of Windows 95. After that it was available as a free download in the internet. Recently Microsoft has release their latest version of IE, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 with new set of features.
Google! On the other hand a company with tremendous growth over a short period of time and now has become the number one revenue generator in the IT industry. Company has a clear vision and a mission which leads them to the top of the IT world. Google dominates the search engine world and also powered with additional services like free mail service-Gmail, earth viewing-Google Maps, video-Google videos and many more. Latest news from this excellent company is that they have released their first ever graphical web browser, “Chrome”.
Web Browser
Web Browser is a sophisticated software application that enable its users to search, view and interact with information and other materials like videos, music etc, that are available electronically. Web browsers allow users to roam around the World Wide Web by going through available links and web addresses. There are hundreds of thousands of web pages available in the Internet, those contain various information that is accessible through a web browser.
It doesn’t mean that web browsers are only used in the World Wide Web; it can also be used to access locally hosted web pages and other applications that are developed to be compatible with the graphical web browsers. It can also be used as a content viewer of the file system.
Google Chrome Beta
Chrome browser development has started as an open source project at Google in order to initiate a new era of web browsers which supports today’s web applications effectively. Most of the web pages that are viewed in a browser today are probably a web application rather a simple HTML web page.
Google has introduced ample new technologies to the browser world along with Chrome and those have made Chrome a stable, faster and a secure web browser. Instead of traditional single-threaded rendering mechanism, chrome has introduced multi-process architecture which has its own memory space and its own global data structure. So each tab has its own process which increases the browser stability to its maximum. Because of this multi-process architecture if one tab gets crashed it will not affect any of the other tabs, only the crashed tab will be the sad tab with "AW-Snap". Users also can view these processors, usage of memory and CPU they consume with the use of Chrome task manger facility. Even plug-ins have their own process running which of cause can be seen in the task manager of Chrome. Don’t forget to click on the “Status for nerds” if you are really a nerd and in need of seeing more precise data about the process memory usage.
V8 is a Java Scripts Virtual Machine for chrome which is far more advanced than the typical Java Script engines used in ordinary web browsers. V8 gives a power to Chrome by executing heavy java scripts within milliseconds. V8 is capable of dynamic code generation which gives more speed. Further, it has a highly efficient garbage collection mechanism. So developers do not need to worry any more to load their web applications with fancy java scripts pieces, they simply have V8 now!
So what is the significant difference the end user can see other than these technological jargons? In Chrome main feature that end user will see is Tabs. Tabs that can be attached or detached by simply drag and drop them where ever you prefer, and tabs that have their own set of controls including a URL bar known as Omni box. Omni box is not just a URL bar. It has an inbuilt Google search and also offer search suggestions. It also shows the list of previous site that the user has visited.
Chrome has also introduced a new mode of browsing called “incognito mode” which allows users to browse through any site they want without having a history or history search and without saving any cookies in the computer.
One last feature that the end user will be interested is that the safe browsing. It will warn the user when a user gets in to a site that might harmful. Because chrome has very large list of harmful sites and it matches the site that the user visits with the list.
This is not everything about Google Chrome, besides this is merely a few of the fantastic things that anybody could see when looking at newly born baby. If you look for more, there will be definitely much much more things available about what this excellent piece of software can do.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
Microsoft has released their latest version of Internet Explorer that is version 8 beta 2 with a list of newer features. IE 8 also uses a multi-process architecture but not like in Chrome. IE 8 doesn’t create process for each tab, it is sort of a hybrid model which creates several instances of IE and shares them among the running tabs. Here again if a tab crashed no affect to the other tabs as user can simply kill the iexplorer instance that is not responding without harming the other running tabs. Further the automatic crash recovery mechanism reloads the tabs that got crashed and takes the user to the page that was there in that tab before crashing.
Microsoft has also improved the script engine which responds more quickly for Java Scripts and AJAX than earlier versions.
When it comes to user experience IE 8 has introduced a new set of features which are not there in their previous versions of IE. Web Slicer is one of the eye catching feature which allows users to view only a part of a web page that is frequently updating without going to the full site again and again.
‘InPrivate’ is another feature that is also available in Chrome which allows user to brows without a trace. Which means no search history, no cookies, no saving of user name passwords etc.
IE 8 has ‘SmartScreen’ filter which provides the warnings to the end users about harmful web sites that are listed as unsafe.
When it comes to the list of features and the use of hardware of a computer both the Browsers are much similar and both take the Web applications to the new era of internet. Users will experience and enjoy these fabulous features of both bowers. However Chrome has introduced few original concepts to the world of web browsers. Most importantly although IE 8 is free, Chrome is free and it is also an Open Source project where the whole world contributes to its technology, ideas and to numerous other things.
