Drafting a browser

After my latest post about Google Chrome, I was pondering how to use the process separating system on other projects or making a own browser with the same idea. Fortunately I found that there's GtkSocket and GtkPlug. With them you can easily embed other processes on a main process.

So we need a main application, which creates tabs and takes care of handling them. Quite easy job to do. When creating a new tab showing a new GtkSocket inside it. Socket id is passed to a new process, for example by launching a new process with exec and passing socket id (numeric value) as a command line agument. That's about the minimal required functionality for the main process. It just handles tabs and launches other processes.

The client application reads the numeric socket id from it's command line arguments, creates a new GtkPlug with gtk_plug_new (socket id as a parameter). Now it can just draw any Gtk+ widgets on that GtkPlug widget and show them. So now we can draw, let's say, a URL bar and for example WebKit/Gtk on that GtkPlug widget. And let's define some signals that when typing URL on the URL bar the URL will be opened on the WebKit/GTK. Now the client app is ready.

And what do we have now? A main app, which opens tabs, launches a client app and passes GtkSocket id for it. Client shows URL bar and WebKit. The contents of client app is shown inside the main app's tab view. Isn't that now a simple web browser, where every tab is running it's own, separate process? Somebody could now catch the idea and continue working on this kind of approach. And that's not just browsers. The GtkSocket is normat Gtk+ widget, which can be used like any other widget. One could make very interesting apps where one main app embeds other processes inside it and showing their content. Now anybody got some ideas? At least I do...

Google Chrome

Recently Google announced their web browser project called Chrome. They also released beta version for Windows. It seems to be a interesting project. Especially when they say that it's released as open source.

The main renderer of Chrome is based on Webkit. Webkit is quite good browser engine used for example by Apple Safari, Nokia S60 web browser and Google Android. On top of that Google has made it's own JavaScript engine, which seems to be faster than any other JavaScript engine on the market.

One good idea on Chrome is that every tab is it's own process. Also JavaScript runs on it's own thread making the web experience more better. Since traditional browser runs all tasks in queue it means that when one task is taking a long time, others must wait for it.

My first impressions about Google Chrome is that it includes great innovations and ideas, but I have also my doubts. There been also criticism about the EULA. What I'm waiting is that other browsers adapts ideas from Google Chrome and so everybody would benefit even if they don't want to use the Google's browser. I'm sure that Mozilla Firefox project will react soon. Better browsing times are about to come...