Today’s announcement of Google’s Chrome and it’s use of tabs, is a clear indication of the next evolution of web apps and browsers. In order to better explain I am going to define two commonly confused terms: Web Page and Web Application.
A web page or webpage is a resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser.
A web application or webapp is an application that is accessed via web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet.
With this in mind it is important to note that Google may NOT be targeting Firefox or IE’s traditional users directly, but rather the next generation of Web App users. This is all inferred from Chromes distinct UI usage. For those you not familiar with the screenshots released by several publications here you can see a full window picture of Chrome:
Tab Usage and the Future of Extensions
In this browser, unlike any other browser out there the tabs are over the navigation. At plain sight this might seem unreasonable since you would be “redrawing” the Address bar buttons(Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh) on every single tab, unless you were planning something completely different.
Enter Mailplane, a Single Application Browser(SBA) that harnesses the power of a web app with the comfort of a desktop app. Mailplane is an app that is used to access Gmail and adds a dedicated Tool bar and several extensions(drag and drop, iPhoto plugin and more) making Gmail more Mac friendly.
What Google may be preparing for might simply be a new type of extensions or a set of web standards, that may allow a web app developer to extend Chrome to resemble what Mailplane has done for Gmail. Customized Tool bar buttons and offline use through Google Gears could replace the standard Address bar buttons to make the app more usable.
By doing all these Google might be targeting the application users rather than traditional web page viewers. Google needs this app to solidify itself in the desktop with all it’s plethora of web app.
Separated at birth
As noted from the Google post on Chrome:
By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.
So if the visual distinction indicating that a Tab = an App wasn’t enough, the underlying treatment of a tab by the system will be like that of an individual app. Multithreading usage(according to the comic) will allow the apps to be completely separate, thus improving performances.
The current state of web browsers is not app friendly, hopefully Chrome will change that through tabs.
Note: It sucks that Chrome is Windows only for now!
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