Today Google released their new browser, Chrome. It's very pretty, sleek, and it implements an idea that's a been sorely needed in the browser space for a long time.

Chrome separates each tab into its own process, so if a page or plugin (*cough* Flash *cough*) causes a crash, it can only take out that tab. The rest of your tabs and browser instances keep going on their own.

This has been desperately needed in browsers for years. Most people keep at least one, and often several browser instances open at all times so it's quite a nuisance when some silly plugin brings the whole show down. Firefox has made some kludges to handle this, like the ability to restore a session after a crash, and they probably would have moved in this direction eventually.

Chrome also has a new, streamlined Javascript engine, v8. This, along with the robustness that a multi-process browser brings, makes Chrome an excellent platform for the web applications (like Gmail and Google Docs).

That's what Chrome is really about. If they can get it installed widely, they (and anyone else) can make an end run around Microsoft's OS monopoly. The clincher is an open document standard, which is why Microsoft has been fighting the Open Document standard so viciously, and trying to force their proprietary format through the ISO process. Without that, Microsoft can hold on to their OS monopoly by withholding Office from any serious competitors.

There are a few disappointments with Chrome. There's no ad filtering, and as yet no extension mechanism to implement it (though they've promised to rectify the latter).

Google is, of course, not going to be terribly keen about people stripping advertisements from the web, but they also will have to face the fact that it's necessary. I realize they have to walk a fine line with this, but they're in a great position to help mediate between the extremes of filtering absolutely everything (as many Firefox users do with Adblock Plus and EasyList/Element) and the downright offensive lengths some advertisers will go to to annoy the crap out of people.

Google could start a clearing house for web advertising with a voluntary code of conduct requiring advertisers to tag their ads appropriately for filtering by the browser. Public key encryption could be used to verify that an ad is released by a member in good standing. Users who don't want to see animated ads, ads with sound, ads for porn or whatever could filter those and let less obnoxious advertising through to support the sites they visit. There could even be an automatic negotiation between the browser and ad server. A user who may be willing to accept text ads could be presented with those instead of being forced to block all ads to keep the annoying ones out.

Psystar, the plucky little Mac clone company, is still selling its wares despite the legal bullying of Apple. They've hired some pretty heavy hitters themselves, so I'm not quite convinced they're really doing this on their own.

Regardless, I wish them luck. If they can force Apple to accept commoditized hardware it will be a big win for the whole industry, Apple included.

Well, except for Microsoft.

David Kirkpatrick of Fortune published an editorial on the stumbling dance between Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. He's mostly right on the old-school business issues, but he misses a lot on tech and what it means.

They seem to have gotten the idea that Microsoft's search has caught up with Google's technologically, but they provide no justification for that opinion. (On an anecdotal note, shortly after the previous entry was crawled by the msnbot, I started getting links from them on "traffic" from the UK.) It seems like he's just repeating talking points or fishing for advertising dollars.

Google is still unequivocally the best search engine to use, but Kirkpatrick is right in that this doesn't really matter much for Google's bottom line (but wrong on why). Google makes it's money by buying and selling advertising. If it owns the destinations those ads are ultimately served on, great, they get a bigger slice of the pie, but they're just as happy to split it with anyone else.

That's where Google and Microsoft part ways. Google isn't threatened by Yahoo existing alongside them offering search and mail, in fact they're quite happy to sell ads for them. Microsoft cannot stand the idea of anyone, anywhere competing with them. For them, it's all or nothing. Microsoft needs to get it's hands on all the pie, where as Google will just make more pie.

Where does Yahoo fall in this? They're just fine where they are. They're in the red, and Google isn't going to crush them for daring to compete. Microsoft would certainly like to, but they haven't the ability. Yahoo's visitors are almost all going to be people using Microsoft's operating system and browser which will default to their search engine and other things. People visiting yahoo.com have made a conscious decision not to use Microsoft's web services, and that's not going to change if Microsoft buys them.

Google can get away with buying web services because people like them (and they don't change them for the worse). People don't like Microsoft, so expect an exodus of visitors from Yahoo if they get their mits on them. Most of those will go to Google, and there will be a bloom of independent implementations of things Yahoo does well, like Flickr. Don't be surprised if Google is one of them.

Kirkpatrick thinks Google has an Ebay like hold on the ad market, but they really don't. There are lots of other similar services. Google gets the most attention because they've got a lot of goodwill, but they could easily be overtaken in this market if they pissed people off. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that's not particularly likely to happen, and they've got such a terrible reputation that they'll never be able to match Google's goodwill. Neither can traditional advertising companies, who haven't built us lots of cool toys as Google has, and who seem incapable of knowing when to say 'no' to ad buyers.

So no, Google's advantage isn't control over any market, and while they've got some cool tech, that serves mainly to increase the size of their market for everyone. Ultimately, Google's real advantage is that people don't think they're bastards.

The Register reports that anti-virus company AVG is sending out fake web traffic from its customer's IPs as they surf the web. They're identifying their bot as Internet Explorer 6. AVG claims they're doing this because they malware pages would just block or spoof their bot if it used a proper user agent.

There's a bit of outrage in some sectors, because this is driving up traffic and skewing people's logging and analysis. Some are outright blocking IE6, or redirecting the traffic to AVG's site. Of course, anyone who actually uses IE6 is being caught up in this along with the bot.

I think this might be the actual goal, and if so, I tip my hat to you grisoft, you sneaky bastards.

Ars Technica reports on an Intel blog warning developers that we need to adapt an open ended number of cores.

Intel, of course, is primarily worried about making sure people are buying the n-core chips they'll be selling in the years ahead. Of course, that doesn't mean they're wrong, but I don't think the changes, from a coder's view, are going to be as generalized as some seem to. You're not going to get the people smearing their VB on the walls or poking Sharepoint with a stick to wrangle threads. Most of those folks can't even handle pointers without cutting themselves. If they're to see any benefit, it'll have to be done for them at a lower level, and that's fine.

Now, I'm not saying we won't see big changes in how we code. We certainly will. My point in this post is that it doesn't matter. We're going to go through interesting times, and there will be lots of attempts at getting parallelization right, but this is a revolutionary rather than evolutionary change.

The really cool stuff will spring off from the side, where no one was looking. Ars correctly points out that we won't be getting "free" performance upgrades in terms of periodic increases in clock speed anymore. What's important to note is that we will, suddenly, start getting "free" processors no one really cares about because they're idling.

Expect filesystems to get a lot smarter. Need to clear IO cache? Throw a spare core at compressing it rather than just tossing it. This is easy to parallelize, so throw all the idle cores at it.

Expect virtualization to get thrown at all sorts of problems. Need backwards compatibility? Keep whatever you need running on a core in the background.

You'll likely only be running local servers for sensitive or frequently accessed large stores of data. Renting virtual server instances is going to get cheap. When you can fit a few hundred cores into 1U, the price of renting one will probably be rolled into the cost of bandwidth.

Keep in mind, Intel is far from wrong. We still need to find ways to sensibly use lots of cores for singular tasks, but the really neat things will come out of the slack that arises when we don't keep up with them.