I chanced upon the Google Chrome comics here: http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/ and i was pretty impressed with the one process per tab concept. Is this the first time a browser has used the concept? It's a pretty simple idea and brilliant to boot
Yes it is the first browser to implement each tab in a different process (some tabbed browsers haven't even had threads, so a hold up in one tab locked the entire app), and no, it's not really a brilliant idea. The advantage is that each web page is isolated from the others, so a problem with the page can't take down all your other tabs/windows. That's not the page's fault, though. Doing this is basically an admission that they can't write a browser without bugs that will take down the app. That's basically the cardinal sin of web development: allowing bad input to fuck up your application. Also, it's horribly inefficient compared to using threads, probably the reason no-one else thought to do it before: everyone will tell you it's the wrong way to build an application. The Right Way(TM) is to eliminate the bugs, not skirt the issue by offloading the task to the OS.
That's the theory. In practice, all browsers have such bugs, and they've side-stepped another big problem browsers have in memory leaks where they take up 100s of MB after a few hours/days. You don't get memory leaks from dead processes. Depending on how the browser's implemented, it could also help protect against cross-site scripting (if cookies and state aren't shared across pages).
Given that it uses the same WebKit HTML renderer that Safari does and that processes are fatter than threads, the speed of the browser is probably down to V8, Google's own JavaScript engine. It's 4-5 times faster than the engines in other current browsers.
However, WebKit and Firefox both have comparably fast, new JavaScript engines in current development versions. Microsoft is probably shitting itself because this will make webapps every bit as responsive as the bloated shite they run on their latest OS.
Can't wait for the Linux and/or Mac version to come out to have a play with it.
