Everybody seems to think the launch of the Google Chrome browser is very important and cool. Probably because Google itself is considered important and cool. I am a bit more skeptical about the whole Google thing, they seem to building themselves into a pretty dangerous monopoly company… but there are some interesting architectural and parallel computing aspects to Chrome — and Internet Explorer 8, it turns out.
Both IE8 and Chrome have taken to running each tab of a multi-tab browser as its own protected process, to make it both parallel processing and to increase robustness. I think that is a very good idea, and I am waiting for Firefox to catch up.
Why does running a browser as a parallel program make sense? If you look at the tradition, when the web started, you would load a page, render it, and read it for a long time. With multiple tabs and windows, each such display was really also just a set of static prints of pages that you flipped between. No point in being parallel there. However, in recent years, the web page model is changing. Pages are becoming far more active, starting a long time ago with Java applets, Active-X controls, and similar, and today the main drivers seem to be Javascript/AJAX/Web 2.0 pages and media players like Flash and Silverlight.
Basically, we see another example of a domain change enabling parallel processing to be applied. The domain of web pages has changed from single-shot renderings of single pages at a time, which is essentially serial, to lots of active programs running at the same time.
I think we are going to see more of parallel processing being used to enable richer user experience. This is one way that the world is making use of the increase in computing power and communications bandwidth, just because it is there. It gives us a nice sea of threads to run in parallel — the only issue probably being IO bandwidth and cache restrictions of single chips.
The use of processes for robustness is kind of an application-level virutalization. The OS provides isolation between processes, just like virtualization provide isolation between operating systems.
Also, a purpose of Chrome seems to be push other browsers to finally implement features like private browsing and really high-performance Javascript machines.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9114486 is about the private browsing issue.