Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Extensions at Google I/O
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Today I gave a presentation at
Google I/O
explaining some of the cool ideas that lie at the heart of our upcoming
extension system
. For those who didn't get a chance to attend the conference, you can check out the slides, below:
The actions menu, visible in full-screen mode, will let you show speaker notes. We'll also post a video of the talk as soon as it's available.
As some of you know, it's already possible to write
extensions
using the latest developer build of Google Chrome. You can find out more about the system, and learn how to write your first extension, by reading our
HOWTO
document. We've really focused on making extensions as easy as possible to write, so you'll be up and running in no time.
We're still pretty early in the development of the extensions system, and we're constantly adding new features and tweaking the APIs based on your feedback. So if you try it out, we'd love to hear from you at
chromium-discuss@chromium.org
.
Happy coding!
Update:
Video of this talk is now
available
, as are videos of a number of other
Google Chrome-related talks
.
Posted by Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer
Scaling JavaScript to Large Web Applications
Thursday, May 21, 2009
The V8 JavaScript engine has been designed for scalability. What does scalability mean in the context of JavaScript and why is it important for modern web applications?
Web applications are becoming more complex. With the increased complexity comes more JavaScript code and more objects. An increased number of objects puts additional stress on the memory management system of the JavaScript engine, which has to scale to deal efficiently with object allocation and reclamation. If engines do not scale to handle large object heaps, performance will suffer when running large web applications.
In browsers without a
multi-process architecture
, a simple way to see the effect of an increased working set on JavaScript performance is to log in to GMail in one tab and run JavaScript benchmarks in another. The objects from the two tabs are allocated in the same object heap and therefore the benchmarks are run with a working set that includes the GMail objects.
V8's approach to scalability is to use
generational garbage collection
. The main observation behind generational garbage collection is that most objects either die very young or are long-lived. There is no need to examine long-lived objects on every garbage collection because they are likely to still be alive. Introducing generations to the garbage collector allows it to only consider newly allocated objects on most garbage collections.
Splay: A Scalability Benchmark
To keep track of how well V8 scales to large object heaps, we have added a new benchmark, Splay, to
version 4
of the V8 benchmark suite. The Splay benchmark builds a large
splay tree
and modifies it by creating new nodes, adding them to the tree, and removing old ones. The benchmark is based on a JavaScript log processing module used by the V8 profiler and it effectively measures how fast the JavaScript engine can allocate nodes and reclaim unused memory. Because of the way splay trees work, the engine also has to deal with a lot of changes to the large tree.
We have measured the impact of running the Splay benchmark with different splay tree sizes to test how well V8 performs when the working set is increased:
The graph shows that V8 scales well to large object heaps, and that increasing the working set by more than a factor of 7 leads to a performance drop of less than 17%. Even though 35 MB is more memory than most web applications use today, it is necessary to support such working sets to enable tomorrow's web applications.
Posted by Mads Ager and Kasper Lund, Software Engineers
Chromium Tech Talks
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Since starting work at Google, I've formed a deep appreciation for the number of high quality talks we have access to here (both
technical
and
not
). Reading code and documentation is pretty much unavoidable when you're a developer, but you really can't beat hearing directly from the expert's mouth on topics that you're interested in.
Last Wednesday, 5 Chromium experts gave mini tech talks on subjects ranging from the network stack to hacking on WebKit. Armed with 2 video cameras, a microphone, and a whiteboard, we did the best we could to capture these talks and make them available to Chromium developers around the world. Whether you're a seasoned Chromium contributor or just getting started, I think these videos have a lot to offer.
Here's a rundown of the videos:
Darin Fisher
talking about Chromium's multi-process architecture
Brett Wilson
talking about the various layers of Chromium
Dimitri Glazkov
talking about hacking on WebKit
Ben Goodger
talking about Views (and how to write good tests for them)
Wan-Teh Chang and Eric Roman
talking about Chromium's network stack (and its history)
I hope these are just the first of many tech talks we can offer to you, the Chromium community.
Posted by Jeremy Orlow, Software Engineer
Guest post: 3D graphics in the browser
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Today, we shared with the open source community an early version of
O3D
, a new shader-based API for 3D graphics in the browser. We are excited about this release: we believe that a 3D API for the web will allow web developers to create powerful, immersive 3D apps, that are comparable to the experience offered by client applications and game consoles. This will make the web better, not to mention more fun!
O3D is still at an early stage and is not a part of the Chromium code base. However, we hope that, combined with projects like Mozilla's
Canvas 3D
, it will encourage the discussion within the graphics and web communities about a new open web standard on 3D graphics for the web. With JavaScript (and browsers) becoming faster every day, we believe it is the right time for such a standard to emerge. To help you participate in this broader discussion, Google has created a forum where you can
submit suggestions
on what features a 3D API for the web should have.
If you are interested to learn more about O3D, you can visit us at
code.google.com/apis/o3d
.
A video of the O3D Beach Demo
Posted by Henry Bridge, O3D Product Manager and Gregg Tavares, Software Engineer
Chromium and Google Summer of Code
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Time is quickly running out for the students to apply for this year's
Google Summer of Code
.
The Chromium project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this awesome program. This means that over the summer, you have the opportunity to work on new and exciting features for Chromium (and supporting projects) and experience browser development first-hand with a mentor from the project and real deadlines.
Full guidelines and details on how to apply can be found on the official
gsoc website
. To participate, pick an idea off our
handy list
or suggest one of your own (it's best to discuss it with a mentor first), then write up a proposal on how you'd go about accomplishing the task in the allotted time frame (3 months).
You can find a list of suggested topics
here
. These are only recommendations though, feel free to stop by our
mailing list
or
irc channel
and suggest something new. If you do decide to write your own proposal, we're looking for familiarity with the codebase, and lots of intelligent detail. The more details you can provide, the better!
Student registration
runs from the 23rd of March until the 3rd of April. We're looking forward to seeing the project submissions and expanding our community involvement.
Posted by Jeremy Moskovich, Software Engineer
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Since we launched Google Chrome in September of 2008, we've tried to provide insight into the product and its development here on the Chromium blog. In that time, we've made a lot of changes to Google Chrome to provide a better experience, and now that change is coming to the Chromium Blog. This morning, we launched a new blog, called the
Google Chrome Blog
.
The Google Chrome Blog is intended to highlight points of interest to general users, in a way that is accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It's where you will read about new features that have been released, find interesting tips on how to get the most out of Google Chrome, and stay plugged into the product in general. Many of the types of posts that previously would have surfaced here, such as announcements of our
spell-checking improvements
, will now appear on this new blog instead of the Chromium blog.
Have no fear, the Chromium blog will still exist, but now with a renewed focus on the original purpose of the Chromium blog. The blog will be dedicated to announcements of things that are happening within the Chromium project itself. We've always felt it important that, as an open source product, we do our work in the open (from
general
and
technical
discussion groups to
code reviews
to
design docs
) and stay in touch with the open source community. We're going to take this opportunity to try to be more communicative about project status, and news of note particularly to the developer community. We hope these changes make for a better experience for you, so please
let us know
what you think!
Posted by Ian Fette, Product Manager
Distributed Reliability Testing
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
We want Google Chrome to be as stable as possible. No matter what site you browse to or what you do, Chrome should never crash. A system we call "distributed reliability testing" is one of the main tools we use to help turn that goal into reality.
One of the advantages to being associated with Google is that we have access to a lot of information about the Web, and a lot of computers to test on. About once an hour, our distributed test infrastructure takes the very latest version of Google Chrome in development and uses it to automatically load a large number of the pages that Google has seen are most popular around the world. When it's done, it produces a report like this on the
Buildbot waterfall
that all our developers (and anyone else) can see:
Results for top 500 web sites:
success: 499; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 1
Results for top 500 web sites without sandbox:
success: 463; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 2
Results for extended list of web sites:
success: 99768; crashes: 3; crash dumps: 3; timeout: 463
Here the final test got through a bit over 100,000 pages before stopping to make way for the next build to be tested. And before each
Dev, Beta, or Stable channel
release, we run with a much larger number of URLs.
In addition, we "fuzz-test" the user interface, automatically performing arbitrary sequences of actions (opening a new tab, pressing the spacebar, opening various dialogs, etc. — a total of more than 30 possible actions). These are also run in our distributed testing architecture, so we can exercise thousands of combinations for each new version of Google Chrome in progress. The same report that shows the page-load results above collects these UI test results too:
Results for automated UI test:
success: 64643; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 0
This sort of large-scale testing is great for finding crashes that happen only rarely, or that only affect pages that developers wouldn't have visited as part of their haphazard manual testing. By catching a problem right away even if it's very rare, it's easier for developers to figure out what change caused the error and fix it before it ever gets close to showing up in Google Chrome itself.
Posted by Pamela Greene and Patrick Johnson, Software Engineers
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