Google shows off in-house browser beta

Open-source 'Chrome' promises security as well as efficiency.

Ever-expanding web giant Google has released an early version of its own browser, developed in house but under open-source principles, with a number of built-in security systems and techniques supplementing new ideas for speed and efficiency.

The browser, dubbed 'Chrome', will include alerts from Google's database of known-bad sites, including sites carrying malware, whenever the user attempts to visit them or turns up links to them in search results. To further combat phishing, the address bar highlights the domain portion of the URL, to make it clearer when a spoofed site is visited.

Perhaps most significantly from a security viewpoint, the individual tabs of the browser, each operated as a separate process, will be run in a sandbox designed to minimise access to the machine underneath. Speculation that this kind of integrated sandboxing would emerge in a browser product has been rife since Google's acquisition of browser sandboxing specialist GreenBorder, 15 months ago.

The browser is currently available for Windows only, with Mac and Linux versions expected soon. A blog entry announcing the beta issue is here, with a comic book detailing the new ideas and development process here. It can be downloaded for trial from here.

03 September 2008

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1 comment

There have been quite a few reports of problems with this, some vulnerabilities including the 'carpet bombing' bug that hit safari a while back and also some very dodgy-sounding data gathering behaviour. I guess that's why it's still a beta (although going by Google's record it could stay that way for a long time...)

by Paul Westlake, 09 September 2008, 13:43