Chrome, the new Google browser, was released a couple of days ago as a beta version for Windows Vista/XP and officially entered the browser war, currently dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome offers many interesting features, aimed at making the browsing experience more robust, more secure, and faster. I was especially interested in the new V8 JavaScript engine, with its just-in-time compiler and a full-fledged garbage collector.

We tested Lightstreamer on Chrome soon after its release, and the results were amazing, as all the Comet demos worked seamlessly out of the box. I posted a quick video tour:

Some of the Lightstreamer online demos are shown in the video. I noticed a couple of Chrome features that should be particularly interesting to the Comet community:

• Chrome offers a Task manager, under the Developer menu, which reports the memory footprint and the used bandwidth for each process (one of the most appealing features of Chrome is that it runs independent Web applications as different native processes, to increase the level of sandboxing; see below). This native bandwidth meter is probably gonna be an important tool for Comet developers.
• Chrome decides whether to create a new tab as part of an existing process or in a new process based on the navigation path. I have noticed that if you open a new tab from an existing tab’s link, the new tab will live in the same process of the previous, instead of creating a new sandbox (the heuristic could probably be a bit more complex, but I won’t investigate this here). Opening multiple instances of a Comet application in the same tab space (process) or in different tab spaces affects the possibility of sharing resources. For example, Lightstreamer is able to share the Comet connection among different web applications (and different instances of the same applications) to minimize the HTTP connection pool exploitation. This happens if the applications share the same process, though based on different tabs. On the other hand, if the tabs live in different processes, they will create their own Comet connections. I consider this a wonderful trade-off. In other words, based on the level of affinity of applications, the Comet connection will be automatically shared or not.

These are just my very first thoughts. More reflection is necessary.