Where is the chink in Google Chrome's armor?

Question

While browsing with Chrome, I noticed that it responds extremely fast (in comparison with IE and Firefox on my laptop) in terms of rendering pages, including JavaScript heavy sites like gmail.

This is what googlebook on Chrome has to say

1. tabs are hosted in process rather than thread.
2. compile javascript using V8 engine as opposed to interpreting.
3. Introduce new virtual machine to support javascript heavy apps
4. introduce "hidden class transitions" and apply dynamic optimization to speed up things.
5. Replace inefficient "Conservative garbage colllection" scheme with more precise garbage collection scheme.
6. Introduce their own task scheduler and memory manager to manage the browser environment.

All this sounds so familiar, and Microsoft has been doing such things for long time.. Windows os, C++, C# etc compilers, CLR, and so on.

So why isn't Microsoft or any other browser vendor taking Chrome's approach? Is there a flaw in Chrome's approach? If not, is the rest of browser vendor community caught unaware with Google's approach?

Answer 1

Chrome's approach is difficult to write, and requires forethought from the developers. IE and Firefox are both attempting to move to a process-per-tab model, but due to backwards compatibility are not able to transition quickly. Chrome, being an entirely new browser build on a clean rendering engine (WebKit), was easier to write in this way.

Answer 2

They have crossed over from a web browser as a tool to view web pages, to a tool optimized to work for web applications. There may be some flaws in this initial release, but they are changing the game.