Google marked today’s second anniversary of the Chrome browser with a web retrospective: “Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome.”
“Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project …”
The “research project” linked from the Google post was a Hotnets talk by UW CSE’s Charlie Reis — now a Ph.D. alumnus and Google Seattle employee — describing work he did with UW CSE professors Steve Gribble and Hank Levy, “Architectural Principles for Safe Web Programs.” Aware of the work, Google Seattle site director Brian Bershad invited Charlie to join the Chrome team, where Charlie contributed to Chrome’s process structure as part of his Ph.D. work. The fact that Chrome was an open source project meant that the arrangement was no mess, no fuss, no bother — just lots of benefit for all concerned.