Google have produced a comic book to announce their new open source web browser called Chrome. Drawn by renowned artist and narrative theorist Scott McCloud the thirty-eight page comic goes into a surprising amount of detail about the browser’s code architecture, user interface design and licensing philosophy.
Google Chrome will, according to the strip, use the open source HTML rendering engine Webkit that started life as part of Linux’s K Desktop Environment and has been subsequently developed by (among others) Apple and Nokia. Some of Webkit is licensed under the GNU LGPL with the remainder available under the BSD license. It will be interesting to see how closely Google works with the Webkit project in submitting back any changes they have made to the core project, particularly as it is Webkit that powers Apple’s iPhone browser mobile Safari, Nokia’s mobile Symbian browser and Google’s browser within their forthcoming mobile operating system Android.
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