Chrome was designed to improve on the way other browsers handle JavaScript

Chrome is a challenge to Microsoft's browser, used by aboutthree-quarters of Web surfers. But it could equally be called achallenge to Microsoft's Office software suite, because what Googlereally wants to do is to make the browser a stable and flexibleplatform that can do practically everything we want to do with acomputer, from word processing and e-mail to photo editing.
To strengthen that effort, Chrome was designed to improve on theway other browsers handle JavaScript, one of the technologies usedto make Web pages more interactive and more like desktop softwareapplications. Google's online word processing and spreadsheetprograms use this technology, but it's also very widely deployed onWeb pages to do less sophisticated things, like drop-down menus.
At first blush, Google's focus on JavaScript makes sense.JavaScript can eat up computer processor power, and if poorly usedby a Web site, can bring down the browser. One of the things Chromepromises is that if one browser tab crashes, it won't take down thewhole program.
Chrome also has some cosmetic differences from Internet Explorerand Firefox, like putting the tabs at the very top of the window.That's a nice move, but it's the browser's performance that reallymatters to me. And this is where Chrome's attention to JavaScriptmight miss the point.
At work, I often have 40 or 50 tabs open in Firefox, grouped indifferent windows depending on which topic they pertain to.Frequently, Firefox would slow down all the other applications onmy computer, then seize up completely.
At first I thought JavaScript was to blame, and blocked it fromrunning. But that made many sites unusable, and it didn't help: Thebrowser still froze.
It turns out the culprit is not JavaScript but another technologyused to make Web pages more interactive: Adobe Systems Inc. 's Flash plug-in. It's the program-within-a-program that playsYouTube videos and those annoying "splash" pages thatsome sites employ to dazzle you with animations before letting youdo anything useful on the site.
Flash is a tremendous resource hog in Firefox, eating up processortime to the point where there is nothing left for other programs.It does this even if you're not actively doing anything. Merelyhaving a YouTube page open on your screen will suck power from yourcomputer's central processing unit, or CPU. This is outrageousbehavior for a browser. It's my CPU and I want it back.
Luckily, there's a small add-on program for Firefox that lets theuser prevent Flash files from running automatically when a pageloads, and it turns Firefox into a stable, efficient browser.
What does this mean on Chrome? Well, it has the same problem. Itlets sites running Flash take over your computer's resources. Itdoesn't hog the CPU quite as bad as with Firefox, but in a way,it's more serious, because unlike with Firefox, there's no way toprevent Flash from running. Chrome's controls are quite bare-bones,perhaps because it's still in "beta."