Although Chrome is now even a year old (counting the public exposure), it has certainly affected the browser landscape. Not only was, and is, Chrome unique and noticable, but also simply a true technological leap.

First of all Chrome introduced V8, their own new JavaScript engine that uses a new way of compiling JavaScript files giving it an enormous performance boost. Not long after the folks from Apple working on WebKit announced SquirrelFish Extreme, which gave it another leap on their SquirrelFish effort. SquirrelFish Extreme, later renamed Nitro actually surpassed V8 in several benchmarks. Not long after this war started Mozilla joined in the fray as well, announcing TraceMonkey which showed significant improvements over the old JavaScript JIT-compiler, following (but not really beating) V8 and Nitro on an honorable level. This is just one example how a browser launch affected the environment. As we speak Opera Software is also working on their new JavaScript, which should get it back in the running of fastest browsers (as they're currently not on the JavaScript side).

Another big invented here thing from Google is the multi-process browser, Chrome (with some configuration options) starts a new process for each domain opened in a tab. Although this will cost you a bit more memory (as each processes needs some additional memory usage for non-sharable parts), it does offers really compelling features, such as increased stability and security. Security is interesting as each process is separated, they cannot access each others memory (easily), giving it much more of a sandbox feeling. The other compelling feature is stability. Now with the web turning into sites and web apps (such as Google Mail and Wave), it becomes much more interesting and important that the browser doesn't crash. With Google's option to create shortcuts of web sites, web apps will almost be seamless with your desktop. And you don't want your Google Mail or Wave to crash while you were visiting a dodgy site which triggered a bug in your browser, do you?

The folks at Mozilla didn't think so either. The problem is that Firefox is of course an existing browser, while Chrome was made from the ground up with these concepts. So in order to take on this big task they've divided it into phases. Currently Phase-I should be complete, which demonstrates content in separate processes. There's still a lot of work to be done, and it's not completely certain yet in which release it will be ready, but it's a big progress and it's really good to see Mozilla taking competition and the concept seriously.

With Microsoft using a similar approach in Internet Explorer 8, I hope that the others will follow soon as well, being Safari and Opera.