After graduating from the University of Auckland with a computer engineering degree, Ben Goodger, now 28, scored a job with the AOL-owned Netscape - the company whose web browser ruled the mid 1990s, and now forms the bones of the Mozilla Foundation's open source Firefox.

From Netscape he moved to Mozilla to work as an interface lead on Firefox, the insurgent that gained more than 20% market share against Microsoft's dominant IE in most countries (which will explain a lot for people who were curious why the beta versions of Firefox 1.0 had codenames like "One Tree Hill", "Greenland" and "Royal Oak").

Google, one of the companies bankrolling Mozilla, noticed Goodger's success and poached him to help found then lead interface development on its top secret project to create its own web browser, Chrome. For two years up to its September launch, Goodger and his team chew through their work with, amazingly, nary a leak reaching the outside world. 

Goodger, who when not tweaking browsers is remodelling a 1964 ranch style home in Los Altos Hills, California, recently answered a few questions for KeallHauled:

CK: What was it like being part of a two-year secret project? How did they stop getting the word out?

BG: It's been a pretty exciting time. One of the advantages of our approach is that we've been able to go back to the drawing board and really re-think every aspect of the modern browser. We started out as a sort of "skunk-works" project even within Google, which helped keep the secret well... secret. This also meant we were able to try out a lot of crazy ideas without being in the spotlight, which was useful in the formative stages of the project. In the end, we took the stuff that worked, stripped out all the stuff that didn't, and the result is Google Chrome.

CK: What aspects of Chrome are you most proud of?
BG: I think we've been able to build a pretty groundbreaking product. The first and foremost thing I'm proud of is something a little less tangible: our ability to challenge conventional wisdom about browser design.

I've been working on browsers for almost ten years, so I know how hard it can be sometimes to break free of the constraints of having to take an incremental approach to improvements. For example, the idea of a multi-process browser had been tossed around before, but it always seemed too daunting a challenge to actually execute on.

At the beginning of Chrome it wasn't clear that it would work, but we felt driven to push the idea as far as we could, and in the end it turned out we were able to resolve the tough problems. So I would say that the architecture is one area.

I'll extend that to the UI [user interface] too. Taking a minimalist approach to UI is risky - sometimes you can cut too much and end up with something that isn't useful.

We tried to use data wherever possible to justify our decision making. We'd do user studies and instrument our internal testing builds to see what features were popular and what weren't. In the end what I think we ended up with was a core of functionality that is truly useful, as well as powerful.

We're not done, we'll add additional functionality over time, but we wanted to start from the cleanest, purest position and add from there, rather than having to work with a bunch of legacy stuff. So we have a very clean browser window. We put the tabs at the top, because we think of Chrome more as a window manager for the web than a bulky browser with lots of toolbars and redundant code.

We focused on building features that worked invisibly to help you get to your destination, like the Omnibox which lets you search and navigate from one place, but also offers you suggestions for searches and websites, even if you've never been there before.

CK: Where do you see Chrome going next?
BG: The future can be hard to predict, and I don't have a crystal ball. We're still gathering feedback from our beta release and the team is working hard fixing bugs and making improvements in response to that feedback. We also have a number of people bringing Chrome up on Mac and Linux.

We're doing this in a systematic, methodical fashion so that we're able to bring all of Chrome's unique advantages to every platform it runs on.

CK: What's the Chrome strategy in regard to Android? It seems up to now the two projects have been run in parallel. Will they work more closely in future? Could a mobile version of Chrome supplant Android's browser at some point?

BG: I'm not a spokesperson for the Android team so I won't speak for them. Chrome is a desktop web browser, but one built on the open source WebKit rendering engine. Android is also built on WebKit. The characteristics of a mobile device and the needs of a user interface on such a device are very different from the needs of the user interface of a desktop browser. The important thing from our perspective is that we share the rendering engine, so that developers need to only write their site once.

See also:
Raw speed - hands on with Google's Chrome