Google’s Chrome browser has Vista roots
It’s emerged that Google’s Chrome browser, created using a host of open-source coding, actually includes Microsoft content. While it was used perfectly legally, Google made little mention of the Microsoft connection when launching Chrome.
It also turns out that Google may have looked through the coding behind Vista; confusingly enough the code was needed to make Chrome run safely in the service pack 2 edition of XP.
The Chrome project is run on open-source principles, meaning the entire coding behind the browser is publicly available. Scott Hanselman (pictured), a high-level programming figure at Microsoft, has dug through that code and discovered Chrome uses Microsoft’s Windows Template Library.
That’s a system used to create user interfaces for Windows using the C++ programming language. Compared with other similar systems, it allows programmers a great deal of control while keeping coding streamlined. It was actually one of the first of the few projects which Microsoft has released on an open source basis.
Chrome also uses a technology named Data Execution Prevention to help block attacks by hackers and the way Google did this has raised eyebrows. Firstly, it used an unsupported API from Microsoft. (An API – application programming interface – is effectively a go-between from an operating system to a specific program.) That means there’s no guarantee on Microsoft’s part that a future edition of Chrome would continue to work cohesively on Windows.
And secondly, as Hanselman notes, the source code for Chrome outright refers to disassembling the kernel of Vista service pack 1, the very heart of the operating system. That’s a grey legal area at best, though as it was done to keep Windows users more secure there probably won’t be any court action.
In some ways, Google has been pretty cheeky in touting its use of Apple and Mozilla material to produce Chrome while keeping relatively quiet about the Microsoft content. But Microsoft probably won’t complain too much as the incident helps downplay the long-standing debate about how fair the close ties between Windows and Internet Explorer are to rival browser producers.
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