With the release of Google Chrome just coming up tomorrow, by now the blogosphere should be on fire with all the screenshots and juicy details. Even though I see Google Chrome as something that means more to the user than to the developer, there are certain goodies in Google Chrome that aim to provide a better platform for developers. What's the implication for web developers here?

• A stronger push for WebKit. This addresses some moans I saw on Digg (or is it Slashdot?) that could basically be summarized as "oh, great, now we have another fugging browser to debug." Google chose WebKit as the rendering engine for Chrome, so as a web developer, if your current pages and apps work on Safari, it's probably going to work fine on Chrome.
• The V8 JavaScript virtual machine. Google apparently developed their own JavaScript engine and sources show that V8 can at times be up to 10x faster than Tracemonkey, Mozilla's recent effort to integrate Tamarin tracing into the existing SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. With IE 8 Beta 2 also having an about 400% percent perf increase in their JScript engine, web developers can start worrying less about the performance constraints of JavaScript and start writing better web apps. I'm probably going to have some SunSpider benchmarks to do when Chrome is released tomorrow.
• Gears included. Just having a better JS engine doesn't seem enough for Google, so they also included Gears, which provides developers a client-side database storage to enable offline usage for web apps.

JavaScript is gaining more and more momentum as the Web moves forward as a platform and developers will no doubt find themselves held back when writing JavaScript. Drupal is already at least 8% JavaScript and I'd like to see more. JavaScript was, is, and will be the lingua franca of the Web!