The Internet pundits had begun writing off Chrome, Google’s new browser,before it was barely out of its wrapping. As the first wave of early-adopter enthusiasts lost interest in their experiments and returned to their original browsers, so analysts began to declare Chrome dead. But there is a far more interesting set of dynamics at work. Google is not after Microsoft’s share of the browser market: it’s after something much bigger.

To understand what’s truly and enduringly interesting about Google Chrome, one needs to understand what is special about V8, its new Javascript engine.

Ten years ago, Java was so slow it was inconceivable that anybody could use it to build serious systems; its garbage collection process brought entire applications to a shuddering halt.  Then a new virtual machine for Java that enabled code to be compiled on the fly, improving Java’s performance 20 times or more was developed.

Hotspot changed everything: suddenly Java became a language to take very seriously indeed.

Without V8, Javascript suffers from the same problem Java had ten years ago: it’s painfully, unbelievably slow, tens or even hundreds of thousands of times slower than other languages. So despite its flexibility, it’s never been used for any kind of serious development; in fact, it’s been the single biggest hurdle to the development of more interesting applications that can run inside a browser.

There have been a few attempts to replace it as the main tool for getting functionality into the browser, notably Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flex, both of which are being pushed hard. The goal for everyone is enable as much as possible to be done inside the browser, as efficiently as possible.

Applications like Gmail and Google Maps have done amazingly well so far, but they are way out at the limits of what can be done inside a browser.

In a below-the-radar blog post at the beginning of September announcing V8, there was a mention it “has been designed for performance from the ground up. In particular, we wanted to remove some common bottlenecks that limit the amount and complexity of JavaScript code that can be used in Web applications.”

There are three cornerstones of the V8 design: Compilation of JavaScript source code directly into native machine code, an efficient memory management system resulting in fast object allocation and small garbage collection pauses, and the Introduction of hidden classes and inline caches that speed up property access and function calls.

That may not make a great deal of sense to those who aren’t programmers, but here’s the key point: V8 is fast. Very, very fast. So fast that it is now possible, for the first time, to develop seriously functionality inside a web browser without relying on obese plugins.

Security is also much tighter with V8. Every tab opened in the browser is a separate process that is well sandboxed, allowing no leakage of malignant code. In other existing browsers, even Firefox, all tabs use a single execution thread and a single process, making the whole vulnerable to security problems.

Slow runtime environments have been the biggest stumbling block to moving more functionality off the desktop and into the browser; with that removed, things are really going to take off. Google Docs, for one, will gather enormous strength, possibly making it a real alternative to Microsoft Office for the first time.

Which brings us back to the starting point: Google is not interested in winning browser market share, it’s interested in replacing entire operating systems.