But this is particularly awesome. Via reddit.

So, Chris, Tom, and I were talking about this post at Blogoscoped. Aside from the fact that IMO the entire thing smells more than a little hinkey (a paper comic shows up in this guy’s physical mail box, but no where else?), we were studying information contained within the comic. By the way, I’m not saying it’s all fake, but something’s not right; maybe I’ll talk more about that later.

Writing a Javascript engine is hard. Writing a brand new one from the ground up is going to take very smart people. The only names we found for the V8 Javascript VM team were Lars Bak and Kasper Lund. We were able to find some info about these guys. Kasper has a Linked In profile, and a very interesting master’s thesis. His thesis even mentions work by Lars Bak, the co-founder of OOVM, speaker at this year’s JAOO Conference. Lars’s profile doesn’t reflect his Google employment status, but that conference page shows us that is indeed an employee of Google, and a preview of Kasper’s Linked Profile shows us he is too.

So we can confirm that the only people explicitly identified as the V8 team are both very smart, and Google employees. I find it credible to think these guys led a team to create a new JS VM.  How well it’s going to run right now is another matter.

As for their use of Webkit versus Gecko, while I find their reason for using webkit (small footprint, easy embedding, easy learning curve for the codebase) to be entirely believable, I don’t think that was the only factor. I think they chose not to use Gecko also for political reasons. It would become a direct competitor to Mozilla’s Firefox, which whom they just renewed their deal for 3 more years instead of the previous 2 year deals. Chris put it in a way I agree with 100%, that Google would rather fail miserably with a browser and let Firefox become dominant than splinter the Firefox market and allow IE to retain control. By using Webkit, they introduce another OSS browser into the mix to chip away at IE and help put more pressure on web developers to create standards compliant, cross platform code. It’s not great news for Web Devs who now will have yet ANOTHER browser to work with (yes it’s Webkit, but a new JS engine, so you can’t just check against Safari or Konqueror and be done with it), but it’s good news for users, and Google, who wants to keep Microsoft from choking the web as they have the desktop.

We have no idea when Google Chrome will be released, nor even when it will officially be announced. A dead-tree comic in a blogger’s mail box is a funny way to announce things. Did Blogoscoped ignore an embargo? Did someone at Google send this out ahead of time? Why does Blogoscoped say that the comic is CC licenced? Why don’t we get a scan of the cover, or authorship information? We can only take his word for it on who created the comic, although some of the facts seem to line up. why don’t we get a scan of the envelope, or anything to help confirm this source? No answers to these questions yet, but we’re still looking.

Update: Google’s official announcement. Also, an apology to Blogoscoped. While I was right that something was hinkey, it turns out that it was Google, not Blogoscoped. The one possibility I didn’t think about seriously was that someone at Google simply screwed up and sent it out early. Occam’s Razor had cut me again.