Google playing catch-up with HeidiSQL?

... probably not :-). But Google has just released a new web browser named Chrome, which touts a feature known as process isolation:



Each browsing session is isolated in its own operating system process, but at the same time the browser is aware of and communicates with all of them.

This is exactly what HeidiSQL has been doing since version 3.2 (actually, since r233 and r237).

Granted, Google's interface for switching between processes using tabs:



is infinitely sexier than HeidiSQL's window list (also found on the "connect" dropdown button):



... ahem. Theirs is just darn sweet. You have to play with it a little to get a feel for all the smooth detail that went into making Google Chrome work.

Tab-based browsing was all the hype back then, and switching between the processes using tabs had of course been discussed at length by the HeidiSQL team and users. There were (and are) too few HeidiSQL developers, none of which knew the Win32 API good enough to bend around the restrictions Microsoft imposes on modifying the title bar of a window or to paint two processes inside one window to make things work at the time. So we basically gave up at the idea stage.

It's wonderful to see somefirm like Google pave the way and prove that it can be done! We'd just love to copy the tab-container-window part of the GUI to HeidiSQL at some point.

Meanwhile, development on HeidiSQL is happily progressing towards a 4.0 RC release, which will feature unrelated (but also pretty) things. One that I am in particular proud of is the new user manager, which I think is very suave:



Feel free to comment on your favorite issues in the tracker, talk in the forum or join in the development!