Google Chrome: Performance and First Impressions
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 3, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Software
Compatibility
Google is in a unique position to test the compatibility of something like a browser, given that the company has servers that spend their days indexing the entirety of the internet. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to pull from that index and produce a reasonable set of test cases for Chrome.
Plugins like Flash just work, which is nice, but not all websites play nicely with Chrome. Take a look at NVIDIA’s Force Within download page:
The download box won’t load and you’re out of luck with Chrome. Fortunately the NVIDIA example is the exception, for the most part Chrome has been working just fine for me. How about all of you?
Chrome passes the Acid2 test, but gets a 74/100 in the Acid3 test. That’s compared to 78/100 for Safari, 13/100 for IE7 (Wikipedia lists it as a 14 but I was unable to get anything higher than 13) and 71/100 for FF3.
At least Chrome does better than IE7 in the Acid3 test:
Nice
Final Words
In short - I like Chrome. It’s small, quick, efficient, and my only major complaint is that there’s no OS X version yet. As much as I hate having an overly crowded market, it’s the results of this sort of competition that truly beget innovation.
Google has played nice in the market for some time, but its competitors can’t stand idle. Bring on IE8, FF4 and Safari 4, because honestly there is a lot of sense in some of the features Chrome brings to the table.
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Hanpei - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
It seems alright for entry level browsing.But when using it with MS Silverlight, it took up all CPU resources on and AMD athlon system, which make the video laggy; compared to 40-60% cpu usage in Firefox3 or Maxthon (IE7).
William Gaatjes - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
When i am forced for any reason to use IE or firefox on another pc there is always a situation where i am missing some feature of Opera. Opera should definitely be included in browser reviews.Opera does not get the attention the Opera browser deserves.
Use it with he metal blue skin , arrange the buttons as you personnaly feel best to use and it's great.
portokala1234 - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
In performance test you forgot to test JavaScript. I have some intense JavaScript web applications and in some cases Chrome runs up to 10 times faster than FF3. AJAX is running faster to.Overall in very impressed by this browser, if they make extensions like FireBug i will definitely switch to Chrome.
Sorry for my bad english im from Bulgaria.
portokala1234 - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
http://code.google.com/chromium/">http://code.google.com/chromium/ if someone want to compile chrome for other OS.kebab77 - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
These guys have run some benchmarks on a Galaxy S2 with ICS and Chrome browser:http://www.bestsmartphone.com/2012/02/07/chrome-be...
... seems quite a lot faster than other browsers at the more intensive benchmarks.
bigboxes - Sunday, September 7, 2008 - link
[URL=http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1136">http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1136]Google Chrome already beating Opera[/URL]Anubis - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
thats because the sheep will use anything google puts outthey could market a bag of dog crap and people would eat it up because it has the "google" name on it, google fanboys are almost as bad as apple fanboys
DasFox - Saturday, September 6, 2008 - link
I'm not sure why many are lifting up Opera, and Firefox as great, and saying it's like the only browser I use, etc...Such statements like this make me think these people don't really surf much, because if they did they'd notice a few things about these two browsers in particular.
Firefox is still a memory hog at times and then getting itself locked up and crashing when it starts going off really high, yep the memory leaks are still there in 3.
Opera also uses quite a bit of memory and there are many sites out there that just don't work well with Opera at all, and Opera doesn't play nice when the memory starts creeping up too.
Personally for small and light Kmeleon has been a pretty good browser and in regards to performance a much better browser then these two, it just lacks a bit of bells and whistles that people seem to be so drawn to.
I hope that Chrome gives the others a run, but with the history of Google cookie spying, it makes me hesitant to be a Chrome fan, Google has made geeks feel in the past like there is some sort of MS domination going on here...
Anubis - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
Eh I’ve used Opera exclusively since I found in in 2001, back when you had to pay to remove the built in addthere are very very few sites that don’t work right in opera, 99% of those sites i find that don’t work are random news sites linked off of the anandtech forums, which i would not visit anyway
pretty much the only thing I use IE for anymore is windows updates and paying my bills online, because my bank wont let you use anything other then IE
William Gaatjes - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
I agree. I use opera since version 6.x and never looked back.Only bad written websites with activex do not work but that does not bother me since these websites will always be un safe.