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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
105 Comments
View All Comments
geeknerdwoman - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
what's wrong with all the tech sites just ignoring opera!? opera has most of those 'new features for ages and it works just fine.so except for oneProcessPerTab (which has to be proven as useful) and incognito mode (already in dev) there is nothing new at all
flame
firefox sucks by the way
/flame
KeypoX - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
get over opera there is a reason that no one uses it. FF can do all of operas features and more with addons. And opera is missing ALOT. It is ok but not top 3.cousin333 - Friday, September 5, 2008 - link
An other thing: considering the wide usage of Internet Explorer do you really think, that the size of user base matters? Anyway, based on functions, stability, security Opera has no reason to be shamed. Considering innovations, it clearly stands out from the group.Maybe Opera is not a big deal (you think), but good enough for Firefox (both "officially" and add-on wise) and Chrome to shamelessly copy it. :P
cousin333 - Friday, September 5, 2008 - link
"FF can do all of operas features"At least, I had a good laugh...
FF addons ARE powerful. After you spent half of your life searching for them. Praying for them to cooperate :)
idomagic - Thursday, September 4, 2008 - link
Try placing the tabs vertically in FF.Try having access to the same search engines via three different routes (right-click, search and url field) while keeping it dead simple adding additional engines.
Try getting even half of operas additional functions without using more memory.
ChronoReverse - Thursday, September 4, 2008 - link
While I don't know about putting the tabs on the side (there might be an extension for this, Firefox seems to have a bajillion of those), the three methods you enumerated for searching is available in Firefox (3.1 at least since I use a nightly build).LinearCannoN - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
Minimalism is just what i want out of the internet, afterall, its the content on the internet that is all a browser should show, 900 bars here, 30+ icons there, stupid bars an borders everywhere. Bleh...Anyway, there are a few things i'd like to mention, Chrome automatically imported everything from my FF3 (bookmarks, history, passwords and cookies) but not my IE (not that i mind, i imported everything from IE to FF3 when i transitioned anyway)
And as for the Downloads ? if you click the Spanner icon on the Omnibar, and choose Downloads, it shows a nice page showing all downloads and the standard Google search feature to search all of your downloads (kinda, ala FF3 albeit, not in a seperate popup (which always annoyed me)
Overall, Chrome is the browser i've always wanted, FF3 came very very close, but Chrome seems to be heading in the direction i wanted :-)
ChronoReverse - Thursday, September 4, 2008 - link
You do realize you can customize Firefox to remove most of the toolbars and such right?I do like the way the UI in Chrome uses the space of the title bar though. It gives ever more room for the webpages.
Finally - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
On the one hand you are sporting 8GB RAM machines, on the other hand you bitch around 50mb of RAM usage. It just doesn't blend.Btw, instead of going for another browser to temporarily save RAM usage, I would kill one or two of those 51 processes that are not needed. I just did a quick check on my task manager and I have 23 processes running... that's 50% less.
Consider this a great topic for an article:
Windows processes: Which ones are unnecessary and how can I speed up my PC without losing comfort while gaining security?
<-- THAT would be an interesting article!
7Enigma - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
It's a key factor in any program. More importantly this shows that when a page is closed the bloat is reduced, whereas in other browser's it stays pretty much the same. I think this is much more important obviously for laptops than desktops, and especially budget/tablet/ultralight laptops where you do not have the 8GB of ram.But I'll completely agree with you that a detailed running processes article would be very helpful. I'm still using XP until I build my next system and would like something like Viper's XP page to give me a detailed explanation of all the junk running in the background I really don't need. Even better, go into a detailed explanation of how to create different profiles/log ins with different plans in mind. For instance, a gaming profile with the bare essentials to play (maybe even 2 separate profiles, one that does not require the internet for multiplayer support, and thus can not load all the antivirus/IPblocker software), a "secure" profile for bill paying and the like, an "idiot proof" profile that the average teenager/mom/old person can't destroy.
I'd pay money for a well-written detailed article on that!