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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Jynx980 - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
I have been using Wintasks by Uniblue/liutilities to check out processes. It works pretty well and sure beats googling up unknown processes and ones I have forgotten about. I think it is now part of "SpeedUpMyPC 2009" (http://www.liutilities.com/products/speedupmypc/)">http://www.liutilities.com/products/speedupmypc/) I can't seem to get the links button to work.There's also The Elder Geek guide (http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm)">http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm).
I guess the Black Viper site is back. I have no idea what happened to him but he's back anyways. He also used to have different profiles. Maybe this page will help (http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/xpprofiles.htm)">http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/xpprofiles.htm)
The trouble with profiles is that no matter how many are made, someone is going to have problems. In short, if the person doesn't understand what their doing, they should learn more about it first or avoid it altogether. That's just an IT pipe dream though.
Several other sites have services covered so I don't see what more Anadtech could bring to the table. Maybe an introduction article, benchmarks on profiles and after shutting down some common unneeded processes, that would work.
And to stay on topic, Chrome is great/and or sucks.
Alyx - Friday, September 5, 2008 - link
A while back I saw a article on turning all the un-needed stuff off that the black viper site recommends. The machines with stuff turned off had nearly identical resource usage and actually performed worse. Since then I've never bothered with all the optimizations. The amount of time you save is way offset by the headache and time spent setting everything up.nortexoid - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
So far Chrome's been pretty buggy for me. It locks up with flash animations (especially when coming out of fullscreen mode) mostly.It has some nice features. In fact one of them, it's autohiding status bar, led me to that very extension for FF3! Yes, I'm still in love with FF3.
dryloch - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
There were several pages in the speed test that I have never been to. I went to those pages and they loaded faster then your tests are showing. I have been very impressed with the speed of this browser. So far I say good job Google.npp - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
It's a nice thing, no doubt, and I'm sure it will make its way through the competition very fast (by the way, as I'm writing this, a nasty bug prevents the lines from being displayed properly...:) It looks good and feels fast, but I simply can't swallow the absence of all the features that make Opera my browser of choice. It may be that they went too far in their minimalistic approach; inability to import settings from any other browser than IE for example, is downright stupid. Other users also pointed out pretty obvious and common features that Chrome is missing right now.But then again, it may be that I'm just too paranoid; maybe the majority of users will never miss a feature in Chrome, and I guess google is aiming exactly at them. However, the users who like to customize everything exactly their way and need more control on what's going on are still better off with something like Opera, I guess.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
Funny, it was the things I couldn't set Opera to do that caused me to not bother reinstalling in my most recent OS upgrade.idomagic - Thursday, September 4, 2008 - link
Please do give an example.strikeback03 - Thursday, September 4, 2008 - link
Been about a year and a half, but one I remember is that I could not find where to make Opera not automatically shift to a new tab when opening. When I read news I usually scroll down the headlines and open any I want to read in new tabs, then open the tabs one by one and read. With Opera, each new tab opened and went there, then I immediately had to click back to the main tab to open whatever else I wanted, etc.Plus, as mentioned, lack of Adblock is a deal-breaker.
cousin333 - Friday, September 5, 2008 - link
You didn't look hard enough... Did you tried to open links by clicking with scrollwheel? ;)There is an AdBlock in Opera, called Content block... You can access it by using the pages' context menu.
Tegeril - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - link
You can import from Firefox.