Google Chrome

[Sir Lawrence]

Curious to know whether anyone has tried Google's new web browser, "Chrome."

[IAmMarquette]

on it right now. EXTREMELY fast, easy to use, but limited customizability (i assume that will change with time). I'm not yet ready to leave Firefox.

[rocky_warrior]

Haven't used it yet - but read this review yesterday.  Interesting that the beta of IE8 seemed to be the most efficient.  I haven't used IE in years, but if MS actually makes it a good product, I may be tempted to switch back...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/09/03/review.chrome.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest

So which one comes out smelling like roses? The beta of Internet Explorer 8, released just last week.

When playing a YouTube video, Firefox 3 took up 95 percent of the CPU time on a three-year old laptop running Windows XP.

Chrome came in at 60 percent -- still too much. Especially since Google owns YouTube! You'd think it could make its browser work well with that site in particular.

Internet Explorer barely broke a sweat, taking up just a few percent.

When I told each browser to load eight pages, some of which were heavy with Flash and graphics, Firefox took 17 seconds and ended with a continuous CPU load of 50 percent. That means it took up half of my available processing power, even if I wasn't looking at any of the pages.

Chrome loaded them the fastest, at 12 seconds, and ended with a CPU load of about 40 percent.

Internet Explorer 8 took 13 seconds to load, but ended with no CPU load at all.

So while Chrome's performance is a little better than that of Firefox, in practical terms, it is far less useful, because it lacks the broad array of third-party add-ons programs like Flashblock that make Firefox so customizable. With time, it might catch up, but in the meantime, I'd recommend giving the new Internet Explorer a spin.

[MU Chi_IL]

Chrome is fast and does not eat a lot of resources, so from that point of view it is very nice.  There is not much in the add-on department although that will change soon I assume. 

Mozilla released some benchmarking that shows firefox is actually faster, techcrunch has a nice write up:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/03/mozilla-fights-back-with-new-firefox-benchmarks/


I think Chrome is a good start, and will pick up some people from IE that were not tech savy enough to go to firefox, but will switch more because they trust google.  Google is not out to kill firefox, but rather kill IE (which is a good thing).

The Mozilla foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox.  Google and Mozilla just extended the deal for a few more years. 

[spiral97]

CPU is one part of the puzzle.. RAM is another.. apparently IE8 as it stands uses more RAM than the entire Windows XP OS did (http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2008/09/ie_8_consumes_m.html) and 2x fatter than Firefox (http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2008/09/internet-explorer-8-over-2x-fatter-than.html)

IE8 details from the first article:

• 350-400MB memory footprint
• 150-200 concurrent execution threads
• 6 discrete iexplore.exe process instances
• Over 2x more demanding than Firefox

[ChicosBailBonds]

I really can't.  Great search engine, but their toolbar plays havoc with some other programs.  Too much adware with Google Toolbar.  Picasa, which I loved started having all kinds of issues as well with tracking stuff.  Too many of their off shoot products play havoc with some of my programs which I don't like. JMO.

[Gwaki]

according to gizmodo the EULA of Chrome is funky aka they have rights to everything you do with their browser. aka anything you post with it

[rocky_warrior]

Well....the article I pasted got me excited about IE8b2 - so I just installed it (and am posting from it now).

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong - or whether these guys that reviewed Firefox had something wrong with their configuration, but as far as I can tell (in my only-partially-scientific research) - IE is still slower than firefox.

Using this page, with two tabs open (one to this MUScoop thread) in each browser, IE8b2 took 2.11 seconds, Firefox 3.0.1 too 1.679 sec.

Doing a reload (ctrl-r) in each browser 5 times, Firefox eventually loaded the page in 0.915 secs, while IE topped out at 1.625 seconds.

OK - I'm done with this evaluation, reviewers are clearly smoking crack when it comes to IE8b2. 

Back to the chrome discussion - I'd be interested to see page load times between Chrome and Firefox using that link.

[rocky_warrior]

Ok, I'm a sucker, I also decided to run Google's V8 benchmark suite on both FF and IE8.  Firefox on my machine got 125, IE8 a mere 36.  Now I'll have to try chrome

http://code.google.com/apis/v8/run.html

[🏀]

Chrome looks nice.

[rocky_warrior]

And of course chrome got around 1200 on Googles own benchmark.  With the page load test though, it was only marginally faster than FF on average (as opposed to 10x faster).  I was getting approx 1.5s load times with Chrome and 1.7s with FF.