Google Chrome: Performance and First Impressions
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 3, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Software
Performance
Chrome launches very quickly, bested only by IE7 in start time:
| Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 | Internet Explorer 7.0.6001.18000 | Firefox 3.0.1 | Safari 3.1.2 | |
| Application Launch Time | ~0.8s | ~0.7s | ~3.0s | ~1.0s |
Measuring web page rendering performance was a bit more difficult to quantify, I tried loading web pages both locally and over the web and came up with the following table (the results are an average of 3 runs, the browser's cache was cleared each time):
| Websites | Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 | Internet Explorer 7.0.6001.18000 | Firefox 3.0.1 | Safari 3.1.2 |
| www.anandtech.com | 2.8s | 2.2s | 3.3s | 4.4s |
| www.digg.com | 4.7s | 2.7s | 4.1s | 3.4s |
| www.slashdot.org | 4.1s | 4.1s | 6.4s | 4.2s |
| www.techreport.com | 1.8s | 1.3s | 2.4s | 2.6s |
| http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/csstest.html | 0.49s | 0.12s | 0.12s | 0.15s |
| http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/jslibs/oldindex.php | 1.7s | 0.5s | 1.0s | 1.0s |
| http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=red&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2 | 1.3s | 2.1s | 1.5s | 1.2s |
| Google Spreadsheet (Radeon HD 4870 Test Results) | 3.1s | 5.0s | 5.4s | 4.8s |
| Google Docs (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 Review) | 4.4s | 2.5s | 6.6s | 3.6s |
Chrome varies from being the fastest of the four to being the slowest, depending on what you throw at it. Even rendering Google’s own application pages ranges from being unbelievably fast (3.12 seconds for my Google Spreadsheet test vs. ~5 seconds for the other browsers) to average (Google Docs).
Chrome never really feels slow, thankfully non-IE browsers are much better off today than they were several years ago (not to mention that even our slowest CPUs are significantly faster - farewell Pentium 4). The simple UI actually gives off the impression that the browser is faster than it actually is in many situations.
Performance is good, well done Google.
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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.