Google Chrome: Performance and First Impressions

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.