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.

Other Geeky Stuff Compatibility & Final Words
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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.

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