[Arwin]

redundant

[Arwin]

Eurogamer's heavy use of flash seems to bring it to its knees. When that happens, other tabs also aren't responsive. So there's some limits to it's process management there. Maybe it's Flash plugin related.

[ShaidarHaran]

I've seen flash (ads on the inquirer specifically) bring Firefox to its knees recently as well.

I hate flash ads. So intrusive.

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by ShaidarHaran

I've seen flash (ads on the inquirer specifically) bring Firefox to its knees recently as well.

I hate flash ads. So intrusive.

Yep. That's why adblock was invented. Sometimes I feel bad because I know sites need the money. Other times I load a site and all I see is flashing animations and a myriad of colours swarming a tiny and nearly illegible amount of information; That's when I get pissed.

[Spaceman-Spiff]

The Task Manager is a neat feature (Shift-Esc). It tells you how much memory and cpu each tab/plugin is using. Very cool!

[ShaidarHaran]

Originally Posted by Scott_Arm

Yep. That's why adblock was invented. Sometimes I feel bad because I know sites need the money. Other times I load a site and all I see is flashing animations and a myriad of colours swarming a tiny and nearly illegible amount of information; That's when I get pissed.

I can't remember the last time adblock worked for me. Then again, I haven't tried with FF 3.x...

On a similar subject - has anyone else run into trouble browsing TweakTown with FF lately? Often times when visiting their site I'll be redirected to a page stating "you are using a browser with an ad blocking extension/plug-in, please disable and come back" (paraphrased). I'm not even using an ad blocker... Big thumbs down for that move.

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by ShaidarHaran

I can't remember the last time adblock worked for me. Then again, I haven't tried with FF 3.x...

I use that filterset G updater extension and I rarely see any ads. Works great. My main reason for using adblock was I seemed to get a lot less spyware when I had ads disabled. Not sure if it's as much of an issue anymore. Guess we'll see since I can't block ads in Chrome.

[Scott_Arm]

I like that porn mode uses a darker greyish colour and has a picture of a shady guy in the top left.

[L233]

Eh.

Ok, 1 tab opened. I open another tab, head over to Youtube and watch some video. Chrome hangs about half way through the video and the whole browser, (including the other tab that supposedly has a process of its own), is unresponsive. About 2 Minutes later I get a pop-up telling me that the Shockwave Flash plug-in crashed.

Ok, so I reload the Youtube page and guess what? Flash crashes again and the whole browser locks up again.

So not only did I have a crash that I have never, ever, seen before but the browser doesn't do what it has been pimped up to do. It's a beta, alright, but that's still kind of pathetic.

[Skrying]

I'm loving the speed, it's amazingly quick in nearly all instances compared to other browsers I've tried (besides Flash ad heavy websites, which IE handles better in my experience). The UI is taking a bit to get used to such as the context menu but that's to be expected. I really like the Tabs being up top as well and it certainly integrates into Vista nicely.

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by L233

Eh.

Ok, 1 tab opened. I open another tab, head over to Youtube and watch some video. Chrome hangs about half way through the video and the whole browser, (including the other tab that supposedly has a process of its own), is unresponsive. About 2 Minutes later I get a pop-up telling me that the Shockwave Flash plug-in crashed.

Ok, so I reload the Youtube page and guess what? Flash crashes again and the whole browser locks up again.

So not only did I have a crash that I have never, ever, seen before but the browser doesn't do what it has been pimped up to do. It's a beta, alright, but that's still kind of pathetic.

I haven't had any crashes yet, but I opened up youtube and played vids simultaneously in two separate tabs. There are PIDs for each youtube page, but only one PID for flash. It's obvious that it would be a waste of memory to have to full flash processes running, so there is only one flash process. So is it an issue of the flash process being single-threaded for now, or is there a definitely a drawback with plugins and the advertised stability?

[rendezvous]

Originally Posted by Spaceman-Spiff

I ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on my work PC. Running an AMD Athlon 3200+ with 2GB RAM on Win XP SP2.

And here are my scores:
Running on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and Vista

Google Chrome (1583)
2153.0ms +/- 5.4% (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspide...85,96,85,144]})
IE7 (7.0.6001.18000)
35832.4ms +/- 5.8% (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspide...076,9887%5D%7D)
FF 3.0.1
3762.6ms +/- 6.3% (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspide...,108,133,123]})
Opera 9.52
5554.8ms +/- 3.2% (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspide...,126,160%5D%7D)

[L233]

Originally Posted by Scott_Arm

I haven't had any crashes yet, but I opened up youtube and played vids simultaneously in two separate tabs. There are PIDs for each youtube page, but only one PID for flash. It's obvious that it would be a waste of memory to have to full flash processes running, so there is only one flash process. So is it an issue of the flash process being single-threaded for now, or is there a definitely a drawback with plugins and the advertised stability?

I only had two tabs open, only the Youtube one used Flash. Flash crashes (never seen that happen before) and the whole browser locks up until it kills the Flash process or whatever - even non-Flash tabs are unusable. It acts like any every other browser.


Trying to watch a video with the Windows Media Player plug-in is painful - it locks up Chrome ever few seconds for about 20 seconds. And it makes the browser dog-slow.

Trying to scroll while a HD flash video plays on gametrailers.com freezes the browser for up to 20 seconds and sometimes yields a nice "website does not respond" (or somesuch, didn't really pay attention) message.

I'm on my notebook (1.6 GHz intel and 1GB RAM), so it's not exactly high-end hardware but compared to Opera, Chrome runs like dogshit. It's still better than Firefox 3 though, which is utterly unusable on my notebook (5000-8000 GDI objects within 45 minutes, 900 MB memory usage - even when just sitting there with a few tabs opened).

Oh, and since Google ripped off Opera's Speed Dial, they could at least have given it the same functionality instead of making it some useless "most visited" gimmick.

[Skrying]

I don't know what to tell you other than your system sounds screwed up in general. I've never heard of Firefox reaching 900MB. That's absolutely insane. Also, Flash crashes rather often in my experience and is the main reason Firefox crashes.

[L233]

FF2 works perfectly, Opera works perfectly, IE works perfectly. FF3 leaks like a Russian pipeline. Fucked up system? I think not. Chrome works well, too, if it wasn't for the Flash crashes and the fact that it doesn't do what it's advertised to do (i.e. one tab crashing/hanging is supposed to leave the other tabs unaffected).

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by L233

Trying to watch a video with the Windows Media Player plug-in is painful - it locks up Chrome ever few seconds for about 20 seconds. And it makes the browser dog-slow.

Trying to scroll while a HD flash video plays on gametrailers.com freezes the browser for up to 20 seconds and sometimes yields a nice "website does not respond" (or somesuch, didn't really pay attention) message.

I tried this out and I got exactly the same issue. I'd scroll the gametrailers window and the entire chrome application would lock up for 10 seconds or longer.

Then I went to apple and watched a large format trailer, and I got it to lock up by messing around in another window at the same time. If I watch an HD trailer (480p is the best my PC can handle) it plays in the quicktime app, not embedded on the page and I don't seem to have the same problem. But I do notice the playback gets a little tiny bit stuttery. Seems odd because Chrome is not showing CPU utilization above 10% at any time. I wonder how it manages it's processes? I'm assuming it uses the Windows scheduler. I'm running XP on a single threaded CPU (Athlon64 2800), so maybe that is where the issue lies? Hopefully performance improves.


Edit: You can see each of the chrome processes in the Windows task manager. So I played a vid and started scrolling the window and it appears the main PID that's called browser hits 100% CPU and the entire application becomes unresponsive.

[DemoCoder]

In my tests, Chrome stomps all over the state of the art competition, performance wise. Atleast 1.8x Firefox 3.1 and Safari 4. (don't even talk about the joke of IE, even IE8). It also used 1/2 the memory of Firefox 3.1. It's no wonder, since Chrome's V8 engine is done by the same guys who did Java's HotSpot JIT.

The per-tab and per-plugin process isolation is definately a step up in security and stability once they get the bugs shaken out, and I like the simplicity of the interface,

Google more than anyone else, has big, complex AJAX applications, like Gmail, Docs, etc and they need AJAX to run faster, especially if it is to hold off proprietary stuff like Flash and Silverlight from making more inroads.

Internet Explorer is being made increasingly a big joke by Firefox and WebKit (Safari and Chrome) IE8 did nothing to really to stop this, it's still missing alot of stuff, and still slower than the competition. I can't wait for the day when I no longer have to worry about supporting IE in my products, I waste so much time tracking down issues on that heaping pile of crap.

Here's hoping Google's weight can bite even more out of MS's browser marketshare.

[DemoCoder]

Originally Posted by Scott_Arm

I don't know. Nowadays memory is very very cheap. Most computers have far more memory than they actually need. I have a gig and a half of ram, and unless I'm playing games I never really approach anything close to using it. That's no excuse for needless bloat, but I think the security their sand boxing will provide is worth it. If they're aggressive garbage collection really works, I think that will make up for it. My firefox3 sometimes gets up to 120 megs after a good amount of use, even after I close all of my loaded tabs.

The issue isn't memory usage per se, it's memory leaks. Many browsers leak like sieves (especially IE), and if you don't kill and restart the browser after awhile, they consume gigabytes. I've left IE and Firefox (2) running sometimes over a few days, only to find they were consuming 1.5+gigabytes.

As the Javascript heap gets larger, garbage collection burns more CPU as well, so the browsers slow down proportionally. Simply put, you do not want a browser eating up huge swaths of RAM *even if you've got the RAM to spare* because it also results in slower performance.

Basically, Google has focused like a laser on improving performance, security, and simplifying the user experience, and I salute them for it.

[Sinistar]

I watched three HD trailers at gametrailers.com and had no problem while scrolling and the video playing.

Edit:

Actually this is pretty cool, I had 2 HD video's going, dragged a tab so it opened in it own window all while the video's were playing.

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by DemoCoder

The issue isn't memory usage per se, it's memory leaks. Many browsers leak like sieves (especially IE), and if you don't kill and restart the browser after awhile, they consume gigabytes. I've left IE and Firefox (2) running sometimes over a few days, only to find they were consuming 1.5+gigabytes.

As the Javascript heap gets larger, garbage collection burns more CPU as well, so the browsers slow down proportionally. Simply put, you do not want a browser eating up huge swaths of RAM *even if you've got the RAM to spare* because it also results in slower performance.

Basically, Google has focused like a laser on improving performance, security, and simplifying the user experience, and I salute them for it.

Yeah, I understand all that. I've never seen any of my browsers use that much, but I've never left them open for days. I always shut my PC off at night, unless I'm downloading, but I still usually close all my open windows when I'm done with the PC.

I just meant that if the browser consumes 100 to 200 megs, it doesn't really matter for most people. You know, some people might argue over memory performance in the range of 10-20 megs, but it really isn't an issue unless you're running in an extreme performance environment where you probably wouldn't have a web browser open anyway.

Memory leaks are a problem in any software.

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by Sinistar

I watched three HD trailers at gametrailers.com and had no problem while scrolling and the video playing.

I just edited my post and it seems my chrome "Browser" process is hitting 100% CPU utilization. Seems chrome is CPU hungry for some reason and is maybe not an issue on less out-dated hardware. Could it also be an XP vs Vista scheduling issue? I'm still on XP.

[L233]

Two more annoyances:

1. New tabs are opened next to their parent tab in the tab bar - I'd like a choice here, please, as I find this highly irritating.

2. Chrome seems to reset the download location to the default download location every time you download something.

[PARANOiA]

Hrmm, well it Chrome doesn't work behind my work proxy. Both IE and Firefox do. Opening the proxy settings, it seems to be grabbing everything from IE, but no page data displays. It actually displays the HTML headers through the proxy, too - there's a live updating weather page that has the temperature as the page header which does display and update on refresh... but no actual page.

Tried it at home before work though and it's pretty sexy. I don't know what it is about Google but they seem to be able to do very little wrong.

[Scott_Arm]

Found a Facebook bug. If you're browsing a photo album and you click 'next', the new photo will load for a second and then you're automatically brought back to the first photo in the album.

[Skrying]

It's clearly beta software, this is especially true on sites where deeper functions are only accessible when logged in. Testing of course would slump in those areas compared to other sites (judging by how the comic suggested they did much of their testing). With that said I just love the performance. It's incredibly snappy and even so with many tabs open doing relatively demanding tasks such as watching an HD stream, streaming audio, and viewing a large picture gallery at the same time.

I must say though, once plug in support starts to show up I could be switching. I'd really like to see ad block in some form show up and especially a plug in similar to Firefox's Gmail notifier. All the other areas are there for the most part to fit my needs and demands. I'm very impressed with it at this state.