Google Chrome

[Scott_Arm]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[PARANOiA]

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.

Heh, do you really think Google will be actively blocking ads, their only revenue stream?

 

[Skrying]

Heh, do you really think Google will be actively blocking ads, their only revenue stream?

I'm not expecting Google to create an ad block plug in...

 

[Arwin]

Actually one little thing I noticed during the install on Vista - I don't think it asked for Admin priviledges this time?

 

[Kyyla]

Actually one little thing I noticed during the install on Vista - I don't think it asked for Admin priviledges this time?

Yeah I noticed that too. Got to be the first program to do that!

I really like the clean look, it fits well in Vista. The Browser feels snappy, but there's no way I'm going to give it any serious use without adblock and mouse gestures.

 

[Npl]

Yeah I noticed that too. Got to be the first program to do that!

Thats because its installing itself into "Local Settings" instead of the program folder.

First impression: fugly. I dont have Vista or a Vista theme and it sticks out like a sore thumb. No setting to drop the skin and use normal window borders.

Second impression: its quite fast in loading and rendering websites, but I miss the "instant" display of previous pages from Opera and its generally to plain to use.

I already deinstalled it, I satisfied my curiosity

 

[Arwin]

I'm now running it on my XP machine, and here Eurogamer runs well - very well in fact, it's lighting fast. I agree that in XP the window graphics do stand out a bit.

 

[chavvdarrr]

anyone able to use certificates (online banking)?
It also sorta crashed once for 2h browsing with it - it seemed like working, but nothing could be opened, ie just stayed , like if there was no internet connection.
Also small rendering glitches here and there, nothing serious so far.

 

[Arwin]

I've only tried a web VPN service (juniper) for a client, that doesn't work yet. Makes sense though as it wants to check my computer for anti-virus software and such, which I'm assuming Chrome wouldn't allow just yet.

 

[hoom]

Thats because its installing itself into "Local Settings" instead of the program folder.

Isn't that sort of bypassing of Vista security a rather bad thing? (or the actual fact that its possible a big hole in Vista?!)

 

[pcchen]

Isn't that sort of bypassing of Vista security a rather bad thing? (or the actual fact that its possible a big hole in Vista?!)

No, it's not bypassing Vista's security. It just doesn't try to write into places where administrator privileges are required. For example, you can run any executables which doesn't need installation in Vista's user mode perfectly.

Of course, the bad thing is, if everyone on a system tries to install Google Chrome, there will be multiple redundant executable files on the system.