Early thoughts of Google Chrome Browser
I was really shocked when I read the news today. A Google browser? Where did that come from? When I first started reading, I was surely thinking this is another Lively bubble that will burst tomorrow by morning. When I started going through the Google Chrome Book however, thigns started to look a bit different. A bit more innovative.
- New process per tab: One tab (site) cannot hang the whole browser, and a crash won’t kill all other tabs. I.e, multithreaded.
- Process per tab means also I can kill the tab I want. No mass punishment.
- Automated Site Support Testing: Using what Google already has of site index, running automated testing, on most popular sites first and then down to others, gives the Chrome browser an upper hand.
- V8 Generates Machine code: Unlike regular browsers which interprets code over and over, V8 generates machine code from the javascript code. This results in much faster performance.
- Better garbage collection: With such implementation, unused memory blocks can be easily reclaimed by the system, unlike regular browsers.
- Most Visited and most recently bookmarked default homepage, allowing you easy browse to your most probably target page.
After going through the comic book of Chrome, I was thinking this could really be a revolutionary product of 2008 (Yes, could be better than JesusPhone!). Come back at night, I download and install the browser. Pretty small and quick to install, imports all bookmarks and history urls. Programs starts in about 30 MBs of used memory, and this is what I found after quickly testing it against some sites, and comparing it to Firefox:
- Interface is pretty simple, quick to load.
- Usability: No change for Firefox users. IE users… Figure it out!
- Response: For opening and closing tabs it as pretty quick. Doesn’t feel like opening a new process.
- Page load time: Just Amazing. Gmail ofcourse runs like the wind. Yahoo Mail! experience was also superb to all other browsers I used before. The performance is really fast, I would say faster than Safari, though I don’t have benchmarks.
- Most visited pages, and the smart address bar seem pretty helpful and handy.
- Session Maintained: Even though closing a tab kills the process, I revisited Gmail in a new tab and my session is still maintained.
- No Undo Close Tab: Owww :(
- Web site support in general was perfect, except Wordpess as I was writing this post. I noticed I cannot use the mouse drag to resize the image, while I was able to do so in Firefox. Strange!
- # Processes: Unfortunately, after opening three tabs, I ended up with something like 5 processes running.
(DONT COMMENT ON # OF UNREAD EMAILS!)
As you can see, 5 is > 3 tabs, so it does require additional processes as it seems. Also, as more processes are running, you get more CPU processing. I could hear the CPU whining. As I opened Firefox for comparison, the computer started halting for few seconds every now and then. This does not happen that often with Firefox, so I would assume it’s the Chrome processes. I could see some of them taking 10-20% of the CPU usage. Combined together, I would not suggest leaving them on when you want to run a separate intensive application, like a game for example.
- Memory usage: Opening 5 sites (including Gmail and Yahoo Mail) in both Chrome and Firefox, Firefox was taking around 124 MB, while Chrome processes all together were consuming above 250 MB! That’s a lot of memory to take, and over a large number of processes. Ofcourse, unused tabs (processes) may be stored on hard disk until later use, but still, the memory utilization was not the best part for me. Closing any tab however kills the process instantly, thus retrieving back the memory. Unlike Firefox, where the browser after sometime of heavy use would need to be killed to give back some of it’s allocated unused memory.
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I know what you mean, I have been going through the same process of trying the new browser out. There are some good parts about it, adds some nice competition to the group. Makes it great to point out that Internet Explorer is really bad compared to all these browsers coming out. Still doing some testing and there are a few kinks but still good!