I have recently spent about a month learning and trying to live with Google Chrome. I figured I would give it a try and write about my results.
I play an online HTML game called Warring Factions, where you try to conquer the galaxy. I tend to specialize in galaxy exploration, which means I build a whole lot of exploration probes and move them from location to location. This means I have 50+ tabs open, one for each probe, moving them from place to place. A fast browser is a must in these circumstances. I had issues with the performance of Firefox but I dealt with them. When I got into running VMs I bought 8GB of RAM and that alleviated much of the problems I was having. I have a screenshot somewhere of Firefox 3 with 201 tabs open, each with one probe. Firefox was using 2GB of memory. I used Snaplinks to open the probes and it took upwards of 10 minutes to open everything.
So a friend of mine pesters me and I try out Chrome again. My, how things have changed. The first time I looked at Chrome, there were no repository packages for Chrome on Linux and I did not feel like compiling a beta copy myself. I just don’t have that much time to waste on something of a necessity that may not be fully functional. In addition, there were no extensions, no userscripts… it really didn’t have much of anything.
So without further ado, my opinion of Chrome. I started with Beta 4 and now I am running 5.0.
Things I like about Chrome:
- Speed:
In Firefox I relied heavily on the ability to cache inside 8GB of RAM for the performance of the browser. Chrome performs better, even on 2GB of RAM. I cannot quantify how much, but the browser is decisively more responsive all around. For instance, viewing Craigslist with a GreaseMonkey script to preview images was a 30-second freeze on Firefox. It is almost instantaneous on Chrome with the same script. - Memory usage:
Chrome uses significantly less memory than Firefox in the long run. Firefox was such a memory hog that I couldn’t even leave it running overnight. I would return in the morning and find that my system was swapping to disk. I even set up a cron job to pkill firefox every night at midnight in case I forgot and left it running. Chrome tends to eat about 50MB per tab, still a bit high, but far from what FF started off with, and it doesn’t leak memory like mad. - Speed:
I cannot emphasize how much faster Chrome has been. - Extensions:
The ability to add extensions to Chrome was a big draw for me. Many of the same extensions that are available in FF are now available in Chrome, which is a big plus. I use Flashblock, Adblock, and lots of things from userscripts.org. If Chrome had not been available with these features, I would have stopped my evaluation right then and there. This is very important to me. - Browser sync:
I used Google Browser Sync when it was available for Firefox and found it invaluable. When Browser Sync went away I was stuck using Google’s Toolbar to sync bookmarks, which was fine for me. I like that the Browser Sync is integrated into Chrome and I can have a pretty consistent user experience across machines. At this time I have not done much testing of the feature - IE compatibility is sometimes strong:
I have to use some sites in my workplace that require IE. In Firefox there is simply no way to make these work, the JS engines are too dissimilar. In Chrome I am at least able to view and make some changes. While the full functionality is not present, it’s nice that I do not need to fire up IE6 just to view the pages.
Now for the fun part… what I don’t like.
