There are quite a lot testing and reviews happening out there and geeks are busy with comparing the web browsers again due to the launch of Google’s web browser. The overcrowded market of web browsers was not really expecting a web browser from Google and Google Chrome came in to the market as a surprise. Anyway, the question is why Google was this late?

In this article, let’s try to do a performance comparison between four browsers that we know; Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. When we consider the performance, we need to remember that all the browsers should be in the same status such as same toolbars or no toolbars installed, cache cleared, etc. There are so many users publishing their reviews and I’m not sure how many of them follow the standard guidelines for performance comparisons. If you just open the browsers in your computer and measure the startup times, I’m not sure you are doing a proper and accurate performance comparison.

Anyway, let me summarize what the users have seen so far related to these browsers in terms of performance. Chrome startup is now considered as the fastest and I assume this also depends on the hardware and the operating system configurations. Internet Explorer does a quite good job by starting up with a similar time or in a slightly less time. Firefox and Safari take a considerable amount of time for startup and it is almost 3 times as Chrome and IE.

Summarizing what people say about page load times, some claim that Chrome is the fastest of all. This statement has its flaws as you can expect a browser to be fastest for all the kinds of web pages available in internet. If you do a proper performance testing, then your sample of web pages should have a great diversity. One of those fair tests suggest that Chrome’s performance vary from fastest to slowest depending on what you throw at it. This is fair as Chrome is still at its beta stage and nothing more than this can be expected.

Google has used 1 million web pages as the test sample and there can be important web applications that they have missed. Surely they will perform and another few rounds of tunings based on the feedback received by beta tests.

category Applications sheri September 14 2008 Comment (0)

The remarkable addition to the internet browser world, Google Chrome is making its way to the top. Released today, there have been thousands of downloads, dozens or reviews and blog entries are already available on the internet. In this article, we are going to look at some features Google Chrome offers.

First of all, this is just a beta release; not the full and final version. So, don’t be excited if you see some incompatibilities when navigating through the web. The appearance of the new member seems extremely simple and streamlined. Yes, Chrome has been designed with a vision; to make sure the user is not distracted by the browser features when doing work in internet. Chrome can be installed with just few clicks and Google has taken care of most of the background installation procedures. Now where is the user guide? I’m sure someone may want a user guide as this is brand new software. Yes, read Google Chrome Comic Book and that’s your user guide to Chrome!

A normal browser such as IE or Firefox would run as a process in the operating system and each tab will be a separate thread running in the process. So if one tab stops responding, then the whole process hangs. So eventually, users will have to close the browser, losing all the other opened tabs. Chrome offers a revolutionary solution for this problem; not the browser but all the tabs run as separate processes. So if one tab hangs, you can just close it without affecting others!

Chrome offers you another facility that you wouldn’t find prominently in any other browser; searching your bookmarks and history. What a feature??? If you want some site not to be recorded in history, then you can open a special tab for browsing and nothing will be saved in history (including cache and cookies).

There are many other new features offered by Google Chrome and it is here to stay! Let’s discuss some other features and performance compared to other popular web browsers in the next article.

category Applications sheri September 07 2008 Comment (0)