Burning Chrome, Screaming Firefox, Lame IE
Thu, 09/04/2008 - 19:50 — raf
We at Open-Xchange, like everybody else in the industry, couldn't wait to get down dirty with the newest Google Gadget, the Chrome browser. First impression was fast, fast, fast - way faster than anything we've seen. But as a bit more scientific tests showed later, we were probably a bit distracted from it's clean and simple interface.
Our development team ran the first beta version of Google's new browser through a series of practical tests with our AJAX based front-end to our e-mail and collaboration Open-Xchange software. The tests included, for example, launching a web form for a new e-mail, opening the user dialogue for a new e-mail distribution list and opening of a large mailbox.
We compared results for Google Chrome with Firefox 3 and Windows Explorer 7.
To our big surprise, given all the Java Script wonders that Chrome has, what we learned is that Google Chrome does not quite match the performance of Firefox 3, but in numerous tasks performed faster than Windows Explorer 7. Take a look at the exact results if you want to see for yourself.
From my perspective, Google has delivered with Chrome a technically up-to-date Web browser, which performs nicely with demanding AJAX applications. At the same time, however, Google Chrome feeds the mistrust of many that Google could use its browser as a Trojan horse to track and collect even more data about users' on the Internet.
You want numbers? You get numbers:
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| GoogleChromePerformance20080904.xls | 20.5 KB |
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House Cam
Comments
How did you meassure?
How did you measure?
- Did you use a stop-watch or a javascript timer?
- Did you run each test for each browser more then once?
Each time you hit a page on your server did you randomize the browser that hit that page first? If you're talking to a server you have to take the first hit on the server into account.
A lot of these tests seem to be measuring rendering speed not Javascript. Is the "display a large mailbox" an Ajax test?
Measurement
We did the measure with a stop-watch and we did each test more than once of course. The highest and lowest results were eliminated. As you can see in the spreadsheet, we also pointed out the very first access - in your terminology hit the first page, we called it "without cache" and "cached".Regarding the AJAX vs. rendering topic: our goal was to test an existing application. This means that the large mailbox test tests both, AJAX and rendering. The objects are requested with an AJAX request and the JS/rendering engine must create lot of objects and display them.
Testing methodology aside,
Testing methodology aside, WebKit has released SquirrleFish which is supposed to be faster than V8, so that should be thrown into the mix. Since Chrome is based on WebKit, they will probably incorporate the updates in SquirrleFish into V8, so if SquirrleFish beats FireFox, then Chrome will beat it too soon.
As for the trojan-horse thing, whenever someone nags about privacy or freedom, I have to ask: so? what kind of freaky, illegal, deviant things do you have to hide? if you are doing things that you need to hide from everyone, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing them.
(BTW, the CAPTCHAs on this page are impossible to make out!)
Great minimalist designs. I'm
Great minimalist designs. I'm a firm believer in the k.i.s.s. design method. After all, most of the biggest sites on the web use minimalistic designs, like Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. As long as it's a good user interface, minimalist design is a great choice.
location automobile
What do I have to hide?
You argue along the lines of "if you have nothing to hide you don't need to worry about your privacy". As a primer, try Cory Doctorows "Little Brother". Trust me, you should worry.
We'll fix the captcha's, they go a little too far.
I don’t mean that a
I don’t mean that a controlling authority cannot become oppressive, I mean that many people who freak out about privacy have something to hide. Most people who live normal lives don’t care about extreme privacy, they only care about things like not being watched when they go to the bathroom and such. Many people even publicly display many aspects of their lives because they have nothing to be ashamed of.
I love the new CAPTCHAs. I wonder if they are immune to bots.