Google\'s Chrome Browser Pretty, but Lacks Substance

Tag : chrome

To strengthen that effort, Chrome was designed to improve on theway other browsers handle JavaScript, one of the technologies usedto make Web pages more interactive and more like desktop softwareapplications.
Google's online word processing and spreadsheet programs use thistechnology, but it's also very widely deployed on Web pages to doless sophisticated things, like drop-down menus.
At first blush, Google's focus on JavaScript makes sense.JavaScript can eat up computer processor power, and if poorly usedby a Web site, can bring down the browser.
One of the things Chrome promises is that if one browser tabcrashes, it won't take down the whole program.
Chrome also has some cosmetic differences from Internet Explorerand Firefox, like putting the tabs at the very top of the window.That's a nice move, but it's the browser's performance that reallymatters to me. And this is where Chrome's attention to JavaScriptmight miss the point.
At work, I often have 40 or 50 tabs open in Firefox, grouped indifferent windows depending on which topic they pertain to.Frequently, Firefox would slow down all the other applications onmy computer, then seize up completely.
At first I thought JavaScript was to blame, and blocked it fromrunning. But that made many sites unusable, and it didn't help: Thebrowser still froze.
It turns out the culprit is not JavaScript but another technologyused to make Web pages more interactive: Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flashplug-in.
It's the program-within-a-program that plays YouTube videos andthose annoying "splash" pages that some sites employ to dazzle youwith animations before letting you do anything useful on the site.
Flash is a tremendous resource hog in Firefox, eating up processortime to the point where there is nothing left for other programs.
It does this even if you're not actively doing anything. Merelyhaving a YouTube page open on your screen will suck power from yourcomputer's central processing unit, or CPU.
This is outrageous behavior for a browser. It's my CPU and I wantit back.
Luckily, there's a small add-on program for Firefox called "FlashKiller" that lets the user prevent Flash files from runningautomatically when a page loads, and it turns Firefox into astable, efficient browser.
What does this mean on Chrome? Well, it has the same problem.
It lets sites running Flash take over your computer's resources. Itdoesn't hog the CPU quite as badly as with Firefox, but in a way,it's more serious, because unlike with Firefox, there's no way tostop Flash from running. Chrome's controls are quite bare-bones,perhaps because it's still in "beta."
On the plus side, Chrome allows you to diagnose problems withrunaway plug-ins easily, because it tells you exactly which pagesare consuming which resources. Had I been able to do this withFirefox, it would have saved me from months of browser troubles.
So which one comes out smelling like roses? The beta of InternetExplorer 8, released just last week.
When playing a YouTube video, Firefox 3 took up 95 percent of theCPU time on a three-year old laptop running Windows XP.
Chrome came in at 60 percent — still too much. Especiallysince Google owns YouTube! You'd think it could make its browserwork well with that site in particular.
Internet Explorer barely broke a sweat, taking up just a fewpercent.
When I told each browser to load eight pages, some of which wereheavy with Flash and graphics, Firefox took 17 seconds and endedwith a continuous CPU load of 50 percent. That means it took uphalf of my available processing power, even if I wasn't looking atany of the pages.
Chrome loaded them the fastest, at 12 seconds, and ended with a CPUload of about 40 percent.
Internet Explorer 8 took 13 seconds to load, but ended with no CPUload at all.
So while Chrome's performance is a little better than that ofFirefox, in practical terms, it is far less useful, because itlacks the broad array of third-party add-ons programs likeFlashblock that make Firefox so customizable.
With time, it might catch up, but in the meantime, I'd recommendgiving the new Internet Explorer a spin.