Comments on: Dogfooding Chrome

By: Ask Bjørn Hansen

Ask Bjørn Hansen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:27:20 +0000

Since you posting this, I’ve tried it on my Mac, too. It’s very enjoyable; but I can’t use it as a daily browser without 1Password support. There are just too many websites to login to…

By: Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:36:06 +0000

“wasn’t there a browser once that put a little wristwatch badge on the arrow cursor?”

Ahem, Firefox and Camino on Mac OS. I know, I wrote the code :)

By: Dan Kegel

Dan Kegel — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:20:17 +0000

Jens,
I fixed yet another timer leak (in message_pump_libevent.cc) a couple days
ago, maybe that’ll help some more.

By: jens

jens — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:42:52 +0000

Akin — That’s probably due to a Chrome bug where timers were being leaked, causing more and more CPU usage over time. That was fixed a month or so ago; try one of the latest dev channel builds and it should behave better for you. (There have also been some significant memory usage fixes on Windows recently.)

By: Akin

Akin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:06:02 +0000

I did try chrome for couple months but had to go back to firefox. Main problem was with pages that utilize heavy javascripts (gmail, google reader etc) cause chrome to consume 10-15% cpu utilization constantly. Same pages had 3 to 4 % CPU utilization with IE 8 or Firefox 3.5

By: Ed Marshall

Ed Marshall — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 05:08:01 +0000

I can’t speak to the Mac build, but the Linux version is impressing the pants off of me. ;) Over here, our choices are Firefox, Opera, a Chromium nightly build, or any of a half-dozen minor webkit-based browsers, so a couple of days ago I decided to give the 64-bit build of Chromium another try.

Chrome is several orders of magnitude faster at basic window rendering than Firefox; while the rendering and javascript engines in FF might be comparable, actually displaying anything on the screen results in noticeable delays, tearing, and general unpleasantness.

And now that there’s an AdblockPlus implementation for Chrome (along with user scripts/Greasemonkey), I have very little reason to use Firefox anymore. It’s simply too painful to use after spending time with Chrome.

Interestingly, the Windows build of FF doesn’t exhibit the same issues, on similar hardware, and the comparison between Chrome and Firefox there becomes one of features and UI; but as a regular Linux desktop user, the fact that the Firefox developers don’t seem to care much about performance means I need another browser. Chrome is it. :)

By: Jesper

Jesper — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:12:55 +0000

It’s been more than a year, but I still dearly miss the persistent status bar in Chrome when I’m using it in the capacity of my default browser on Windows. I know it’s a stand that’s been taken from a philosophy standpoint, but the on-hover status bar is actually crippled, since it just won’t show URLs beyond a certain length. (As, in all honesty, won’t every other browser — but the length in this case is significantly larger and can be controlled!)

Mac Chrome is probably the best Mac “port” ever of any product that started out somewhere else, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s amazing how good it is as a product and how true it manages to stay to the feel of the platform despite staying its own thing. (I guess it was very Mac-like even on Windows in the sense that it was a brilliant piece of UI design.)

However, I think I’ll continue to stick with OmniWeb until someone else gets vertical tabs (with loading indicators and drag and drop), site-specific preferences, minimal UI footprint (Chrome comes close), persistence and updating “view source” right.

By: jens

jens — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:26:02 +0000

“Really impressed with how far its come in the past few months.”

Yeah, the team is fantastic — a huge well-organized coding machine. Makes me feel quite humble. Plus of course we’re building on (and assisting with) the awesomeness that is WebKit.

The team is really serious about the Mac version, too. There’s absolutely no sense of the Mac (or Linux) being a second-class platform. The decision to do Windows first was just driven by market share and the realities of ramping up a new project.

By: Justin Williams

Justin Williams — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:58:55 +0000

I made the fulltime switch to Chrome from Safari this week as well. It has survived two days thus far, which is more than I can say for anytime I’ve switched to Camino or Firefox. Really impressed with how far its come in the past few months.