Slashdot Mirror
2.0 Beta Chrome On Windows, Chromium On Linux
AlienRancher writes "Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0: 'The best thing about this new beta is speed — it's 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.' Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill." And reader Lee Mathews adds news of the open source version, Chromium, on Linux: "Not only has Chromium gotten easier to take for a test drive thanks to the personal package archive for Ubuntu Chrome daily build team, but development on the browser is also progressing nicely. Despite being a very early build, Chromium on Linux feels solid and boasts the same blazing speed the Windows users have been enjoying for months."
...my god it's fast.
Start up in under half a second. From cold.
When you resize it, the text moves smoothly, the way old-fashioned Xlib apps used to do. My Firefox installation gets about two redraws a second.
Render speed seems to be decent, and it generally feels snappy in a way that Firefox doesn't.
However: this is in no way ready to be used as a browser, even if you're masochistic. No dialogue boxes, so no setting of options. No tab control; you always see the most recent tab, and there's no way of selecting another one. Rendering glitches; Slashdot won't render, for example (although this might be considered a feature). And it's unstable. Five minutes playing made it crash three times.
But I'm going to continue watching with great interest. I'd love to ditch Firefox.
Let's just sum up the state of the three major browsers:
Chrome
Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
Quick and responsive native UI.
IE
Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
Quick and responsive native UI.
Firefox
All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser
No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser
Clunky and slow crossplatform UI implementation
The latest IE 8's absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their shit together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.
High five Firefox devs!
Well given that that AC's post is technically accurate I don't really think it's a troll. It's true, Firefox failed to advance in many respects, the way it should have giving its high level of funding. It leaks like a sieve, everybody knows that. I too have to restart it every couple of days or it ooms my machine. Keyboard navigation is still very dodgy. It has big problems with spinning on on web pages that konq just loads gracefully. Etc.
Yes, you can say it's better than IE 5/6/7. I don't know about IE 8, jury is out.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The "Linux" Chrom(ium) is 32-bit only, and everything indicates it is also Linux-only, meaning they just replaced crappy platform-dependent WinAPI code with not-less-crappy Linux code. Wake me up when I can compile Chrapmium on OpenBSD.
There is no way you can compare a visualbasic gui slapped on top of WebKit with a full-featured cross-platform browser like firefox. Process separation sounds like a good idea now that everyone has crappy code that crashes every now and then.
I would rather Firefox developers focusing in making the code more stable and threadable instead of adding unneeded process overhead.