Google Betas Chrome 4, Touts 30% Speed Boost

CWmike writes "Google upgraded the beta version (4.0.223.16) of its Chrome browser yesterday, boasting a 30% speed improvement over the current production edition and adding integrated bookmark synchronization. Developers Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin, who announced the release, tout Chrome 4.0's faster JavaScript rendering speeds. 'We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, and by 400% since our first stable release,' they said, referring to Chrome 3.0. The new beta includes the ability to sync bookmarked sites across multiple computers."

Comments

60% faster loss of privacy

[h4rr4r]

I bet google would love to see your bookmarks, I bet advertisers would pay dearly for that sort of info.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[RiotingPacifist]

if only you could look at the source* to see that they are not doing that...wait what?

*and if you don't trust them compile your own

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Try SRware Iron. It's just Chrome - tracking bits.
 
  Comparison of Chrome Vs Iron

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true for ALL browsers that have the visited link style and browsing history activated.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[afex]

woah woah, buddy - you are WAYY off base
We absolutely do NOT want to use google email anymore!

we want to use google wave.

Smoking

[Nithendil]

Loads reddit.com and slashdot.com almost instantly. Occasionally the browser will just hang for a second but it makes firefox look like molasses. I have serious reservations about using Google as my search, browser, voicemail, and email but it is difficult when they keep blowing the competition out of the water.

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm right there with you. Basically all of the free tools from Google have no serious competition in terms of quality. Other tools may have more users, but it's not because they're better.

I'm not saying we give them a free pass, but have there been any serious breaches of privacy by Google? We've seen dirty moves by Microsoft, we've seen slow moves by Firefox. We've seen silly moves from Yahoo. We've seen invasive moves by Facebook.

I see Google as pretty freaking amazing. I think even the people who take issue with one thing here or there would have to agree that they are definitely the least of all evils.

Re:Smoking

[Toonol]

But "Slashdot.org" is more ideologically pure than "Slashdot.com". Get your priorities straight.

Re:Smoking

[SuperAlgae]

Well said. Google bashers always baffle me with their lack of factual support. A healthy caution of companies that have so much information is justified. If someone wants to avoid Google for that reason, then fine. But they should not pretend it is because Google has shown any pattern of abuse. If anything, they have been much better than most companies.

I saw someone in another forum using Google's slogan "don't be evil" as some kind of argument that they are evil... asking why they would need such a motto. From my perspective, "don't be evil" is one of the few corporate slogans worth anything. Unfortunately, it is something that cannot be taken for granted. It's sad, but that's the world we live in. And "don't be evil" is certainly more meaningful than most of the warm/fuzzy tripe that other companies spew in their mission statements.

Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I so loved Firefox and use to tell everyone to use it. I loved that it kicked IE's ass. Gotta love any open source project that goes up against Microsoft and wins.

As much as I hate to admit it, I can no longer stand to use Firefox. Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.

In fact, it seems way too fast. Is Google caching the web pages in a nearby Google server? Even sites that use little JavaScript seem to load really fast. Is something going on here?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[L0wt3ch]

I disagree, Firefox is perfect,

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Judinous]

No matter how good Chrome's JavaScript performance gets, it will never be faster, more reliable, or safer than simply not running any JavaScript at all. Blocking all JavaScript by default, with the ability to individually white-list individual items (close, but not quite, Opera), is a bare minimum requirement for safe web surfing. Blocking advertisements does more to speed up real-world browsing speed (not just benchmarks) than any other single change. Until another browser implements these two features, Firefox is the only rational option for home browsing.

I'm not a Firefox fanboy, I'm just aware of my needs. In the business arena, I wouldn't recommend anything but Internet Explorer (behind a proxy, of course), because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments. That's another area that I wish more browsers would improve upon.

If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets along with their superior rendering performance, they would blow the web browser market wide open. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, since most technical people are well aware of these issues.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[jim_v2000]

I actually get more value out of the addons in Firefox than the speed boost in Chrome. This is mainly because I usually open a bunch of links in new tabs first, and then go through and read them. In this situation, speed isn't that important.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[ElectricTurtle]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BitZtream]

Heh, considering I develop software for a living, one of our products is embeds on XULRunner 1.9.1 (which is what Firefox 3 is built on top of) and several of our products use WebKit for rendering HTML.

So yes, my knowledge of them and profiling them tells me this.

You can find my name in the Gecko commit logs and all over the developers mailing lists, wheres yours? I don't think I've seen Anonymous Coward committing anything.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Beyond simple dislike of relentless commercial pressure, which is a matter of taste(but can be a strong one, is the issue of performance.

For reasons that, I assume, have to do with the fact that advertisers are subhuman vermin who would sell their own grandmothers for a nickle, ads are overwhelmingly among the slowest page elements to load. Even if you don't mind what eventually pops up(which can be a tall order, particularly with noisy flash crap) wasting 10 or 15 seconds on what would otherwise be a highly responsive page waiting for one or more overloaded 3rd party ad servers sucks. It sucks even more when you do it dozens of times a day.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Guspaz]

The lack of extension support is a myth. As is the supposed lack of adblocking extensions.

The chrome extension API specifically includes the exact functionality needed for ad blocking via the filter APIs... and yet here we have conspiracy theorists breaking out their tin foil hats and claiming that Chrome is Google's plot to get rid of ad blockers. *facepalm*

The adblock extension I linked above isn't the only one, although it's the only one that I've tried. It's a bit buggy and the UI isn't all there yet, but it does subscribe to the real ABP's easylist, and it *does* block the ads in the list.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[aardvarkjoe]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

Because web advertising has gone way beyond "little images trying to sell things." Instead, we get Flash monstrosities that slow my computer to a crawl, pop-ups that jump in front of the content you're trying to read and steal mouse clicks, and pages full of blinking, animated pictures that make it difficult to find the actual content.

Just because you don't mind having your time wasted in that way doesn't mean that everyone else will put up with it.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

I used to be like you. Still am, in a way.

Here's the thing: Clicking something and having the action take place instantly makes that unnecessary for quite a lot of tasks. And that goes not just for links to new pages (though that is a factor), but for links that drive Javascript.

I'll give you an example: I always hear people whining about the new Slashdot AJAX crap. I agree, it's bloated and completely unnecessary, and on Firefox and Konqueror, it's slow as hell. In Chrome, it's actually faster than the old system -- click reply, half a second later there's a reply box ready to type, and that's about the longest anything takes here. Clicking on a semi-hidden thread to expand it is even faster.

Granted, that's not "instantly", the way so much of the Web has become for me. But the difference is pretty staggering, and pretty significant.

I still use tabs almost the way you do, but that's when I have a slow connection, or a bunch of links that I can't easily visit in serial.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[CoughDropAddict]

Want proof? Ctrl+U.

Whoa, don't blow my mind quite so hard. I'm not sure I can handle all this wisdom at the same time.

C'mon, you think I execute shell commands by writing a C program that calls fork(), exec(), and pipe()? You think I write web pages pixel by pixel? Obviously high-level languages and programming paradigms are appropriate in many cases.

I'm sticking it to the Java weenies who think that C and C++ are obsolete. The people who year after year say that *now* Java is "often as fast as C++ and sometimes faster." The people who still won't acknowledge that there is a real reason C and C++ are still the languages of OS kernels.

It's not premature optimization to write libavcodec in C. Likewise with OS kernels, virtual machines, rendering engines, DSP plugins, and many other applications where the code will almost certainly be on the critical path of a resource-intensive application. It's not premature optimization to use manual memory management in applications that need to move lots of data around with low latency.

Really Fast

[gmuslera]

With it Google news is showing articles of next week.

Re:Really Fast

[martin-boundary]

I'm on Debian, you insensitive clod. For some reason, the only articles I actually see are from two years ago.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[ltmon]

FYI, nightly builds for all platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Linux x64) available here: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Should get official versions soon, I guess, but I find any given nightly build (on Linux) fast and reliable.

Fast, even on Slashdot

[zach_the_lizard]

The annoyingly slow preview scripts here on Slashdot, that appear to bring Firefox to its knees, take very little time at all to run. Now we can finally enjoy Slashdot with its annoying web 2.0 features. Thanks, Google!

Re:Love to use it, but...

[BitZtream]

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Which can be found by visiting:

http://www.google.com/search?q=chromium+mac+download

Imagine that.

I stopped bothering with Chromium, Safari isn't different enough to justify the instability of Chromium for me.

JIT javascript

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I learned something interesting about Google's javascript parser while evaluating various parsers as potential candidates for a scripting engine in an application. The reason it's so fast? It's got a JIT compiler, just like modern Java runtimes. This means that once things get going, JavaScript is going to approach native code speed. Unfortunately it also limits the platforms on which the engine can run. Google is targeting x86 (of course) and ARM (naturally, since they've got their eyes on the mobile market). Interesting times...

Re:JIT javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody already knew that. Fuck off back to digg, loser.

Re:JIT javascript

[BZ]

Spidermonkey (the ECMAScript implementation in Gecko, hence in Firefox) and Nitro (aka SFX Extreme, the ECMAScript implementation in Safari) both use JITs as well.

> just like modern Java runtimes

Not quite; the tradeoffs are somewhat different.

> JavaScript is going to approach native code speed

Somewhat. Depends on your jit, on your code, etc.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Mac

Hello PC, Whats that you have there?

PC

Oh this? Its Google Chrome and its faster than IE and Firefox.

Mac

But it still gives you viruses and spyware right?

PC

Oh Mac, you're such a brainwashed little cunt.

PC (Cont'd)

Look, it uses WebKit, the same stupid thing your Safari browser uses. Happy now?

Mac

Sort of. I'm a Mac and I want it my way. I want Google Chrome now!

Mac (Cont'd)

PC... give that to me.

PC

You know Mac...You could just buy a PC, or at the very least boot windows on your over priced PC hardware.

Mac

But then I will get viruses...

(PC Throws his arms up and walks away)

PC

I give up.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[jeffstar]

That all depends on your industry/area of research.

ah, i see, it depends on your niche...

Re:Plugin support

[13bPower]

http://www.chromeextensions.org/

They have adblock.

Speed is nice, but lets get some basic features

[pyrico]

I really wish they would put at least one developer on getting some of their basic features requests done.

For example, I wanted to use Chrome as my HTPC browser as it does a good job scaling it's plugins to the system 2x DPI (unlike Firefox where flash applets are tiny squares in big dark frames they are supposed to fill).

But Chrome does not save the full page zoom setting! Every time you open a tab or browser instance you have to Ctr + which becomes unusable. It has not browser-wide options related to full page zoom and their font options are confusing and seem to make no effect.

Worse is the how easy it is to fine lots and lots and lots and lots of people complaining about this on their own help forums without a single response from the developers.

I know they are avoiding feature creep and keeping things slim, but even by a 80/20 rule, this kind of thing should be picked up (and could even replace their useless font settings dialog).

Re:Love to use it, but...

[JasonMaloney101]

Anyone else have the commercial's traditional piano tune playing in their head while they read this?

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Temporal]

I know. Perhaps this is the real reason Chrome even exists. They can prevent people from blocking ads, and of course track peoples surfing habits.

Actually, Chrome 4.0 has extensions, and multiple ad blockers have already been written using the system, without being stopped by Google.

Quite sad actually. The browser is pretty nice overall. Its too bad they will most likely treat their users like most corporations do... like shit.

Actually, we're a little bit smarter than that. As it turns out, treating users "like shit" -- for example, by crippling our products just to drive away the small minority of users that run ad blockers -- is actually not profitable. On the other hand, making the internet better for users, in general, is profitable to us, since it directly leads to more usage of other Google products. Which is why Eric (the CEO) frequently tells employees, in plain terms, that we should be doing whatever we can think of to improve the internet for users, without worrying about how to monetize it -- in the long term, this approach is far more profitable than being dicks.

(This post is my personal opinion -- I am not authorized to speak for Google.)

Re:Sucks To Be You

[causality]

Say what you will, but it is nice having an OS that is *tightly* coupled with the hardware -- it cuts way down on poorly written drivers that are responsible for many of the BSOD in MS land. It is a premium to pay, but the frustration spared is well worth it.

Ah yes the "blame it on the drivers" apologetic for various Windows issues. It's the perfect excuse, really, because it's difficult to falsify. So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability, and if the Mac is so stable because it has such a comparatively narrow range of hardware to support, what would be your answer to that question?

Note, my question was about Windows. I don't dispute that the Mac is quite stable. I just believe it's stable because it's based on Unix and Unix had this kind of stability long before Apple decided to use it. Apple was just smart enough to recognize that and smarter still to put a pretty and usable GUI on top of it. It's the "faulty drivers" excuse for Windows that I don't quite buy, and mostly because I've never received an answer to that question that made sense.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[LordLimecat]

Ummmm... Slashdot? Google Wave? Yahoo Mail? Google Mail? Facebook?