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Visually Demonstrating Chrome's Rendering Speed
eldavojohn writes "Recent betas of Google's Chrome browser are getting seriously fast. Couple that with better hardware, on average, and it's getting down to speeds that are difficult to demonstrate in a way users can appreciate. Which is why Google felt that some Rube Goldberg-ish demonstrations with slo-mo are in order. Gone are the days of boring millisecond response time metrics."
I think that was the coolest commercial I have ever seen.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
Ok Google, I've resisted getting Chrome up until this point but you've sold me. Until it gets some form of Adblock Plus like functionality it likely will not replace Firefox as my general purpose browser but as a backup browser I am going to give it a try now.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
It's great marketing but I'd be interested to see a side-by-side comparison of Chrome and a few other browsers rendering in slow motion for comparison. Chrome is the fastest, but only by about 30%. Still stands out as a great ad campaign though.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Anyone who can explain why the screen in the first example renders from bottom to top?
I would expect it to start rendering at the top.
Chrome is caching ALL content, even stuff that says "no-cache". While "no-cache" is somewhat broken, things like the horrible "Blackboard" web apps don't really work in Chrome because it's caching things that shouldn't be cached. If Google intends to do this, and encourage this with other browsers, they need to start teaching designers how to properly use caching headers so that Chrome doesn't break usability with it's aggressiveness.
What I found amusing is the spudgun community responded to this quicker than Slashdot. Their thread is here;
http://www.spudfiles.com/forums/googles-clear-spudgun-in-720p-high-speed-cool-footage-t20946.html
The truth shall set you free!
Earlier this week, I attended Web 2.0, a conference in San Francisco. One of the big exhibitors is Microsoft. At their booth was a beautiful woman demonstrating a preview of IE9. At the time, she was demonstrating the graphics performance of IE9, highlighting the fact that they used the graphics controller directly to render the spinning graphics (which looked like a Windows-NT-3GL-screen-saver) much faster than Firefox and slightly faster than Chrome. She mentioned that it was “HTML5 rendering” and pointed to the site where you or I could prove it to ourselves -- http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/. As she stood their beaming, I innocently asked if I could try, and she foolishly agreed to let me browse http://html5test.com/ which gave IE9 a score of 19/160 (BTW, that is what IE8 shows too). Then I tried it with Firefox and got 101/160, and Chrome 118/160. The beautiful woman was taken aback, obviously never having seen this site or acting as such. After learning what the site was about then generally questioning its motives, she dismissed the tests out of hand, saying they were basically irrelevant when compared to Microsoft’s. A gentleman standing next to me replied something like, “browser compatibility has been the biggest issue in developing applications, and now that most other browsers seem to have converged on a common standard, you dismiss it as irrelevant. You demonstrate a new version that will not be out for a year but does not feature any movement toward compatibility with anything but yourself.” The beautiful woman went into damage control, replying that what was being demonstrated was a preview, not even beta, and implied that many things may be added by the time it ships. I hope so, but I doubt it. BTW, others at the kiosk demonstrating Windows Mobile 7 were saying that will ship by the end of the year with IE8 and , of course, Silverlight.