Slashdot Mirror
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."
Your sub-millisecond rendering time enabled me to get FP!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
If you are interested in the behind the scene info.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oarMXGq3gI
I think that was the coolest commercial I have ever seen.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
But this is seriously cool stuff.
This is marketing which probably only really appeals to geeks. Most companies these days are much more worries about the "casual" audience at large.
Google remains true to its origins and is proud of it.
So, yeah, you can say this is all a plan to become the big brother, bring profit to their shareholders or whatever. To me it's just plain neat and I'm glad we have Google around to make sure the other players are kept in check.
See the video description for an FAQ (also n.b. this is measuring page rendering, not page downloading - 2 of the 3 sites were loaded locally):
"Why does allrecipes.com in the potato gun sequence appear at once, and not the text first and images second? And why does it appear to render from bottom of the screen to the top?"
Chrome sends the rendered page to the video card buffer all at once, which is why allrecipes.com appears at once, and not with the text first and images second. Chrome actually paints the page from top to bottom, but to eliminate a shadow from the driver board, we had to flip the monitor upside down and set the system preferences in Windows to rotate everything 180 degrees, resulting in the page appearing to render from bottom to top.
Equipment used:
- Computer: MacBook Pro laptop with Windows installed
- Monitor - 24" Asus: We had to replace the standard fluorescent backlight with very large tungsten fixtures to funnel in more light to capture the screen. In addition, we flipped the monitor 180 degrees to eliminate a shadow from the driver board and set the system preferences on the computer to rotate 180 degrees. No special software was used in this process.
- Camera: Phantom v640 High Speed Camera at 1920 x 1080, films up to 2700 fps
It exists! https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom Now we wait for no-script.
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.
From TFYTV:
The other two examples were indeed from a local disk copy.
how many of us here have installed for friends or family because of features that likely appeal mostly or only to geeks? The vast majority of my extended family uses firefox right now because I put in on there and hid IE on them until they got used to it.
Market to the geeks, and the plebs will follow. If for nothing else than they don't want to seem out of the loop
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
"...you could have a browser coded by Jesus Christ himself and it's going to be slow as dirt."
Not only that, but it would take three days to recover from a crash.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.