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."

Comments

Thanks, Chrome!

[Gizzmonic]

Your sub-millisecond rendering time enabled me to get FP!

You can bash Google all you want

[acid06]

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.

Re:You can bash Google all you want

[steelfood]

I think anybody can appreciate the explosions in the potato and lightning tests. After all, Michael Bay is very popular for a reason.

Geeks likely understand it at a different level, but it's still entertaining for the layman.

Re:You can bash Google all you want

[sznupi]

Notice how the benchmark you linked to tests only JS; not performance in actual usage, which "a side-by-side comparison of Chrome and a few other browsers rendering in slow motion for comparison" would be about. Also, that 30% number is in relation just to previous version of Chrome.

Re:You can bash Google all you want

[electrosoccertux]

Set up 20 pages as your homepage in Firefox.

Now open those same 20 pages in chrome and set them as the pages shown when you open a new instance of Chome.

Now close both of them.
Now open Firefox. See how it lags your system and can only max out one of your processors?
Now open Chrome. See how it pegs all 4 of your cores to 100% for about 2 seconds, and then is done rendering?

Firefox is so slow at opening my homepages, that it hangs the Windows 7 UI. And before you ask, yes, I have about 20 pages set to my homepage and visit them all multiple times/day-- market news blogs, forums, websites, etc-- most of which an RSS feed is not sufficient.

Re:Why does it render from bottom to top?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Chrome is cheating...

[stazeii]

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.

Re:Too bad they kind of cheated on the fetch speed

[gotpoetry]

Two of the three were from local source. The Pandora example was not.

From TFYTV:

Chrome Browser vs. Sound: We loaded an artist page from Pandora.com, a streaming internet radio service directly off the web on a 15Mbps internet connection.

The other two examples were indeed from a local disk copy.

slim edge of the wedge

[butterflysrage]

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

Re:file://...

[Concerned Onlooker]

"...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.

Re:I think

[bill_mcgonigle]

I think that was the coolest commercial I have ever seen.

Let me just say this to the guy at Google who:

• used his 20% time
• got work to buy him:
  • a tesla coil
  • a high-speed camera
  • parts to build a potato gun
  • a frier
• spent work time building, testing, and playing with all this
• and generated real Company value from the effort

<WaynesWorld>
We're Not Worthy! We're Not Worthy!
</WaynesWorld>

Somebody please post a scan of this most legendary PO of all time.