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Google Chrome 27 Is Out: 5% Faster Page Loads
An anonymous reader writes "Google on Tuesday released Chrome version 27 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version features a big boost to page loads (now 5 percent faster on average) as well as significant updates for developers. The speed improvement is thanks to the introduction of 'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,' according to Google. Starting with this release, the scheduler more aggressively uses an idle connection and demotes the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets."
Come on, USA! Catch up to the rest of the world.
Loaded 27 onto my laptop. It was so fast, the computer launched itself out of the house at FTL speed and is now tweeting from somewhere around Alpha Centauri.
Guess I'll replace it with a Chromebook.
Is "'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,'" a codeword for 'not loading huge fucking flash objects from shitty overloaded ad servers'? Because that really helps with load times...
Latency. The world isn't getting any smaller.
Same reason applications that used to fit on a floppy and launched in 5 seconds on a 33 mhz computer now require multiple DVDs and still take 5 seconds to launch: more features (whether necessary or not) and better graphics and other resources. Pages in 2003 probably used more highly-compressed graphics and didn't rely half as much on externally-loaded fonts and all sorts of Javascript garbage (including 3rd-party-loaded material such as Facebook "Like" buttons that allow Facebook to track your every move around the web).
The hideously poor performance that I observed had nothing whatsoever to do with Chrome or the browser, the problem was that in order to paint a simple page, my browser was also sent to the following hosts: a.fsdn.com, b.scorecardresearch.com, ad.doubleclick.net (47 times), fls.doubleclick.net, ajax.googleapis.com, www.google-analytics.net, libs.coremetrics.com, edge.quantserv.com, js.bizographics.com, ad.yieldmanager.com, r.twimg.com, and several connections to facebook and twitter, which are really puzzling since I have no facebook or twitter account. After about 3 minutes, something in the world of TCP/IP finally closed a couple of the doubleclick connections and the browser painted the page!
Extension? Chrome and Firefox both have that capability native these days.
Firefox: Go to about:config and search for click_to. Turn it to true. (It's really neat and even tells you what type of content you'll load before you click.)
Chrome: Go to chrome://settings/content and select Click to play for plugins.
Its memory usage that is such a great problem for me, not really the issue of CPU time. If chrome is constantly cuasing disk caching because of the enormous memory usage, that is going to cause massive speed degredation, which is far greater than any 5% decrease in CPU time by an algorithm. I wish Chrome had a feature for not storing uncompressed copies of image if they are off screen and would fix the massive memory holes. Really no reason a browser should use more than 5-10 MB of RAM per open tab.
Try loading a page that hasn't changed for years.
I will offer as my suggestion, the Space Jam movie homepage:
http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
5% actually makes a huge difference. "Latency matters. Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%." [link]. These statistics would not be true if the average Joe would not notice them. He notices, he just wouldn't phrase it as "this site was 100ms slower than usual so I didn't buy from it."
Links (elinks I think is the package name) is a console browser with some CSS layout support (unlike lynx when I replaced it).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If you want a Google Chrome like browser I would recommend Chromium, which unlike Google Chrome is open source and doesn't track you as much as their proprietary product. You will miss out on some of the extra features available only in Google Chrome, but most of it should be the same.
given that much of what we have today is a nearly proper superset of ten years ago, there wouldn't be much stopping you from doing 10-year-old page styles on modern browsers
[blink]i disagree![/blink]
I think Google and FB and others like them have a lot of blame to share for the web needing a 10X fatter pipe to get the same speed: if every freaking page didn't have to talk to Google Analytics, send your cookie to FB for tracking etc either before (likely) or during page load perhaps you could actually enjoy the content you are there for in the first place on a slow connection. Now you need the fast pipe just to get all the preamble out of the way to all parties interested.