
Dear Chrome, Slow Your Roll - ssclafani
http://massivegreatness.com/bloated
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asadotzler
Something that people who are not terribly familiar with browsers often don't
get is that it's not all about the browser. Content plays a major role.

I hear "Firefox 1.0 was fast and lean and had no bloat" all the time but if
you download Firefox 1.0 and run it, you'll find it awfully slow and clumsy.
(And the same is true for Chrome 1.0.)

So, what's changed. It's the content, stupid.

Back in 2004, when Firefox 1.0 shipped, a web page was usually a simple
document that was a couple hundred kilobytes. Today, a "web page" is an
application that might be multiple megabytes even if it's just a seemingly
simple list of status updates.

Back in 2004, you might have had one web app, maybe Gmail, open all the time
in a tab. Today, you probably have several of these web apps open in tabs all
of the time, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, etc. and they're considerably
larger and richer than they were 8 years ago.

Yes, browsers have added features. But they've also added massive amounts of
performance and efficiencies that were absent in earlier browser releases.
It's not as simple as "browsers get bloated over time."

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ripperdoc
Take every piece of software and OS, and you will find conflicting views of
whether it goes faster or slower with time. You buy a new device, everything
feels snappy, but one year down the line, things feel slow. But the problem
is, this is based on expectations, based on hardware, based on usage pattern,
etc.

What we need is a objective software speed measure based in UI terms (because
that is what people in the end notice). Such as "time to start" and "time to
get to usable state". This should be measured automatically after each build,
and normalized to hardware. Only then can both developers and users see hard
evidence that software, e.g. Chrome, is now running slower than before.
Because the cost of adding a feature is otherwise invisible to the developer,
while the user's keep getting into anecdotal discussions of what is faster or
slower, comparing wildly different hardware capabilities.

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jdietrich
The data disagree with you. Pick a benchmark, any benchmark, and you'll see
significant improvements in Chrome performance over time. It starts faster, it
renders pages faster, it runs JS faster. I can't comment on stability, because
I haven't seen the data and because Chrome is highly reliable for me and
everyone I know.

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laurihy
For me, turning plugins such as flash into "click to play" seemed to speed up
things a lot in osx / chrome. The setting is a bit hidden, but you can find it
from settings -> show advanced -> content settings -> plug-ins.

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sonnyhe2002
If the slow down is only noticed on OSX, it's a OSX problem especially when
OSX 10.7.5 just came out. Most application that runs perfectly on window tend
to run poorly on OSX.

... Here comes it hate mail :(

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mtgx
I'm curious, what does the author of the post, or others, think Chrome added
that was unnecessary?

~~~
error54
Agree. The author complains a lot without naming any specific features that
are considered "bloated." As a web developer, I love all the features that
Google rolls into Chrome with each update; especially in the developer tools
section.

