

Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast? - mbrubeck
http://blog.chromium.org/2009/12/technically-speaking-what-makes-google.html

======
noarchy
I don't really notice whether a page renders .1 seconds faster. But I do
notice when a browser starts up quickly, and how smooth its responses are. And
while I love Firefox to death, it is falling short of the mark in those areas
of everyday use, compared to Chrome and Safari. If it were not for the addons,
I would have dumped it by now. It makes me sad to even type that :(

~~~
sid0
I consider this notion of speed being the only important factor pretty stupid.
No amount of speed matters when a browser's UX sucks. Firefox is the only
browser where it's actually _possible_ to get a decent UX (vertical tabs and a
way to quickly search through tabs are absolute necessities).

~~~
dylanz
I think it depends on what kind of "browser" user you are.

I spend most of my time online, and only use my browser for viewing web pages,
and sometimes testing during development. I rarely ever bookmark anything, and
if I do, it's a link I "really" go to a lot and just put it in the bookmark
toolbar. Basically, I use tabs and hot-keys.

In a nutshell, start up speed and browsing speed is most important to me. Take
it with a grain of salt though, as I don't mind viewing documents online in
lynx/w3m/etc.

~~~
sid0
I usually have around 200 tabs open, and any other browser is a nightmare to
use. Firefox + Tree Style Tabs + Ubiquity is the only way I can maintain some
degree of sanity. Since I keep my browser open all the time, I don't
particularly care about startup speed.

Hell, forget about admittedly niche things like vertical tabs. Chrome gets so
many basic things wrong, from scrolling to text selection, that it's just a
poor joke of a browser.

~~~
derefr
If I may ask, _why_ do you have 200 tabs open? Are you really using the tab
bar as a random-access array of pages, or are you using it more like a queue?

~~~
sid0
I'm just in the habit of opening tabs and forgetting about them for a few
days, then coming back to them when I have time, so I guess it's more like a
queue. I'm not saying it's desirable or optimal for everyone -- it's just how
I work, and I find it quite effective, and I treasure my workflow a lot more
than I care about "speed".

I also usually have lots of tabs with API documentation open, so it's
important to maintain state such as the position of the scrollbar. Keeping
tabs open is a much easier way to maintain this state than creating bookmarks
for every function in the API.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Perhaps you should investigate some sort of bookmarking technology like
delicious.

~~~
sid0
I've looked at them and tried to use them before, but the problem with any
bookmarking technology is that I always get the feeling that bookmarks are
permanent. (When was the last time you deleted a bookmark?) I really don't
want most of the links I open to be permanent. With tabs, it feels good to
know that there's always an out -- the red X in the top right corner.

~~~
ErrantX
I fear it is not the browser that is the problem: just that your workflow is
unique.

As an aside I'm surprised you can survive with FireFox and 200 tabs. Once I
get above about 50 the memory usage and lag just gets too much for it to be
usable. Any tips?

~~~
krzyk
Well, this usuage is not so unique, although I don't have 200 tabs, but
usually way more than 50.

As a side note, untill chrome is ported to linux (with a usable state) and
untill adblock is ported to chrome, this browser does not exist for me :)

------
InclinedPlane
What makes google chrome fast? A solid javascript compiler, a fast page
renderer with a high performance DOM (webkit), and a few additional tricks
like dns prefetching.

... and lazy competition. IE is satisfied with incremental performance
improvements every 5 years, firefox is arguably still burdened with the
luggage of AOL's Netscape rewrite from ages ago (though they've been making
tremendous progress with each release), and safari on windows is an after
thought.

~~~
oconnor0
How does Safari (or WebKit) perform on OS X?

~~~
ionfish
Very well. WebKit have a "zero-tolerance policy for performance regressions"
[1], and it shows.

They also have a very good incentive to improve JavaScript performance, since
Mobile Safari also runs on WebKit/Nitro.

[1] <http://webkit.org/projects/performance/index.html>

~~~
warfangle
While safari has a fast rendering engine, and most of its performance
benchmarks makes it out to be competitive - I don't know what it is - but it
simply /feels/ slower. Less responsive - from beachballs on link clicks to
loading up the initial 3D eyecandy. Than Chrome on windows, that is.

~~~
ionfish
Safari _feels_ fast to me, but it's an open question how much our respective
views are shaped by our preconceptions about our respective preferred
browsers. Are you using it on Windows, or on OS X? I don't know (because I
don't use it on Windows) what its performance is like on Windows, although as
InclinedPlane pointed out upthread, Apple have less incentive to optimise
there.

If it's slow on OS X, perhaps you view a lot of sites with Flash content. The
OS X Flash Player is pretty awful (I use ClickToFlash [1] to block it), and a
frequent harbinger of the beachball. I also tend to disable the "initial 3D
eyecandy", because it does slow things down, and for me at least it's pretty
pointless.

[1]: <http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/>

~~~
DTrejo
It would be interesting to do a study of which browser people _think_ is
fastest (based on a trial of all the browsers somehow perfectly skinned to
look like other ones).

------
ecaradec
I've noticed that chrome is very fast at start up, but if I forgot it opened
for some time, when I get back to it again switching tabs and repaint is very
slow. Repaint take like 0.5 seconds. Could it be related to the handling on
the many processes on Windows ?

~~~
elblanco
I've noticed the same thing, and that I seem to have less of a problem with
that on other platforms.

------
amichail
The timing of this is funny. On the one hand, Google introduces a faster DNS
service. On the other hand, one of the videos shows how DNS pre-fetching in
Chrome means that DNS lookup speed is not that critical.

~~~
eli
it doesn't mean it's not that critical... it means it's a problem, and that
different teams are trying to solve it from different angles.

~~~
amichail
It does take away much of the incentive to use a faster DNS service though.

~~~
pyre
It's not like people not using Google DNS is losing them money.

~~~
notauser
It does if they are using OpenDNS or an ISP like Comcast (if they still do DNS
interception?).

These organizations redirect failed lookups to their own search pages and sell
the traffic on for a price or show their own ads.

The alternative is a clean failure which gets handled by the browser. I
believe that most browsers send you to the default search in those cases -
which is usually Google.

There's a kickback involved in that case too (searches from Firefox earn
Mozilla a small fee for example) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was
cheaper.

