

What’s the Fastest Web Browser in the “Real World?” Chrome. - nathantross
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/08/whats-the-fastest-web-browser-in-the-real-world-chrome/

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guano___
So this benchmark measured "how the population actually experiences web
browser performance", and the article pronounces Google Chrome as the obvious
winner, with the slight sidenote that FF 5 has a faster "perceived render
time"?

It just seems slightly disingenuous.

~~~
mikeryan
Obviously Chrome is _really_ the fastest. Firefox just _seems_ the fastest ;-)

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hugh4life
"The second metric, perceived render time (green), refers to the amount of
time it takes for the visible portion of the page to load in the browser.
Again, Chrome did well here (2.374 seconds), but in this case, Firefox 5 did
better (2.18 seconds)."

I bet this gap gets larger the more tabs you add. Chrome starts choking after
about 40-45 tabs... Firefox can handle 200 easy.

The problem with Firefox is that "tab groups" function is horribly broken(as
in, should not have been included yet) and that Tree Style Tabs just
encourages opening hundreds of tabs.

~~~
Que
Do you find it a normal use-case to have 40+ tabs open in a single browser
window?

I only ask because that seems like it becomes unusable ~20 tabs, maybe this is
heavily subjective but I cannot maintain anywhere near that number of tabs in
a single browser window.

~~~
hugh4life
I rarely have fewer than 40 tabs open... I usually have about 80-110 but I
would like to bring it down to about 60 or so though. Tree Style Tabs makes it
easy to gather up tabs but when it comes time to delete them I hesitate or
they're hidden under a top tree node where it would take too much time to
clean it up.

I think I just found an extension that could replace Tree Style Tabs. I was
looking for something like this last month didn't see it. This puts the Tab
Groups in the sidebar. .

Pano: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pano/>
<https://github.com/teramako/Pano>

What I like about this extension is that the tree would only allowed to get 1
level deep. With Tree Style Tabs, many tabs I don't want anymore can hide
under a top tree node. Also, it looks like it will play well with Tab Mix Plus
and I can keep the top tab bar.

~~~
crazygringo
Honest question -- why?

The only time I have more than 2-3 tabs open is when I open a bunch of
articles at the same time (like on HN), to read through one-by-one, closing
them as I go along.

How do you keep track of all those tabs? Why not just use bookmarks, open what
you're interested in, and then close it?

I'm sincerely interested in this from a UI point of view...

And if your interest is speed in visualization, if the answer isn't a special
list of sites that browsers might pre-render in the background, so your
favorite sites always "loaded" instantly?

~~~
Wilduck
I have tons of tabs open mostly because I hate the back button. Every time I
open any new page it goes in a new tab. Any time a page will be relevant for
more than the next five minutes, it gets moved to the front or back of my list
(depending if it's for business or pleasure). If it might be interesting, it
floats in the middle, otherwise it gets closed.

Admittedly this is probably a strange way of working with the web, but I like
to be able to easily find things that I've been working on recently. Only at
the end of the day do I fully scan through my tabs and bookmark anything I'll
_need_ to reference later.

~~~
beej71
My pal has this usage pattern, as well. Seems nutty to me, but it goes to show
everyone has their best way of working.

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AshleysBrain
Chrome is very fast and I do love it, but it still doesn't have a hardware
accelerated HTML5 canvas. So if you open up a HTML5 game, IE and FF5 skip
along nicely, but Chrome gets very choppy.

I hope they fix this soon, because if your "real world" involves "playing
HTML5 games", Chrome is one of the slowest!

Edit: here's a little HTML5 "game", try it in IE9, FF5 and Chrome:
<http://www.scirra.com/labs/ghostshooterfullscreen/>

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Lucadg
I find Chrome for Os X as being very "aggressive" with caching. Sometimes it's
misleading as what I am seeing is not what I should see. That forces me to
clear the cache more often than other browsers. I love the speed but start to
wonder wether the price to pay is worth. I'm not even sure what I am saying
makes any sense, does it?

~~~
phreakhead
Yes! They cheat! Sometimes my internet connection will go out and all my tabs
in Chrome lose their scrolling ability! It's like they just cached a bitmap of
the page instead of the actual page itself.

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palebluedot
It would be interesting to see some additional data - for instance, the load &
perceived render times for each browser under different operating systems -
how is Safari on OS X vs Safari on Windows? Chrome & Firefox across Linux,
Mac, and Windows?

I imagine that Safari is predominantly on OS X, and IE on Windows. Does that
affect the load and render times? I guess since the two fastest (Firefox &
Chrome) are also on all platforms, and probably more equally distributed, that
would suggest that the OS isn't as important - but without more information,
that is just a guess.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Fx is consistently faster than Chromium on my Linux machines, while my
roommate notices the inverse on his Windows machines. It's definitely
partially OS-dependent.

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rospaya
Obligatory "what about Opera?"

~~~
jarek
Don't be silly. Everyone knows the only use of Opera is lifting their age-old
features and advertising them as revolutionary.

\- remembers 5.12

~~~
nathantross
Ofcourse, I do love the Opera app for iPhone, which is a lot faster then the
Safari standard.

~~~
jamesgeck0
That's because Opera Mini isn't a normal browser. It's something like a thin
client. Opera's servers do all the rendering and shoot things to your phone in
a little binary file which the app just has to display.

Opera Mobile and Opera Desktop are more conventional browsers.

~~~
falcolas
There is a "thick client" opera browser as well. Good browser.

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Iaks
I only know one thing for sure around this discussion:

FF runs netflix without hitching on my 2008 macbook. Chrome drops frames about
once a second and I get an un-watchable movie.

This very well could be because of Silverlight, but I don't know enough of
about the underlying connections between Silverlight and the browser to judge
this. As an end-user the experience is still the same.

I do, however, still use chrome for everything else. The unified search/url
bar hooked me and I can't go back.

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sp332
I'm not sure how big a difference it really makes, but you can tweak the
"perceived" render speed in FF by changing how long it waits between starting
to get data and rendering the partial page. Go to "about:config" and add a new
integer called "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" to something lower than the
default of 250 (milliseconds).

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wtallis
And how much faster will page load times be with thorough blocking of ads and
the kind of third-party scripts needed to gather this data? I'd bet even a
halfway-decent ad blocker will make far more difference than choice of
browser.

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btilly
I'm curious about how much of this could be caused by the confounding
influence of real world Chrome users being more technically savvy and
therefore more likely to have good broadband connections.

~~~
tybris
Is that true? My computer savvy friends are slow to switch from Firefox,
because they've come to rely on certain plug-ins. My non-computer savvy
relatives, who kept switching back to IE if I gave them Firefox, are all using
Chrome.

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ck2
It's a cliche but we really do benefit from all the competition.

Heck I am still on Firefox 3.6 and perfectly happy.

