More on Google Chrome
Well it’s been blowing up on the web which is no big surprise. I’ve had more time to play with it and have a few more observations from myself and others on the web.
More after the jump
The biggest thing I think was that Google was using an old version of webkit which had known vulnerabilities. This seems strange being there are updated builds coming out all the time for webkit that I would have thought they would have tried to keep up better then that. Lets hope this isn’t a continued pattern in the future but this is first release so we have to cut them some slack.
I didn’t notice a huge increase in speed with the AJAX apps I use but it’s nice to see that Mozilla is already “up to speed” with a faster engine. Part of the talk out there is that google releasing their own browser will help push innovation of the other browsers but I don’t believe that they were just sitting around like IE was in the recent past. News like this goes to show that the current underdogs of the market were still out there trying to be the best.
Another thing that came out that I also found funny was that there are google sites that don’t support chrome. I have to imagine Google is turning into a Microsoft type environment where people on product teams don’t really seem to talk. Not that they haven’t seemed like your standard fare company for a while just it’s sad to see things not all coming together like I feel the “other” web company has. Though I am partial to them because I love their developer community and the stuff that comes from it.
And now comes the biggest fail on Chrome. One of my biggest issues with FF is that if you leave it running over night with an AJAX app running (gmail, google reader, etc) it starts to bog down and either dog or just crash. At the same time though I have usually 10-30 windows open with 5-20 tabs in each window so it’s not like it’s doing nothing. Well as a test last night I cleaned up my Firefox session and had 4 tabs open. Opened the same identical tabs in Chrome and left it open overnight. FF went up from about 120M to 160M in total memory used and the CPU was doing nothing. Chrome started off bigger at 130M and didn’t increase much, but it had constant CPU usage anywhere from 10-30%. That’s not horrible except that I then went to use chrome and nothing would load. New pages wouldn’t load, but Google reader attempted to still work though images from other sites that were in the feeds wouldn’t load. Hopefully this gets addressed in the future but we will see.
Overall it is a neat toy to play with but with these issues and the lack of extensions (give me my Web developer plugin or give me death) it’s far fro being my browser of choice.