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Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux
- trickjarrett 16y agoIt certainly feels faster. It also took less than half the time to run the webkit JS benchmark than my firefox install. 414ms vs 1046ms. And it also fixed a glitch I was fighting with the Xmarks extension being unable to sync. So I'm back to Chrome as my default browser.
- iaskwhy 16y agoThe new test system looks amazing! I love when companies do that kind of stuff, it must keep their employees happy!
- ronaldj 16y agoThey have some more small little artsy videos they did for Chrome's features, which I've never seen before: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html
- potatolicious 16y agoIt reminds me of a discussion thread we had a few days ago, when people were lamenting that it took so many billions and trillions of CPU operations to do relatively simple things today - that we're not really getting the real value of Moore's Law. It's heartening to see modern computing power like this :)
- rottencupcakes 16y agoProbably the single thing that keeps me using Firefox is its address bar. It's a much nicer experience than Chrome's, with its user-friendly auto complete mechanisms. The speed of the browsers is rarely the bottleneck for me anymore. I'll switch to Chrome for intense javascript experiences, but that's about it. I feel like chrome needs to start focusing more time on the experience - these speed improvements aren't paying dividends anymore.
- albertzeyer 16y agoWhat do you mean with the address bar? Chromes bar also has autocompletion. I even find it simpler to use. In Firefox, I have to press the down-key + enter to select a suggestion. In Chrome, I just have to press enter. What do you think is missing otherwise in Chrome? I think the overall user experience is probably much better compared to Firefox in nearly all aspects.
- trickjarrett 16y agoI concur with rottencupcakes, the FF "AwesomeBar" is still a bit more... awesome than Chrome's. It isn't just auto-url completion, it does a fair bit more completion and analysis to suggest what you're trying to type.
- hasanove 16y agoWhile I use Chrome as default, I too miss Firefox autocompletion. In Firefox, I would just start typing "Hacker News" and HN would popup as a first suggestion after first letter, probably based on usage frequency. The only way to get the same result in Chrome, is to start typing "news.ycombinator.com", which means you have to remember url, not the name. Chrome, will surely find by "Hacker News" too, but I will need to type in at least 5-6 characters for that.
- _delirium 16y agoThat might be why I prefer Chrome's. I usually type URLs, only fall back to typing titles if I don't remember the URL, and it really annoys me how often Firefox will take me to the wrong site unless I type a fairly large prefix of the URL. In Chrome I can just type ne..., while in Firefox I have to go all the way to news.y... before it'll give me the right completion.
- abstractbill 16y agoAs far as I can tell, both browsers have basic learning algorithms that are supposed to predict better over time what site you want (in both Chrome and Firefox I can now just type 'n' to get to Hacker News). However, even though I currently use Chrome as my primary browser, I think Firefox still gets this slightly better - I think it learned more quickly and accurately for me at least.
- ashishbharthi 16y agoJust installed and tried on Win XP. It definitely feels faster than Safari and Firefox.
- apphacker 16y agoWhat kind of specific improvements are they making to the JavaScript engine that is leading to such dramatic speed increases?
- not_an_alien 16y agoAny way to tweak the auto-update features for Flash? I want to have the debugger version installed instead, or disable it altogether. :/
- _delirium 16y agoWeird, I just upgraded on Linux (from 5.0.342.9 to 5.0.375.29) and fonts on a bunch of sites (like HN) are different now. I wonder what did that.
- buster 16y agoThis is an interesting read on the state of fonts on Linux/Gnome, read it to understand some of the complexity: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/fonts/ http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/fonts/
- ddemchuk 16y agodoes it have firebug yet? That's all I care about. And no, the development toolbar is not good enough
- ck2 16y agoWorks in any browser: http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite
- brettnak 16y agoLast time I tried firebuglite, it didn't really work in any browser.
- TheBranca18 16y agoI'd have to say the developer tools are comparable to Firebug and won't freeze Chrome the way Firebug periodically freezes Firefox.
- ddemchuk 16y agoYou, my friend, clearly don't use Firebug that much. Until you can add new attributes to existing selectors in developer tools, it simply cannot compare
- chmike 16y agoWhat I dislike in chrome is that passwords are not secured by a SSO password like in firefox. What I like in chrome is its thin and lightweight frame. What I miss in Chrome and Firefox is bookmark synchronization on my own server because privacy is important to me.
- logic 16y agoWeave (https://mozillalabs.com/weave/ https://mozillalabs.com/weave/) solves the bookmark (and configuration in general) synchronization problem for Firefox; I was hosting my own server quite happily until I switched to Chrome. Switching was a hard decision for me: I like Firefox, quite a lot, and I'm very comfortable using it. But on Linux, it's unbearably slow, while Chrome flies. Once a mostly-workable adblocker was available for Chrome, I didn't have many reasons left not to switch to something more productive.
- tvon 16y agoThings keeping me from using Chrome: * Lack of built-in RSS support. This one kind of blows my mind. * Worst progress indicator I've ever seen. * Can't open external links in new windows, have to open in "tab of whatever my last used browser window was". * Flash crashes more than it does in Safari/Firefox, but I don't blame Chrome for that. Not exactly constructive to the conversation I guess, but at least the first three things have been driving me nuts for a bit.
- ube 16y agoMy list of things keeping from Chrome is same as yours though I'd also add lack of google gears support. I don't understand how they have that for firefox but they don't have it from Chrome. In addition to this Chrome (on the mac) crashes quite frequently for me.
- blehn 16y agoMore good news: pinned tabs are back.
- eelinow 16y agoJust upgraded and almost immediately had to file a bug report. Flash video will not play in anything but full screen, and getting to said fullscreen requires about mouse clicks in quick succession. I'm running OS X 10.6.3 on dual quad-core xeon (Nehalem 8 Core) Mac Pro with 6gb ram. Chrome is my default browser, and while I am part of the Youtube Html5 Beta, the inconvenience is rather large. Flash apps are a no-go entirely as they will not render.
- nanijoe 16y agoI don't know if this happens to anyone else, but lately Google Chrome just freezes up most times I open a page that has flash. I'm using it on a Mac
- coyul 16y agoIf you haven't quit the browser in awhile, this can happen. The good news is that in Chrome you can kill just the flash plugin without losing the rest of your browsing session (I usually do this by opening the Activity monitor and killing it from there; usually at that point you can see that the Flash plugin has gone completely nuts eating memory...) Once the Flash plugin is dead, you can reload any open tab that needs Flash and it will come back better behaved. Until the next time it gets into whatever state causes that complete non-responsiveness. Note that the alternative to this -- at least in Safari -- is just to have the browser crash completely occasionally. If you look at the crash dump, it's still the Flash plugin doing it, though.
- rykov 16y agoThe speed and subtlety of nose-picking is also fantastic (at 0:09 mark)
- theschwa 16y agoI still miss bookmark tagging from FF. In fact, I often keep a FF window open just so I can keep my bookmarks organized with tags.
- Maro 16y agoChrome is still missing features that are must have for me from a usability perspective. The number one is "full page default zoom" (eg. not just text zoom). For some reason this request is being ignored since 2008: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=32a8d83bd71bc1a8&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=32a8...
- Shorel 16y agoI still prefer Opera, the speed of Chrome, the functionality that Firefox has to copy.