6 ms·

Holy shit this browser is fast. Wow.

by run4yourlives 18y ago

mamama 18y ago
True. And fairly polished, too.
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  Very. I'm very impressed with this so far.
- kleevr 18y ago
  I listened to part of the shareholder thing. I think they said it's been in development for 2 years. That's a long time to stay in stealth mode...
  - enomar 18y ago
    And pretty amazing they didn't have a leak!
    - ken 18y ago
      Are you sure they didn't? How many Google browser stories have you seen in the past 2 years, and dismissed out of hand?
      - netcan 18y ago
        The splash the pond strategy.
      - enomar 18y ago
        Did you ever see a leaked screenshot, memo or email? Everything else is just rumor or speculation.
- JoelSutherland 18y ago
  Extremely polished. My only complaint so far is that I miss the bar at the bottom of the browser that typically displays the active link and download status. I find the little pop-up distracting. If this survives the day without a stability issue it becomes my primary browser.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    Looks like they made some minor adjustments for keyboard-only types: instead of a dotted gray box, they highlight whatever item you've tabbed to with a more visible yellow box. And text boxes are expandable! (Or is this a News.YC feature I missed?) Edit: Last paragraph wrong on both counts; see response.
    - dcurtis 18y ago
      Those are features of Webkit, the core browser technology that Chrome and Safari are built on.
  - soldarnal 18y ago
    Several things about the tab interface bother me: - Double clicking on the tab bar to open a new tab just resizes the window because it's actually the title bar - There is no window menu icon in the top left, so double clicking there doesn't close the browser - Closing all tabs closes the application It's certainly fast, though, and probably will supplant FireFox as my gmail browser. The tab switching animation is slick too. Definitely looking forward to how this develops. Seems more like a web application browser and less like a web page browser, which is obviously something Google needs to seriously attack Microsoft's desktop monopolies.
marketer 18y ago
Not only does it feel much faster than Firefox/IE, but everything is much simpler. They stripped away all the unnecessary toolbars and menus, and the configuration options are much simpler.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  The popular notion is that Google doesn't know how to do UIs. Guess that's not exactly right.
  - nswanberg 18y ago
    Google seems to live by the maxim "the data is the interface", making their UIs look very staid. The logo in the title bar is an amazing study in self-discipline. It's a mute color and 13x36 pixels!
  - yters 18y ago
    mixmax pointed out to me awhile back that even though that's the popular impression, their visual design is actually quite in depth. For instance, he said to consider the difference between the Google front page logo with and without shadows.
- pgebhard 18y ago
  It's like it's doing to Firefox what Firefox did to Mozilla. Strip away the fluff to have a slim browser that does what you want. They keep harping on how it's open source and that their great ideas will improve the web. Wasn't that the goal of Firefox (née Phoenix)? I guess they didn't want to deal with trying to have their developers help fix Firefox. Sometimes, it's just easier to start over.
- Angostura 18y ago
  Thats how these things always start. ... and then people start requesting 'just a couple' of new features.
  - rudyfink 18y ago
diptanu 18y ago
Dromaeo results http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571 http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571 Check it out. A lot faster than FF and Safari. I am not counting IE here...IE is outdated with the launch of Chrome.
- semerda 18y ago
  On a P4/2.4GHz with 768 MB of RAM running XP (spare pc). JavaScript Performance Tests - http://dromaeo.com/ http://dromaeo.com/ Google Chrome - 705.00ms (Total), Firefox 3 - 3303.40ms (Total), Safari 3.1.2 - 3888.20ms (Total), IE7 - Crashed the browser on "base 64 Encoding and Decoding v122" test. It was also very slow on the 1st 2 tests.
  - Zev 18y ago
    fwiw, WebKit (r36053) nightly ran the tests in 794.80ms and the latest FF3.1 nightly Gecko/20080903051823) was nearly double Chrome, running at 1343.40ms
jmtame 18y ago
Yeah, the status bar is clunky though. Phew.. the JS rendering in this beast is wicked.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  The JS performance alone might well be game changing. That, plus Google Gears, and Microsoft Office is starting to look vulnerable.
iron_ball 18y ago
Yeah, I dig it for real. Unfortunately, there are three Opera features that I have come to require -- direction-key navigation among links; mouse gestures for Forward and Back; and named searches* created by right-clicking search fields on sites. If plugins fill these holes, I will seriously consider using this. * For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on. Q: It's open source, iron_ball, why not write your own?
- dr 18y ago
  For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on. It's not quite as easy as right clicking the search box in Chrome, but you can still do it by right clicking the address bar and going to Edit search engines. You can manually add named searches there. After the first time you search on certain sites, it will automatically add them as named searches (I noticed this with Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia--you'll see them show up in the Edit search engines area).
mixmax 18y ago
I just installed it - and I feel this will be the same experience as when I went from Hotbot to Google way back when. A friend told me about this wicked new search engine, and after having used it once I never used hotbot again. I have the same feeling about this.
- dmix 18y ago
  You don't use any Firefox add-ons? For that reason alone I'm stuck on Firefox for a while. I tried moving to Safari a few months back when they updated webkit, but I needed firebug, greasemonkey, compete etc.
  - netcan 18y ago
    Platform dependence.
    - Herring 18y ago
      More features, you mean. I'm not even gonna bother with chrome when it comes out for linux. I have dozens of extensions & mousegestures alone can't be traded for any number of milliseconds.
  - ptn 18y ago
    Google will try to make switching from FF/Safari/IE as swift as possible, which means they will have to deal with the add-ons. The "Import Settings" thingy is not enough.
KirinDave 18y ago
Welcome to WebKit, sir. It's always this fast for those of us that use it. Part of me is a little irked that google is going to get credit with many people for things like "Inspect Element". But it's entirely Apple's fault for keeping Safari so far behind the state of Webkit.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  It´s the same that comes with WebKit (at least the Mac builds). Very nice indeed.
- snewe 18y ago
  I somewhat agree. I saw little JS performance difference b/t chrome (on XP) and the latest nightly build of Safari (Webkit).
  - KirinDave 18y ago
    There is a difference and for every non-DOM js benchmarking suite I can find, it's about 3x in favor of V8. It's most impressive.
trezor 18y ago
Its scrolling, both for page-up/down, scroll-wheels and touchpads seems to be set about 3-4x more sensitive than in other browsers or applications in general. This gives it a nice illusion of speed, but it gets annoying pretty fast once you realize you want to scroll with any kind of precision without needing to have a lifetime of training in FPSes.
- dkokelley 18y ago
  I have the same issue. I'm looking now to see if I can adjust it...
- eggnet 18y ago
  I'm running it in vmware on a mac, I don't like how it scrolls. Using the touchpad on a macbook, you can scroll down a pixel at a time if you move slowly. The smallest quanta I can scroll with the touchpad via vmware running vista is far too large. I really hope the native mac version scrolls better.
Prrometheus 18y ago
I love it. Can't wait to get it on my Ubuntu partition.
tokipin 18y ago
for me it's fast loading lean webpages (like google results pages,) but on most pages i can't tell the difference between it and FF3 on a Blogger operation (hitting the preview button with a lot of HTML in the editbox, which performs some processing on it) FF3 is faster. i don't know what the difference is due to -- guessing string or DOM operations no noticeable differences with Gmail
- llimllib 18y ago
  There's a report on reddit about poor DOM (specifically innerHTML) performance: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z9xo/introducing_v8_googles_new_javascript_engine/c059wef http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z9xo/introduci...

Holy shit this browser is fast. Wow.

mamama 18y ago

True. And fairly polished, too.

run4yourlives 18y ago
Very. I'm very impressed with this so far.
kleevr 18y ago
I listened to part of the shareholder thing. I think they said it's been in development for 2 years. That's a long time to stay in stealth mode...
- enomar 18y ago
  And pretty amazing they didn't have a leak!
  - ken 18y ago
    Are you sure they didn't? How many Google browser stories have you seen in the past 2 years, and dismissed out of hand?
    - netcan 18y ago
      The splash the pond strategy.
    - enomar 18y ago
      Did you ever see a leaked screenshot, memo or email? Everything else is just rumor or speculation.
JoelSutherland 18y ago
Extremely polished. My only complaint so far is that I miss the bar at the bottom of the browser that typically displays the active link and download status. I find the little pop-up distracting. If this survives the day without a stability issue it becomes my primary browser.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  Looks like they made some minor adjustments for keyboard-only types: instead of a dotted gray box, they highlight whatever item you've tabbed to with a more visible yellow box. And text boxes are expandable! (Or is this a News.YC feature I missed?) Edit: Last paragraph wrong on both counts; see response.
  - dcurtis 18y ago
    Those are features of Webkit, the core browser technology that Chrome and Safari are built on.
- soldarnal 18y ago
  Several things about the tab interface bother me: - Double clicking on the tab bar to open a new tab just resizes the window because it's actually the title bar - There is no window menu icon in the top left, so double clicking there doesn't close the browser - Closing all tabs closes the application It's certainly fast, though, and probably will supplant FireFox as my gmail browser. The tab switching animation is slick too. Definitely looking forward to how this develops. Seems more like a web application browser and less like a web page browser, which is obviously something Google needs to seriously attack Microsoft's desktop monopolies.

marketer 18y ago

Not only does it feel much faster than Firefox/IE, but everything is much simpler. They stripped away all the unnecessary toolbars and menus, and the configuration options are much simpler.

stcredzero 18y ago
The popular notion is that Google doesn't know how to do UIs. Guess that's not exactly right.
- nswanberg 18y ago
  Google seems to live by the maxim "the data is the interface", making their UIs look very staid. The logo in the title bar is an amazing study in self-discipline. It's a mute color and 13x36 pixels!
- yters 18y ago
  mixmax pointed out to me awhile back that even though that's the popular impression, their visual design is actually quite in depth. For instance, he said to consider the difference between the Google front page logo with and without shadows.
pgebhard 18y ago
It's like it's doing to Firefox what Firefox did to Mozilla. Strip away the fluff to have a slim browser that does what you want. They keep harping on how it's open source and that their great ideas will improve the web. Wasn't that the goal of Firefox (née Phoenix)? I guess they didn't want to deal with trying to have their developers help fix Firefox. Sometimes, it's just easier to start over.
Angostura 18y ago
Thats how these things always start. ... and then people start requesting 'just a couple' of new features.
- rudyfink 18y ago

diptanu 18y ago

Dromaeo results http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571 http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571 Check it out. A lot faster than FF and Safari. I am not counting IE here...IE is outdated with the launch of Chrome.

semerda 18y ago
On a P4/2.4GHz with 768 MB of RAM running XP (spare pc). JavaScript Performance Tests - http://dromaeo.com/ http://dromaeo.com/ Google Chrome - 705.00ms (Total), Firefox 3 - 3303.40ms (Total), Safari 3.1.2 - 3888.20ms (Total), IE7 - Crashed the browser on "base 64 Encoding and Decoding v122" test. It was also very slow on the 1st 2 tests.
- Zev 18y ago
  fwiw, WebKit (r36053) nightly ran the tests in 794.80ms and the latest FF3.1 nightly Gecko/20080903051823) was nearly double Chrome, running at 1343.40ms

jmtame 18y ago

Yeah, the status bar is clunky though. Phew.. the JS rendering in this beast is wicked.

stcredzero 18y ago
The JS performance alone might well be game changing. That, plus Google Gears, and Microsoft Office is starting to look vulnerable.

iron_ball 18y ago

Yeah, I dig it for real. Unfortunately, there are three Opera features that I have come to require -- direction-key navigation among links; mouse gestures for Forward and Back; and named searches* created by right-clicking search fields on sites. If plugins fill these holes, I will seriously consider using this. * For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on. Q: It's open source, iron_ball, why not write your own?

dr 18y ago
For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on. It's not quite as easy as right clicking the search box in Chrome, but you can still do it by right clicking the address bar and going to Edit search engines. You can manually add named searches there. After the first time you search on certain sites, it will automatically add them as named searches (I noticed this with Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia--you'll see them show up in the Edit search engines area).

mixmax 18y ago

I just installed it - and I feel this will be the same experience as when I went from Hotbot to Google way back when. A friend told me about this wicked new search engine, and after having used it once I never used hotbot again. I have the same feeling about this.

dmix 18y ago
You don't use any Firefox add-ons? For that reason alone I'm stuck on Firefox for a while. I tried moving to Safari a few months back when they updated webkit, but I needed firebug, greasemonkey, compete etc.
- netcan 18y ago
  Platform dependence.
  - Herring 18y ago
    More features, you mean. I'm not even gonna bother with chrome when it comes out for linux. I have dozens of extensions & mousegestures alone can't be traded for any number of milliseconds.
- ptn 18y ago
  Google will try to make switching from FF/Safari/IE as swift as possible, which means they will have to deal with the add-ons. The "Import Settings" thingy is not enough.

KirinDave 18y ago

Welcome to WebKit, sir. It's always this fast for those of us that use it. Part of me is a little irked that google is going to get credit with many people for things like "Inspect Element". But it's entirely Apple's fault for keeping Safari so far behind the state of Webkit.

rbanffy 18y ago
It´s the same that comes with WebKit (at least the Mac builds). Very nice indeed.
snewe 18y ago
I somewhat agree. I saw little JS performance difference b/t chrome (on XP) and the latest nightly build of Safari (Webkit).
- KirinDave 18y ago
  There is a difference and for every non-DOM js benchmarking suite I can find, it's about 3x in favor of V8. It's most impressive.

trezor 18y ago

Its scrolling, both for page-up/down, scroll-wheels and touchpads seems to be set about 3-4x more sensitive than in other browsers or applications in general. This gives it a nice illusion of speed, but it gets annoying pretty fast once you realize you want to scroll with any kind of precision without needing to have a lifetime of training in FPSes.

dkokelley 18y ago
I have the same issue. I'm looking now to see if I can adjust it...
eggnet 18y ago
I'm running it in vmware on a mac, I don't like how it scrolls. Using the touchpad on a macbook, you can scroll down a pixel at a time if you move slowly. The smallest quanta I can scroll with the touchpad via vmware running vista is far too large. I really hope the native mac version scrolls better.

Prrometheus 18y ago

I love it. Can't wait to get it on my Ubuntu partition.

tokipin 18y ago

for me it's fast loading lean webpages (like google results pages,) but on most pages i can't tell the difference between it and FF3 on a Blogger operation (hitting the preview button with a lot of HTML in the editbox, which performs some processing on it) FF3 is faster. i don't know what the difference is due to -- guessing string or DOM operations no noticeable differences with Gmail

llimllib 18y ago
There's a report on reddit about poor DOM (specifically innerHTML) performance: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z9xo/introducing_v8_googles_new_javascript_engine/c059wef http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z9xo/introduci...