5 ms·

Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast?

56 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

amichail 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    It does take away much of the incentive to use a faster DNS service though.
    - pyre 17y ago
      It's not like people not using Google DNS is losing them money.
      - notauser 17y ago
        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.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Google is going for a belt and suspenders approach here. On the one hand they are encouraging people to dump DNS servers from crappy ISPs (of which there are many). This benefits everybody regardless of their browser. On the other hand google is implementing and promoting dns prefetching in the browser in order to sidestep the problem of page load overhead due to dns lookups. Though neither method is perfect they complement each other well.
InclinedPlane 17y ago
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 17y ago
  How does Safari (or WebKit) perform on OS X?
  - ionfish 17y ago
    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 http://webkit.org/projects/performance/index.html
    - warfangle 17y ago
      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 17y ago
        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/ http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
noarchy 17y ago
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 :(
- jimmybot 17y ago
  I don't know if it's rendering or if it's disk access or what's going on, but I installed the Django docs locally expecting it to be pretty much instantaneous to access. With Chrome, it is. With Firefox there is a very noticeable and very annoying delay.
  - sidmitra 17y ago
    Is firebug turned off. I've sometimes mistakenly left it on and there's a huge performance penalty there.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  IMO it's usually the longest wait that is most irritating. It was never the 1 second load in games that annoyed the crap out of me, it was the 2 minute load to initialize everything. Every subsequent load in the session felt like the first, regardless of length. I know full well that the .1 second that Chrome may be faster is negligible, and largely irrelevant. It's that IE took forever and Firefox wasn't significantly better, Chrome however was a dream, any load or delay from that point on was never associated with the original painstaking load.
- sid0 17y ago
  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).
  - 17y ago
ecaradec 17y ago
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 ?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  In chrome each tab is its own process. If you don't have much ram then leaving a tab idle for a long time will cause its resources to be swapped out to disk so reactivating it might be slow. Same as any other application you leave idle on a machine with low ram.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I've noticed the same thing, and that I seem to have less of a problem with that on other platforms.

56 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  It does take away much of the incentive to use a faster DNS service though.
  - pyre 17y ago
    It's not like people not using Google DNS is losing them money.
    - notauser 17y ago
      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.
InclinedPlane 17y ago
Google is going for a belt and suspenders approach here. On the one hand they are encouraging people to dump DNS servers from crappy ISPs (of which there are many). This benefits everybody regardless of their browser. On the other hand google is implementing and promoting dns prefetching in the browser in order to sidestep the problem of page load overhead due to dns lookups. Though neither method is perfect they complement each other well.

InclinedPlane 17y ago

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 17y ago
How does Safari (or WebKit) perform on OS X?
- ionfish 17y ago
  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 http://webkit.org/projects/performance/index.html
  - warfangle 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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/ http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

noarchy 17y ago

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 :(

jimmybot 17y ago
I don't know if it's rendering or if it's disk access or what's going on, but I installed the Django docs locally expecting it to be pretty much instantaneous to access. With Chrome, it is. With Firefox there is a very noticeable and very annoying delay.
- sidmitra 17y ago
  Is firebug turned off. I've sometimes mistakenly left it on and there's a huge performance penalty there.
electromagnetic 17y ago
IMO it's usually the longest wait that is most irritating. It was never the 1 second load in games that annoyed the crap out of me, it was the 2 minute load to initialize everything. Every subsequent load in the session felt like the first, regardless of length. I know full well that the .1 second that Chrome may be faster is negligible, and largely irrelevant. It's that IE took forever and Firefox wasn't significantly better, Chrome however was a dream, any load or delay from that point on was never associated with the original painstaking load.
sid0 17y ago
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).
- 17y ago

ecaradec 17y ago

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 ?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
InclinedPlane 17y ago
In chrome each tab is its own process. If you don't have much ram then leaving a tab idle for a long time will cause its resources to be swapped out to disk so reactivating it might be slow. Same as any other application you leave idle on a machine with low ram.
elblanco 17y ago
I've noticed the same thing, and that I seem to have less of a problem with that on other platforms.