Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Google Chrome, a Contrarian View.

I read the comic about Google Chrome. I love the architecture! We downloaded it here in the office, and sure enough - it forks a new process for every page load. This is the browser architecture that I've been waiting years for, one where a script on one page won't kill performance in another window.

So, I went home and tried it on my single core Athlon at home. Ouch! The performance is terrible. The browser keeps locking up, it stops responding to mouse clicks, keypresses, anything and everything. It acts like alpha quality software, not the "beta" it is supposed to be.

I've got a 2 year old system (Athlon64 3800+), the only difference between it and new ones is that it is single core. It's still fast enough to play new games on, but it can't handle Google Chrome.

I can only assume that Google Chrome has a tendency to starve some of their child processes on single core machines.

In the meantime, I'll stick with Firefox 3. It leaves Google Chrome in the dust.