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.

3 comments:

Damian said...

You're not the idiot that put it on the Spectra, are you? :)

Jason Pollock said...

thankfully, no.

Determinist said...

Performance is fine on my dual core machine here at work. Shame that it doesn't work on the single core machine.

Also, I noticed that it only installs on XP and higher, so can't install it at home (Windows 2000).

Also noticed a few oddities when on some complex sites (usopen.org, for the tennis - highly java loaded) and facebook, where it would refuse to go through photos when you click "next" and it show you the next photo and then snap back to the first.

All in all, a decent experience though. That is, until I read your blog post. Shame really.