What makes a browser fast? “Good enough for who it’s for,” may sound somewhat cynical, but it makes sense in context. Application speed expectations constantly shift to the right, it doesn’t matter what application you’re evaluating, and browsers are no exception. At the risk of irritating him, I’ll point to the browser speed comparisons that Tarquin (Mark Wilton-Jones) did a few years ago. I’m hoping he gets this gets updated with Chrome data before too long, but by now keeping the article up-to-date is probably as appealing to him as scraping chewing gum off the bottom of theater seats.
I have two browsers open right now. One is Firefox 3.0.1, the other is Chrome 0.2.149.29. Windows XP (SP3) task manager shows that the oodles of Firefox tabs I have open are chewing up one large lump of memory in a single process. If one of those tabs dies, the whole session dies with it. Firefox has never let me down in terms of recovery, but it’s annoying to have all the tabs go down at once because of a failure in one of those threads. Chrome, on the other hand, is running a process or two for every tab I’m using, and I understand that one of the processes craps out, that tab will die but the others will keep on working. This is a good thing for the future “cloud computing” user who will really truly be disappointed in a serious business-case kind of way when his browser dies in the middle of some complex work and communication.
Something else I get about Chrome is that “Google Gears” and Chrome are made for each. Cloud computing will require a stable browser with multiprocessing potential. To get a head start on understanding some of this I’ve signed up for a “Remember the Milk” account and I’ve begun to access it with Chrome.
Baby steps.
[tags]chrome, cloud computing, tarquin, google gears[/tags]
