Google Chrome: not faster, safer or smaller after all

By Davey Winder
Thursday, 04 September 2008 16:32

Networking

Like the iPhone, Google Chrome has been embraced by most of the media with rose-tinted spectacles enhanced praise. Much of the acclaim coming before anyone had actually even used the open source browser in a real-world environment. Now that it has been put to that test, how shiny can the Chrome reputation remain?

Only cave dwellers will have missed the arrival of the Google Chrome web browser client. Right from the get go there has been something of an assumption that this will be a better browser.

Better than Internet Explorer because it is open source. Better than Firefox because it has a new and improved JavaScript engine in V8. Better, smaller, safer, faster, easier.

But how do those assumptions stand up to some real-world testing where Google Chrome is faced with the kind of questions that actual users, rather than marketing types, are keen to know the answers to?

Let's start with the big issue of small size. "We designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple" Google says, but how streamlined is it when placed under the test microscope?

Google Chrome is the "fattest of them all" says one researcher after running a 10-site, multi-tab scenario test across IE7, IE8 (Beta 2), Firefox 3.01 and Google Chrome.

This test is designed to benchmark the memory footprint of the browser clients, an important metric when talking about 'size' as a practical browsing consideration.

The results were not what the testers were expecting and they admit that they discovered "it is Google Chrome, not Internet Explorer 8, that is the true memory consumption leader."

Now that is quite some statement to make, so how is it backed up? Well the test pretty much mimics real-world intensive browsing usage. It opens up an assortment of 10 popular websites, including some very media heavy ones, in separate tabs.

So how did Chrome actually fare in terms of memory consumption, what were the figures? We also examine how safe Chrome is in the real world, all on page 2...

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