back to article Google in Chrome rebetafication

In December, just three months after a much-ballyhooed release, Google took the beta tag off its open-source Chrome operating system browser. It was an unexpected move by the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, which typically holds onto beta tags for most of eternity. Well, after another three months, the world's largest ad …

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  1. adnim

    Oh hum

    Please, o please tell me what is faster than instant.

    Dependent on contention ratio, number of hops, available bandwidth, current demand on the site one visits, number of unoptimised images on page, the rendering PC's local RAM, CPU, GPU and OS etc,etc,etc. Firefox's rendering for me is instant. Well maybe, maybe not, but it is certainly quicker than I can focus my eyes on the rendered content. Same goes for IE, even though I hate the pos.

    If a human cannot measure the time difference between a page rendered in different browsers wtf does it matter, Google stfu.

  2. Andy

    I'd like to know

    ... if the javascript speed improvements are a result of their in-house effort to bring V8 up to speed with the latest Webkit "Nitro" engine, or of abandoning V8 in favour of Nitro after all.

    The former seems pointless, the latter really demands the giving of so-far-non-forthcoming credit to the guys working on Webkit.

  3. Spoonguard
    Gates Horns

    But does it fix the textarea bug?

    being able to delete what I have written with impunity would be nice....

  4. Alex
    Joke

    ..apparently

    you can get hold of the pre beta beta release via torrent, but as with other browsers functionality that you would typically take for granted is broken but it is to feature a "reach around browsing" feature which will offer a minor distraction from the horrors your PI is getting exposed to behind the scenes. GREAT!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    But what of the resizing...?

    ...is it still lame compared to FF? Because I use my TV for browsing, re-sizing of _everything_ is vital. No point zooming the text if the box that contains it stays the same- I end up with one word on each line in a small column down one side. I don't know how they did it, but resizing is the awesome in FF3. Get with the program big G!

  6. Chris Beach
    Paris Hilton

    beh?

    Urm, chrome has had multiple channels for ages, the newest is not beta, but the dev one, which changes almost weekly.

    You can change to less stable easily using http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel, going to more stable needs a reinstall though.

    Paris cos she knows lots about well used channels...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I can't see the point either.

    Javascript seems as fast as I could want on Firefox, Opera and even IE 7.

    Now, if they could sought out "unlimited" ISP offers in the UK, that would be a trick :-)

  8. /etc
    Gates Horns

    JavaScript

    @adnim

    "If a human cannot measure the time difference between a page rendered in different browsers wtf does it matter, Google stfu."

    This is mistaken - as well as boorishly ill-mannered. (STFU, indeed!).

    Microsoft would like people to think the appearance of a static page from a cache is what counts - hence the recent false claims about the speed of IE. (It's actually painfully slow in use compared to the alternatives - which is precisely why they're trying to throw sand in the public face in the hope that people don't realize that.)

    Deliberate misrepresentation from MS - hence the accompanying avatar.

    What's important about Chrome and the Safari beta is the speed of the JavaScript engines. The latest Firefox 3 betas seem to be catching up, too.

    Three different JavaScript benchmarks here - including SunSpider:

    http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/browser_brouhaha_your_maximum_guide_browsers_today_and_tomorrow?page=0%2C6

    What this means is that you could be twiddling your thumbs while you wait for Internet Explorer to respond when you're not loading a static page from the cache but actually USING a JavaScript-heavy web application.

  9. Stef

    News?

    There's been three channels for as long as I can remember. I'm on 2.0.170.0 and it is visibly faster than IE (by a very very very long chalk) and Firefox (by a nubbin)

  10. Mart
    Thumb Down

    Installations?

    I want to know when they're going to conform to standard installations and not have the app install to the users profile rather than program files!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    surely theres a name for that...

    'and one for a developer preview, which incorporates experimental features you won't find in the beta.'

    so that'll be an Alpha then? OMG they are doing it just like everyone else....News?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Meh

    Opera is faster than anything else around IN READ WORLD USE. it's also the best at memory management, with none of that silly Firefox memory chomping it does (even in the stable releases).

  13. Mitch Kent

    One down, one to go.

    Full page zooming - huzzah! That to me is the only bit worth reading from the article. Give me adblock and all of a sudden I might have to reconsider FF as my default browser. Of course depending on when SRWare Iron get their mits on it...

  14. daniel
    Flame

    rant

    adnim...

    well done you for having a nice fast computer... not everyone has one though.

    also, are you suggesting that companies should continue to code bad/slow software just because you have a nice computer? what's going to happen when that 1 application you have that 'appears' to run quickly becomes 10 applications start showing their true colours? Going to go buy yourself a bigger and better computer again?

    Chrome is one of the very few piece of software I've seen (in a long time) that has set out to do something new and do it efficiently too. I have a fairly powerful laptop running Vista and little else (even aero is disabled) yet the difference in performance with IE and Chrome is still astronomical.

    I don't it's Google need to be STFU...

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Odd isn't it?

    Firefox fanboys (and girls) have long bragged about their browser being faster than IE, then something comes along which is demonstrably faster and suddenly speed is unimportant to them.

    Look people: IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, Epiphany and phuque knows what else all get the job done. Yes they've all got their problems and they've all had their critical security flaws. Some of them do some things better than others, but to the average net user (ie the huge majority) it really doesn't matter what browser they use. All these little bitch fights between sad little bedroom surfers really are missing the point.

    The point is that web browsers are stuck in the dark ages. Even to Opera users tabbed browsing is still a relatively new things, but in other applications you've been able to view tabs side by side for years. So what's really needed is not speed improvements, but new and useful features. Full marks to Google for introducing side by side browsing. Of course as all Opera users will know introducing a new feature to the browser market will not increase your market share, it will just mean the other browsers will have the same feature in their next release.

  16. Andy

    @ Anonymous Coward 11:13

    Yeah, right. Webkit gives Opera a thorough whipping in most departments. Opera may be faster than Firefox (though the 3.1/3.5 betas are fairly nippy), but that's not saying much.

  17. Nathan

    Side by Side?

    Finally, someone did the side by side tabs thing. Been waiting for that for about 2 years perhaps?

  18. Leigh Smith

    For those after Chrome adblocking

    Try adsweep. It is a GreaseMonkey script that can be used in Chrome. It is not as feature packed as adblock but I find it more handy than proxy based solutions.

  19. Will
    Thumb Up

    @ Michael Kent @ Leigh Smith

    http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=50&topicid=25916

    adblock for Chome using Privoxy

    It is fantastic.

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