The ongoing internet browser war welcomes its new contestant: famous internet giant Google just released beta version of its upcoming internet browser, which is called Chrome. In the year 2006, person from Google said that they have no plans for releasing their own browser. Recent events show that this was not true. As said in 33-paged presentation, made like a comic book, Google Chrome is very different from any popular browser. It use WebKit engine (same as Safari’s), and it was written from scratch to work flawlessly with complex content like JavaScript and modern web applications.
Features that make Chrome distinguish itself from monsters like Mozilla Firefox or Opera are simple but truly amazing. First, every tab is an independed process. This makes memory management a lot easier, eliminates the reasons for memory leakage. Each tab is on its own - if one tab crashes there will be no impact on other tabs. This is very useful feature, because if you are working with many tabs at once, you may lose important information if entire browser goes down. Second, it has revolutionary JavaScript engine, which is made to work even faster than in the fastest browsers. Multithreaded page loading is another key to success, because it is very disturbing to wait with a blank screen for some JavaScripts to load: now all elements are loaded simultaneously, not one after another. In the built-in task manager you can see what tab eats more memory or CPU time than others, and effectively manage your tabs to reduce unneeded memory or CPU usage.
However, let’s make an experiment and see, if this new browser from Google is faster than its famous competitors - Opera, Firefox and IE. We installed all of these browsers, and made them through some simple tests to see, which one will be faster. All browsers are freshly installed, without plugins or other add-ons which can influence on their work. The configuration of our test machine is: AMD Athlon x2 64, 2GB RAM, Windows Vista x86.
Launch time
Launch time is not very important parameter, but it influences the overall pleasure of usage. We were very impressed by Chrome launch time, it easily overdone almost every browser except IE, which launch time was almost completely the same. Let’s see whole result table:
| IE |
1 sec |
| Firefox |
2sec |
| Opera |
3 sec |
| Chrome |
1 sec |
JavaScript speed
There already exist some JavaScript browser speed tests, so we tried this one to see, what speed will have new JavaScript engine from Google. The results were interesting and amazing: while Opera handled this test in about 600 milliseconds, Chrome did it in 350! According to the sheet published on that page, Opera results was fastest that any other browser, and Chrome overdone them easily. However, we believe that there are no ultimate tests, and each and every test may have its own winners. We tried to make our own JS test, to be sure that this test is not optimized for special browser. The task was a simple JavaScript below:
var t = new Date().getTime();
for(i = 0; i<10000000; i++){};
var t1 = new Date();.getTime();
document.write(«Time for executing: „+(t1-t)/1000 + sec.);
We launched it from our local server to eliminate the risk of internet connection influencing the results. So, the testing time begins.
Results for 1 page:
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer was out of the competition, because it didn’t want to handle our simple script, asking every time to disable page scenarios. Firefox, Chrome and Opera handled it correctly, but in different time. So, the results are:
| Firefox |
3.6 sec |
| Opera |
5.7 sec |
| Chrome |
0.3 sec(!) |
It is amazing how fast Chrome is compared to leading browsers! But let’s try to make this task more complex and open 5 instances of this test page to see, how browsers will handle multithreading.
Results for 5 simultaneously started pages:
| Firefox |
18 sec (when JS was executed in one tab, all interface buttons were blocked, so we opened pages one after another) |
| Opera |
27 sec |
| Chrome |
0.3 sec(!!!) |
Almost unbelievable results, which show that Chrome’s JavaScript engine is truly advanced and powerful. It made through this simple test many times faster than its competitors, Firefox and Opera. However, tests will never show a real situation, so we wanted to make a simple usage test and see, how efficient will be Chrome’s memory management. We opened 5 tabs simultaneously, five heavy loaded pages in each browser. All browsers was tested on one set of pages, so they are all in one conditions.
Memory usage on 5 tabs right from the start:
| IE |
60 MB |
| Firefox |
64.4 MB |
| Opera |
52.2 MB |
| Chrome |
75.4 MB |
At the first glance, Chrome is eating more memory that its rivals, but let’s look on this results after 10 minutes of intensive usage:
Memory usage on 5 tabs after 10 min of intensive surfing:
| IE |
96 MB |
| Firefox |
109.8 MB |
| Opera |
96.6 MB |
| Chrome |
84.1 MB |
Results are not such amazing as speed, but they show that Chrome’s multithreaded tab handling, while eating more from the start, wins after some intensive usage.
All these test clearly show us, that new browser from Google is truly revolutionary and very interesting. It is now only on Beta stage, so the result may even improve after time. Of course, it lacks some advanced features that Opera or Firefox have, but let’s hope that all of them will be implemented in the final release. Google made a wise choice for keeping its browser open-source, so all the improvements done in the Chrome can be used by other developers in their browsers. It is early to tell, will it have bigger popularity that nowadays leaders, but it is clear that this browser will not pass out unnoticed. Developers say that final version will be released for all operating systems, including Linux and MacOS, and even on the final stage it will remain fully open-source.
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