Chrome - quick review

[andrewducker]

I was looking for an email I'd sent myself, and I have several thousand emails in my sent items, so it's easiest to read/search them through the gmail interface.

I opened it it up and waited the customary 5 seconds while it loaded the page.

And then I had thought.

I've always assumed that those 5 seconds were the various bits of html and javascript downloading.  It had never occurred to me that it might also be the running of the code that takes time.

So I grabbed Chrome - which is much faster with Javascript - and installed it (which took about 2 minutes in total) and opened up GMail.

Almost instant.

I'd been blaming the internet pipes/servers for the loading speed, and actually it's the speed of the browser.

Of course, right there on the page there was a large advert - and the tabs don't work "right".  So I'm not going to use it much. 

But I was impressed by the speed - and I'll be looking forward to either Firefox catching up or Chrome getting extensions.

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Were you running Firefox 3.0.x before or the 3.5 beta, given they're claiming the massive speed increases in 3.5?

[andrewducker]

3.0 is what I run. I don't have a spare box to install 3.5 onto - it would overwrite my current version, which would suck, as I strongly suspect that my addons aren't supported in 3.5 yet...

I am looking forward to the speedups in 3.5 though.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

The crucial two - AdBlock and NoScript work in 3.5. The rest are somewhat patchy at the mo.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm interested in what you mean by the tabs not working right? I use Chrome at home (FF in the office), but I really prefer the way Chrome's tabs work and the ease I have in rearranging them. I appreciate that most of this is personal workspace related, but I'm always interested in how other people do stuff.

[andrewducker]

I don't use NoScript. I used it for a bit and found that it got in the way all the time and never saved me from anything.

If it had a shared whitelist (similarto adblock( then I'd be tempted...

[andrewducker]

Entering a URL in the address bar should open a new tab. Admittedly I didn't play in the options to see what was there - but that's a minimum requirement.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It might be worth installing Firebug to see where the slow bits are.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

I'm about to ditch Chrome. It seems to be crashing my machine, and it just lost my tabs, and the history will only display back 2 days.

[andrewducker]

Not sure there's much point to me doing that, as there's not much I can actually do about it, is there?

[matgb]

You can install it in a separate folder, I've done that before. It's also possible to have it run on a different profile but I find that more annoying.

I'm already running a different window for Gmail and opened links from there, I might just switch to Chrome for that only, would almost certainly eat less memory on this crappy machine as well.

[andrewducker]

I am tempted to use Chrome for accessing GMail, and other javascript-heavy sites. At least until Firefox 3.5 comes out.

On the other hand, 99% of the time I access my gmail email I do it over IMAP anyway, so no browser required :->