Google Chrome is here

Today, Google officially launched its contribution to the browser market, with its new browser "Google Chrome". I will not go into all the details about it, because I already wrote about it here, but I will talk a bit about the performance.

One of the things that Google Chrome is supposed to do, is to improve the world of web applications. That is, this browser is designed to be a faster, better and more stable platform for complex websites. So how does it perform?

The answer is both "well... that doesn't seem that impressive..." and "oh my god!!! - that was fast!". You see when it comes to rendering a page; Google Chrome is consistently slower at displaying a site, than any other browser. It is slower at rendering the page on the screen and it takes Chrome between 200-500% longer to connect to a site.

E.g. it took 46 seconds to display Core77.com in Google Chrome and only 11 seconds in IE 8.

So it is not a browser I am going to use for general browsing. It is terribly slow at rendering pages.

But it is amazingly fast when it comes to JavaScript usage, one of the key performance problems with web applications. As you can see below, Google Chrome is almost twice as fast as the second fastest browser.

(Using SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark)

The initial verdict? Well, the insanely slow rendering speed far exceeds the incredibly fast JavaScript performance. As such, the overall experience was a bit of a bummer. I have only used it for about an hour, and I am already annoyed at waiting for the pages to load.

And, I have not - yet - looked at all the other features. The only thing I tested was speed.

- Download Google Chrome (XP/Vista only)