Google Betas Chrome 4, Touts 30% Speed Boost 383
CWmike writes "Google upgraded the beta version (4.0.223.16) of its Chrome browser yesterday, boasting a 30% speed improvement over the current production edition and adding integrated bookmark synchronization. Developers Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin, who announced the release, tout Chrome 4.0's faster JavaScript rendering speeds. 'We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, and by 400% since our first stable release,' they said, referring to Chrome 3.0. The new beta includes the ability to sync bookmarked sites across multiple computers."
Smoking (Score:5, Interesting)
Password Sync also please (Score:2, Interesting)
The biggest feature keeping me on Firefox right now is bookmark and password syncing. Xmarks does the job beautifully.
I love the fact that native bookmark syncing will be coming to Chrome, but nobody has mentioned password syncing. This is arguable just as important as bookmark sync and should be possible to release alongside bookmarks in this next release.
I wish they would mention it at least just to know that they are working on it. At the very least I can fallback on the Xmarks version for Chrome that will be available for Chrome 4, but I would much prefer a native solution.
Fast, even on Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
I get annoyed when I try to scroll a window in Chrome and it's so fast I can't control it easily.
I'll be keeping firefox around for as long as there's no adblock and no flashblock for Chrome. Chrome wins the instant they're compatible with Mozilla plugins.
I'm glad that there's once again some vibrant competition in the browser sphere.
JIT javascript (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a Firefox fanboy, I'm just aware of my needs. In the business arena, I wouldn't recommend anything but Internet Explorer (behind a proxy, of course), because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments. That's another area that I wish more browsers would improve upon.
If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets along with their superior rendering performance, they would blow the web browser market wide open. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, since most technical people are well aware of these issues.
Speed is nice, but lets get some basic features (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I wanted to use Chrome as my HTPC browser as it does a good job scaling it's plugins to the system 2x DPI (unlike Firefox where flash applets are tiny squares in big dark frames they are supposed to fill).
But Chrome does not save the full page zoom setting! Every time you open a tab or browser instance you have to Ctr + which becomes unusable. It has not browser-wide options related to full page zoom and their font options are confusing and seem to make no effect.
Worse is the how easy it is to fine lots [google.com] and lots [google.com] and lots [google.com] and lots [google.com] of people complaining about this on their own help forums without a single response from the developers.
I know they are avoiding feature creep and keeping things slim, but even by a 80/20 rule, this kind of thing should be picked up (and could even replace their useless font settings dialog).
Re:JIT javascript (Score:2, Interesting)
Uh, they all have JIT compilers (TraceMonkey in Firefox).
Almost every scripting language does these days. If you're looking at embedding scripting languages then look no further than Lua. It's super small and easy to embed, fast, easy API for extending, and similar semantics to Javascript (except way better). Also, LuaJIT 2 beta just came out a few days ago and it's kicking all kinds of ass as far as performance in scripting languages go (rewriting the book in fact)..
Re:60% faster loss of privacy (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, they slap some Google branding on. That's it. The distinction between Chrome and Chromium is entirely academic (or legal if you prefer). They're functionally equivalent.
If you have a problem using Chrome because it isn't free software, use Chromium. You won't notice a difference other than the branding.
Re:100% less advertisements would be nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Chrome 4.0 has extensions, and multiple ad blockers have already been written using the system, without being stopped by Google.
Actually, we're a little bit smarter than that. As it turns out, treating users "like shit" -- for example, by crippling our products just to drive away the small minority of users that run ad blockers -- is actually not profitable. On the other hand, making the internet better for users, in general, is profitable to us, since it directly leads to more usage of other Google products. Which is why Eric (the CEO) frequently tells employees, in plain terms, that we should be doing whatever we can think of to improve the internet for users, without worrying about how to monetize it -- in the long term, this approach is far more profitable than being dicks.
(This post is my personal opinion -- I am not authorized to speak for Google.)
Re:Sucks To Be You (Score:5, Interesting)
Say what you will, but it is nice having an OS that is *tightly* coupled with the hardware -- it cuts way down on poorly written drivers that are responsible for many of the BSOD in MS land. It is a premium to pay, but the frustration spared is well worth it.
Ah yes the "blame it on the drivers" apologetic for various Windows issues. It's the perfect excuse, really, because it's difficult to falsify. So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability, and if the Mac is so stable because it has such a comparatively narrow range of hardware to support, what would be your answer to that question?
Note, my question was about Windows. I don't dispute that the Mac is quite stable. I just believe it's stable because it's based on Unix and Unix had this kind of stability long before Apple decided to use it. Apple was just smart enough to recognize that and smarter still to put a pretty and usable GUI on top of it. It's the "faulty drivers" excuse for Windows that I don't quite buy, and mostly because I've never received an answer to that question that made sense.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh, considering I develop software for a living, one of our products is embeds on XULRunner 1.9.1 (which is what Firefox 3 is built on top of) and several of our products use WebKit for rendering HTML.
So yes, my knowledge of them and profiling them tells me this.
You can find my name in the Gecko commit logs and all over the developers mailing lists, wheres yours? I don't think I've seen Anonymous Coward committing anything.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
We're not talking about WebKit, we're talking about Chrome. Chrome is faster than Safari, they both use WebKit. Safari has more features and it costs.
FireFox uses Gecko rather than WebKit. I'm not talking about the differences in the rendering engines alone as that is not all their is to a browser. The stripped down browsers that use Gecko are faster than FireFox as well. Same rendering engine, different wrapper, different speeds.
Gecko is FAR more feature rich than WebKit, but Gecko also supports XUL, whick WebKit does not and I doubt it ever will since WebKit isn't trying to be an application development platform for all sorts of apps. WebKit just renders HTML pages and the requirements that go with supporting those standards.
WebKit can support more HTML standards and still not have as many features as Gecko.
When you can load an XULRunner app in WebKit and everything work, then get back to me, until then, I stand by my statement.
Re:Sucks To Be You (Score:1, Interesting)
I get far more kernel panics and oopses than I ever see BSOD's. Still can't suspend a Linux laptop without some kind of problem on resume.
The Unix in Mac is userland. Whoopee for it, it's certainly a better toolchain than windows is shipping with, but it doesn't impact stability one way or the other. The variation on the Darwin kernel they're now using has all kinds of wacky shenanigans with many parts not resembling Mach or BSD. The fact that they don't have to *test* on a huge variety of hardware helps in QA'ing the platform that's left.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, you're proving those people's point:
sure, maybe Java/garbage-collection/50mb-binaries/etc. are a little slower,
Let's see...
chromium-browser is a 38 meg binary on my system, and that's just the binary. The libraries it distributes bump it up above 40 megs, and it's probably easily 45 or 50 with all the system libraries it pulls in.
Here's an example of where you're both very right, and very wrong:
You're very right in that speed still matters, and always will. By applying a little optimization at just the right point, we gain massive speed boosts for everyone. For example, Webkit instead of Gecko, and all the little tweaks of v8, make Chrome's HTML, Javascript, and CSS at least on par with, and usually several times better than the competition.
On the other hand, you're entirely wrong about the argument you've used. Tons of stuff in Chrome, including the entire extension API, is done entirely in HTML and Javascript, because they are fast enough. I'll give you a stupidly simple example: Hit "new tab". That entire New Tab page is HTML and Javascript.
Want proof? Ctrl+U.
Want more? Next time you start a download, open the download list/manager. HTML and Javascript. In fact, the only things that aren't HTML and Javascript are the Chrome itself -- the toolbar, tab bar, and status bar. Even the toolstrip bar, managed by extensions, is mostly HTML and Javascript.
At a lower level, much of the core Javascript library in Chrome is, in fact, written in Javascript.
Guess what? Javascript is a little slower than C++. It's also garbage-collected.
Guess what else? Even if you could theoretically do these pages in C++, programmer productivity is still more important.
What did we learn?
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Chrome is fast not because speed always matters, but because speed matters at the specific points they targeted.
If you know anything about Javascript, you know how difficult it must have been for the v8 team -- yet if you look at the v8 presentation, much of the optimization they do is remarkably obvious in hindsight. So the second thing we learned is that Java is not slow. A language is generally not fast or slow, by its very nature -- while some aspects of language design can make it easier or harder to optimize a language, it is ultimately the implementation that is fast or slow.
Conventional wisdom (like what you're spouting) says Javascript is slow. Chrome proves otherwise. Remember that the next time anyone says something as stupid as "Ruby is slow."
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
Want proof? Ctrl+U.
Whoa, don't blow my mind quite so hard. I'm not sure I can handle all this wisdom at the same time.
C'mon, you think I execute shell commands by writing a C program that calls fork(), exec(), and pipe()? You think I write web pages pixel by pixel? Obviously high-level languages and programming paradigms are appropriate in many cases.
I'm sticking it to the Java weenies who think that C and C++ are obsolete. The people who year after year say that *now* Java is "often as fast as C++ and sometimes faster." The people who still won't acknowledge that there is a real reason C and C++ are still the languages of OS kernels.
It's not premature optimization to write libavcodec in C. Likewise with OS kernels, virtual machines, rendering engines, DSP plugins, and many other applications where the code will almost certainly be on the critical path of a resource-intensive application. It's not premature optimization to use manual memory management in applications that need to move lots of data around with low latency.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely (Score:3, Interesting)
The quote in my subject from Lord Acton [phrases.org.uk], has been proven time and again, that despite the purest of intentions, a concentration of power will corrupt any person, organization or company. This is the reason that "smaller government" is a desirable thing; We have examples time and again from history that overpowerful organizations aren't trustworthy (current example: US "intelligence community"). It's also the reason we have things like seperation of powers in governmental structures.
This applies equally to companies, and is the reason we have anti-trust laws (not to punish success, but to maintain free markets). In this vein, I think Google may be able to stay "non-evil" for some time (or maintain that illusion for the cynics), but eventually like enough concentrated mass creates a black hole, the power will collapse the regulatory structures. It's a matter of time, and that's why people (even Googlers) want to prevent this from happening.