Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Sep 2008 20:55 UTC, submitted by Punktyras
With all the recent hype surrounding Google's Chrome, it's refreshing to see someone taking a few steps back and looking at the bigger picture. Superlatives were abound about Chrome (I personally really like it), but some people really took it overboard - take TechCrunch for instance: "Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows." Seeing my nationality, I know a tulip mania when I see one. So does Ted Dziuba.
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Member since:
2006-03-13
I loved the link to Ted Dziuba's article. The style of his diagrams matched closely the style of his writing. Something about "Glibc and Shit" struck me as very funny.
Oddly enough, his final diagram was exactly the method I used to test Chrome. I ran Windows in Virtualbox, and installed Chrome. As Dziuba's diagram shows, it's an ungainly stack. It's all the more surprising that it worked.
Chrome ran fine, and at speed. Then I compared it to Firefox 3.0.1 on the same virtual machine, and both ran fine. That said, Firefox was faster. I run a tightly controlled browser, and Firefox's overcame it's rendering deficiencies by:
a) not loading third party adds, and
b) blocking most Javascript.
Chrome mostly closed the gap when I loaded a hosts file from mvps.org. That said, firefox does a better job blocking content that Chrome. A case in point: OSnews loads third party content from com.com, woopra.com, and google-analytics.com. That's three mostly tracking based sites, sites that require three separate DNS lookups, and three potential sources of Web site slowness. That's not even mentioning the drag caused by third party advertising services.
In other words, the hype over Chrome's alleged speed masks the real problem. Browsers are slow, because Web sites are slow. As Web sites rely increasingly on third party content, the potential for slowdowns increases, and that's not something a new browser can fix, neither (unfortunately) can the Web sites themselves.