Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Google Chrome, Google’s new web browser is out, and you can download it! Gizmodo earlier posted some screenshots (as did TechCrunch and Walter Mossberg), but I thought I should post a few of my own captures of the fast, new browser in action.

The first screen you see shows your recent history and a bookmarks bar

The about:memory page shows memory usage of Google Chrome, and any other browser you might have open (Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari). It’s a nice, sneaky feature that makes you feel better about how Chrome manages system resources.

Google Chrome stole Firefox’s Awesome bar. In fact, the Google “do anything” bar is less usable than Firefox’s, and uglier to boot.

As Reisigner noted, Chrome is faster than other browsers. It shows this off with its own task manager.

Chrome seamlessly imports bookmarks, passwords, and browsing history from Firefox

For those afraid Google might do some evil, and watch what you’re surfing on the internet, Matt Cuts in Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com? writes about how Chrome will contact Google:

I knew that as soon as Google Chrome launched, some readers would ask tough questions about privacy and how/when Google Chrome communicates with google.com. So I decided to tackle this issue head-on. I talked to the Chrome team to find out if there’s anything to worry about. The short answer is no. For the long answer, read on.

So, Chrome is a gorgeous, fast, simple, and secure browser. Why not use it? No more crashing, lightning-fast page loading and rendering, faster javascript, a standards-compliant renderer, nice import features… there’s really no reason not to switch.

You’ll be surprised to see that Internet Explorer 8 Beta (8.0.6001.14184) does better on the Acid2 test than Firefox 2 (2.0.0.12) does:

Safari also passes the Acid2 test, but nobody uses it

The results are far worse on the Acid3 test, with IE8 scoring 17% and Firefox scoring 50%, but I believe they are intended. See, when Microsoft releases Beta 2 of their browser, it will definitely pass the Acid3 tests to give the community just that much more shock and awe:

Safari gets 39%, yay?

Ironically, the IE8 website throws an error when viewed with IE8. I guess that’s what they mean by improved standards compliance:

Worse, the Official Microsoft Site prompts to install some nasty, spyware-looking ActiveX control to view the IE8 site:

Congratulations Microsoft, on passing the Acid2, but unfortunately you have a laundry list of things to do, not limited to (a) make it faster and lighter than Firefox, (b) build in good developer tools, (c) get rid of ActiveX, (d) make a more usable UI, or (e) fix your own website to work in IE.

Today the IE blog made the most important announcement of its life with Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8, saying:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously. Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

Already, web designers are calling this the “holy grail” of Internet Explorer web development, and possibly the best suggestion the Microsoft IE team has ever made. Here’s a choice quote from Eric Meyer:

I’m glad that IE will act as browsers have always done, and default to the latest and greatest in the absence of any explicit direction to the contrary. I’m doubly glad that the IE team is willing to do that, even knowing what they have to handle. And I’m triply glad that the proposal was made in public ahead of time, with plenty of opportunity for debate, so that we could have a chance to weigh in and affect the browser’s behavior.

Broken Links is saying “I am very pleasantly surprised; this is a very wise decision.” Robert McLaws thinks, “This is great news for the web standards community… but not-so-great news for the billions of web pages out there.”

Safari has a new version, and a new platform. The once mac-only web browser has released Safari 3 for Windows XP, backed by claims of UI, performance, and integration superiority. The claims are that it is 2x faster in Javascript and HTML rendering, a claim we plan to test ourselves. Note that Safari, the first time it was launched, took about a minute to start up and froze the screen for that time. Only after that did it open fast.

Javascript Performance Results

So, their biggest claim is Javascript performance, which they show like so:

We’ll combine the overall results from these benchmarks together:

1. JS/Bench
2. DHTML Benchmark
3. DOM Query Test
4. JS Speed Tests

We find that depending how you look at it, Safari can actually be considered 3x slower than IE7, or roughly of equal speed. Here is an overall performance chart, with two columns–one is the raw average score, the other averages the worst-test group (three results) into one result and averages it:

Safari doesn’t break much ground here

Here’s the per-test chart, which shows Safari kicking ass in the first test, losing the next three, tying the fourth with IE, and doing well again on the last test:

Other annoyances

Interestingly, Apple tries to bundle Safari with not one, but three separate Apple products: Quicktime, Bonjour, and Apple Update. On top of that, they break the back-mousebutton click that I’ve become used to using in IE/FF, and use tons of my RAM main memory up. No one sums it up better than Dev Hints who notes that “Safari Isn’t the Beauty That Apple Likes To Claim.” It’s not bad, and it’s getting better, but there are still bugs to be worked out.

Hi, my Firefox (the latest public version 2.0.0.1) is leaking memory. I know that you think you’ve heard this before and that it’s extensions, or old version, but seriously this has to stop:

Fixed! Removing the Firebug extension completely solves the problem. I don’t know why Firebug leaks memory, but trust me, it does.

Yup, it’s using 623MB of memory. Opening a new tab is visibly sluggish. Closing a tab, clicking on links–every action takes seconds to perform on my Core Duo 2 6600 processor with 4 GB of RAM. Extensions? I’m running two: Firebug and an S3 attachment:

The secret Firefox memory cache page (about:cache) returns nothing out of the ordinary:

Number of entries: 1114
Maximum storage size: 28672 KiB
Storage in use: 75316 KiB
Inactive storage: 0 KiB

I have no idea what’s causing this behavior, so I’m going to ask for help. Digg this and let the world know Firefox *still* has memory management issues.