I must say that my first expereinces with Chrome have been very positive. I’ve been browsing around my usuage spots with it today and I am noticing a difference, a good one.

A bit about my habits

Normally I browse with Firefox. I use Firefox for all the typical reasons; it’s more secure, has better web staqndards support, easier javascript debugging, Firebug, and a host of other great extensions that improve my browsing experience. However, Firefox is a big memory hog, not as big as early reports of IE8 mind you. There are plenty of intense sites that just don’t perform well for me in Firefox (especially in a terminal server environment) and are sluggish. For those of you that are yelling at me, yes I have Firebug turned off and it is still slow.

First reaction

I was pleasently surprised when these sites were blazing fast when using Chrome today. Quickly looking at the Task Manager, it looks like Chrome is only using a fraction on the resources of Firefox as well.

Putting it to the test

To put Chromes promise of better performance for JavaScript and Ajax applications I decided to pull out all the stops. Benjamin Joffe’s Canvascape is a 3D JavaScript world using the canvas tag. Firefox really chokes on this app, especially in textured mode. I thought that if Chrome could preform well here it probably would perform well just about anywhere.

To my delight Canvasscape runs smoothly and flawlessly in Chrome, even in textured mode. It runs so well it seems that the walking speed may need to be adjusted to as it seems to walk very fast or maybe that is just because I am used to the very slow performance in Firefox.

Conclusions

This first experience with Chrome has been very positive and I hope that future betas and the final product continue to perform this well. Currently Chrome doesn’t have a lot of options, not extensions facility which will hopefully be added in a future beta. Hopefully performance isn’t degraded once more features start getting added to the browser.