Google Chrome

[Firocket1690]

There are a few noticeable changes

Clicking the clickwheel doesn't pull up the round thing, so one would have to use the left scroll bar. or scroll the wheel. I didn't think I used it much, but its good for skimming long articles

Firefox sees a file, and would often prompt you to open it with a program, or save it; Quicktime accessible stuff is the exception, and is usually opened in firefox. Chrome on the other hand, always makes you save the file somewhere, and doesn't prompt opening the proper program. This just stuck out for me 'cause it would make me save torrents.

There is no stop button. Not in the top, no right click, stop. And right click menu could use a refresh, too.

Chrome doesn't play nicely with facebook, either.

Edit: speaking of noticeable changes, where the hell did my avatar go?

[Neith]

Just started using this, impressions are mixed so far.

It's definitely much faster than Firefox 3 (my usual browser), loading websites is extremely quick. The interface is also simplistic, and very easy to use, which is nice. Creating tabs is very quick (it was in Firefox too, but still). I haven't tried downloading anything yet though.

Resource-wise, it seems to use multiple instances in Task Manager- I'm guessing that's to enable to it keep working when one or more components crash. That's nice, but as a sideeffect, it seems to consequently use almost as much resources as Firefox.

It may just be me, but it also didn't appear to like video playback, even on Youtube. Every video I've tried watching so far loaded a lot faster, (including loading the unplayed movie in) but was very jumpy during playback. If this is fixed in a later release, then great. For now though, Firefox seems better for playing videos, at least for me.

Like Firocket said, the lack of a Stop button and no right-clickable Refresh is a minor inconvenience too.

Changing the default font seems problematic too, I've asked mine to change 3 times so far, and tried restarting the browser after it too, and yet I'm still looking at the default font.

This is only a Beta though, so I'd imagine a lot of the issues will be ironed out in future releases. It's a nice browser, but it needs a lot of work before a real release.

[Sekani]

In other news, an independent research firm has determined that IE8 Beta is more resource intensive than Windows XP. I laughed.

Office went that way, may as well make IE resource-intensive to a retarded level too.

As a counter-point, name one "noob-friendly" application that isn't resource intensive. Corporate users don't care about efficiency much if at all, they just want their shit to make them a sandwich in the morning. Stripped down software isn't very good at sandwich making.

As for Google Chrome, tried it yesterday and wasn't impressed enough to start using it on a regular basis.

[Sord]

It may just be me, but it also didn't appear to like video playback, even on Youtube. Every video I've tried watching so far loaded a lot faster, (including loading the unplayed movie in) but was very jumpy during playback. If this is fixed in a later release, then great. For now though, Firefox seems better for playing videos, at least for me.

I've watched a few on and off youtube, and it doesn't seem to have any effect as to the playback. It loads faster, but that's about it.

[Neith]

I've watched a few on and off youtube, and it doesn't seem to have any effect as to the playback. It loads faster, but that's about it.

Strange, must be something my end then. Firefox plays videos fine, but they were always jumpy and would skip a bit when I played the same videos in Chrome.

[Sord]

well, I ran into a problem today. for some reason, it just slowed down, drastically. it would lag on tabs and I'd have to wait for them to switch over to another (i only had about three open.) I had my processes showing and surfed around a bit with that while it was slow, to see if this "split up the processes" thing would show me anything. And... it did nothing. My system idle process would be between 90-95% except when chrome itself would make a little 10-15% spike. By all means it seemed pretty normal. I ran firefox along side it and only chrome was having the issue. I closed out chrome and I've been using firefox for an hour or so now. Went back into chrome to see if by some chance it righted itself, no go. Definitly has some issues to iron out I guess. However, if it's done, then I could see the browser becoming a major competitor. Eventually we should see all the customizable skins and crap. For those of you who didn't read the comic, they said it was open source, so hopefully coders will have some custom themes out at some point (because I know for some people all they seem to care about is aesthetics.)

[Eihwaz]

I read through the comic introduction, and this sounds pretty fascinating. I'll have to give it a try when I have some free time.

[Sekani]

In a shocking twist, many reviewers are giving the nod to the new Internet Explorer over Chrome and, in some cases, even over Firefox. Although the Linux fanboys at Slashdot were quick to slam IE8's high memory usage (see Amtalx's comment above), testers claimed that pages in IE8 loaded faster and used less of the CPU than its competitors. Apparently IE has a different way of handling Flash-based websites (like Youtube) that reduces resource usage and prevents crashes.

I haven't used IE8 myself yet, so I can't really comment much on their comparisons, but does anyone here have any experience with it?

Linkage:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/0....ap/index.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26519075/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Resou...-1-92927.shtml
http://saunderslog.com/2008/09/02/he...hrome-vs-ie-8/

[Solstis]

I'll wait for the Mac beta. My Windows tower has gotten to the age (haven't formatted) that I practically need an exorcism to run new programs. Forget adding hardware.

(I know there are fixes, but I am oh so lazy)

[Sekani]

Tried Google Chrome again on my work machine, and this time it's noticeably faster than Firefox, almost twice as fast at loading pages actually. No idea why it fails so much on my home machine.

Also went ahead and installed IE8 on here and got mixed results. Faster on some pages, slow as hell on others.

Ended up going back to Firefox again anyway. I'm too used to certain addons making my browsing experience more pleasant.