Trying out Chrome - how do they make it so fast?

[lilelvis2000]

The other day I was over at a friend's business and though his PC's were piss slow - Chrome ran like lightening on them. So now I'm trying it out. It appears to be soooo much faster than IE8. How do they do that?

[d000hg]

1. Spent time optimising things that aren't normally considered important
2. Left out most features present in other browsers - it's a very stripped-down application

[Sysman]

1. Spent time optimising things that aren't normally considered important
2. Left out most features present in other browsers - it's a very stripped-down application

Hands up everyone who really uses all the features of a given browser. I know I don't.

[VectraMan]

I think it's only fast if you're impressed by the application starting quickly. In use, the different browsers seem much the same to me.

[stek]

More that IE8 is a POS.

[d000hg]

Hands up everyone who really uses all the features of a given browser. I know I don't.

Same here. I'm not criticising Chrome, only giving my opinion how they keep it small and fast. IE and FF have been around a long time and are pretty huge applications, Chrome is very new.

I think it's only fast if you're impressed by the application starting quickly. In use, the different browsers seem much the same to me.

Agreed. Rendering pages is rarely any kind of issue compared with downloading the content, the exception being JS-intensive pages but even IE8 is pretty fast compared to previous generations of browsers so I'd argue the only non-experimental pages that would cause a problem are just badly written.

More that IE8 is a POS.

IE8/FF3 are roughly comparable as far as startup time goes, so unless you're saying FF is also a POS, you're just spouting misinformation. Do you want to sound cool like the other kids?

[NickFitz]

There are two major things that make Chrome seem so fast: the rendering engine, and the JavaScript engine. The first is going to make an impression in general surfing, and the second when using web applications such as Google Maps or Google Docs.

For rendering, Chrome uses Apple's WebKit, which also powers Safari: Apple spun it off as an open source project, so there are other browsers using it too, such as the Nokia S60 browser. (In fact, WebKit was itself a fork of the open source KHTML project.) The WebKit Architect is Dave Hyatt, who used to be at Netscape and Mozilla - he implemented tabs in Firefox amongst other things. He has blogged a lot about the work that goes into improving rendering performance: here's a post from his old (and no longer styled) blog about improving CSS performance. When the project went open source, the WebKit team blog was set up, but sadly he doesn't write so much any more.

One important policy they have on WebKit is that nothing is allowed to have an adverse effect on performance: if a change, or a new feature, makes things run slower then it simply can't be committed. This helps to avoid the problem of performance gradually decreasing as new capabilities are added.

For JavaScript, Google created their own scripting engine called V8 which uses a load of clever techniques to optimise execution. It also compiles to native code, rather than an interpreted bytecode, so JS applications can run at pretty much the speed of native code. This has led to a speed war amongst the browser makers: Firefox's TraceMonkey beats V8 on some benchmarks, Safari's Squirrelfish Extreme (which also compiles to native code) claims a 36% improvement over V8, Opera's Carackan (native code compilation again) hasn't quite caught up with WebKit and Chrome yet (though they're working on it), and the IE Team claim that the latest preview of IE9 has overtaken Firefox.

So, to sum up: Chrome is so fast because a bunch of smart people at Apple and Google worked really hard to make it as fast as possible, this has got the smart people working on other browsers also working really hard to try and beat it, and IE9 will be a vast improvement on IE8

Oh, and don't forget Google's Chrome comic book, which explains a lot of the internals

[lilelvis2000]

As always Nick, superb.

My impression is that Chrome is just that tick or two faster rendering. On slow machines this is even more apparent. (to me anyway).

[xchaotic]

As always Nick, superb.

My impression is that Chrome is just that tick or two faster rendering. On slow machines this is even more apparent. (to me anyway).

I think that's the idea that Google is having with ChromeOS: make it fast enough so that Google Apps can be run on hardware that is very cheap so that they can dish out £50 netbooks to people and keep on collecting data / serving ads...

I also don't really agree agree on the slimmed functionality, I downloaded Chrome developer channel version with some cool extensions like Speed Tracer (so I could optimise CSS rendering speeds) and at least for me, Chrome is already providing more useful developer tools than other browsers (with the exception of Firebug perhaps) and it will only get better.

[d000hg]

ChromeOS is just a Linux variant with hacks in to only run on SSDs and prevent you installing any local applications. As Linux it doesn't need much resources the way they will be configuring it... but it's the fact they want to force you to run apps through the browser, so they control all the data-flow, which is a little creepy