Recently in Google Chrome Category

I've probably written a dozen entries in which I wondered aloud about how anybody could use the Google Chrome Web browser when, on my 512 MB Windows XP system, it literally ran aground after maybe a half-hour of use, with screens taking forever to render and sending me scurrying back to the relative comfort of Firefox.

Well since that time I've been running both Firefox and Google Chrome on a Windows box with 1 GB of RAM, and my opinion of Chrome has turned around: It's fast and stays fast.

I guess Chrome is one of those applications that just doesn't do well with 512 MB of RAM.

And now that I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop that also has 1 GB of RAM — and I'm having "issues" with Firefox eating tons of CPU — I've installed a couple of other browsers, including the Webkit-powered GNOME browser-of-choice Epiphany and its close cousin (and Chrome twin) Chromium, both of which are easily added from the refreshingly simple Ubuntu Software Center.

(About the only thing I don't like about the Ubuntu Software Center is its method of installing an application as soon as you select it; I'd rather make a number of software selections and then have the system install them all together. I guess that's what the Synaptic Package Manager is for.)

So how is Chromium in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.04?

So far, it's excellent. Everything happens fast. There is absolutely no slowdown when I type into a Web form. I can see in top that when not in active use, Chromium (just like Epiphany) gives back almost all the CPU it uses when rendering a Web page (most unlike Firefox, which holds onto CPU even when you're not in a FF window).

Windows XP runs great in 512 MB. But if you're running a modern Web browser, you really need 1 GB for things to run smoothly. This doesn't mean a modern Web browser — especially Firefox — will run great on a Linux machine with only 512 MB of RAM. But I've never seen it choke so badly with 1 GB of RAM as I have in my current Ubuntu 10.04 installation.

The fact that Chromium is flawless on this configuration and with this CPU (1.2 GHz Celeron) says a whole lot.

My only problem is that the "core" of my Web-based work requires me to use Firefox. ... and if Chromium runs great in Ubuntu, it could only do better in a "lighter" environment, right?

In my ongoing quest to bring the latest news about Xorg and its hatred of the Intel 830m chipset that I have on three laptops, today I'm running a long filesystem check in gParted on the Parted Magic 4.9 live CD.

Don't get me wrong: I love Parted Magic. It's my preferred tool for partitioning drives with gParted and doing all sorts of other things. I generally don't burn new Parted Magic discs. I just keep using the same ones. The last time I made one, it was version 4.6.

But since my Toshiba 1100-S101 hates CD-R discs and likes DVD+R, I needed to burn the CD image onto a DVD. (Recently the Toshiba hasn't even been reading commercially created CD-ROM discs, so it looks like DVD-only from here on out.)

Parted Magic 4.9 is doing everything I need it to do. But I'm noticing in the helpful Conky output that Xorg is consuming 50 percent to 60 percent of the CPU at any given time. Hey, that's the same problem I had in Debian Squeeze ....

Whether this is something that can be addressed in xorg.conf, I don't know, but it is disturbing.

In other Parted Magic 4.9 news, I'm using the Chromium browser for the first time. It appears to work great. I'm no fan of Google Chrome on my Windows XP machine, but in Linux the Google-derived Web browser is performing exceptionally well.

I'm getting ready to install either Debian or Ubuntu again, and I'm undecided about whether or not to use encrypted LVM this time. I didn't have any performance issues with the encrypted drive, but my lack of knowledge regarding modifying LVM worries me. Specifically, Debian Squeeze appears to be larger than Lenny, and I'm worried that my root partition will be too small, and I won't know how to grow it and shrink /home — operations I'm very comfortable doing with non-LVM partitions in gParted.

The Google Chrome browser starts out great. But after a few hours, everything turns to sludgy poo. I can't get anything done, scripts and Flash start to time out, the screen takes forever to redraw ... then it crashes.

My hardware/OS ain't the best: Windows XP SP3 on Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, 512 MB RAM, but I have a whole lot more speed and stability in boring ol' Firefox 3.5.8 (I haven't gotten around to 3.6 ...).

Is it me, or is Google Chrome not so great?

I know that Google Chrome is supposed to be so gosh, darned fast, but on the Dell Optiplex GX520s with Windows XP, 3 GHz P4 processors and 512 MB of RAM (yes, we're stuck in 2005, thank you for asking), the Chrome browser starts off the session with promise but soon bogs down. Going from one window to another not visited in the past few minutes means slow, painful redrawing of said window.

So any speed or stability advantages over Firefox 3.5.x are ... just not there.

That means if I want to get work done in the browser (and that's pretty much what I do ...), I need to use Firefox.

IE - too slow, but I do use it for development because my readers use it. Opera - it just can't handle my Web-based apps (it's the apps' fault, but I can't change that equation) though it remains super fast. Chrome - those screen redraws are killing me. Firefox - it may be a CPU hog, but I can use it all day and it stays mighty consistent, plus I have my beloved Firebug and Web Developer add-ons.

I'd like to love Chrome, but in my situation, I can't. Firefox wins.

Every once in a while I do a couple hours of my Web-intensive work in Internet Explorer on the aging Windows box the company provides for me.

It's running IE 8 with XP, and let me tell you, IE 8 is a slow, surly dog. I remember IE 6 being much quicker, but you could shove an icepick into your own eye waiting for a new tab to open in IE 8.

Since I code for the Web and we have a huge IE user base, I do need to use IE more than you'd think. One thing MS did do was add some developer tools to the browser in version 8. While it's a bit clunky and more than a bit slow on my 3 GHz Celeron/512 MB RAM Dell box, you can actually make changes to the HTML and CSS on pages with the development tool a la Firebug and Web Developer in Firefox.

For raw speed, Firefox and Opera have IE on the ropes. What about Google Chrome? It doesn't take long on this box before I can barely get a screen to refresh between tabs without wondering if the ghost of IEs present has taken it over.

Without FF, the world would be a much more annoying place.

Here's an entry that never got published for one reason or other. It was originally written May 8, 2009:

I made a big deal out of how great I thought the Google Chrome browser was when it first came out. It was so fast, blah, blah, blah ...

Well, until today I hadn't clicked the Google Chrome icon in my Windows XP dock in maybe six months, maybe longer.

After using it for awhile, I found Google Chrome to be less than stable. It would often just halt in mid-task. Screens could be slow to redraw.

And while I liked the development tools that come built into Chrome, there are better tools in Firefox (principally the Web Developer and Firebug add-ons).

But the tools didn't matter so much as my impression of Chrome's speed and stability. It could start out fast, but things would inevitably grind down after the browser was running awhile. I have nothing tangible to base this on, just that Chrome was not working well on my particular box.

So after fighting it for awhile, I just started using Firefox again.

Firefox, especially version 3 (3.0.10 for today anyway), is extremely solid. And I can work longer on this XP box without everything going to hell.

Of course I still have a single task — just one thing, but one critical thing — that requires IE but for some reason lets me use the Opera browser. You don't know pain unless you need to run IE on a regular basis. I spent the morning on a computer (not mine) with nothing but IE. You'd thing that Windows XP with 2 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM could run a Web browser, no problem.

But there was a problem. Sludgy slowness.

Anyhow, all I really wanted to say was that I threw over Firefox for Chrome, but once the shine wore off, I went back to Firefox and have been quite happy to split my time between FF and Opera.

Oh, and on my Unix/Linux machines, I'm also using Firefox (and Opera). No Chrome for those yet. I know Google keeps promising a Linux port of Chrome. I doubt that there will be native builds for OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I've been wrong before (many, many times) and could be again.

Meanwhile, Firefox runs on just about everything. I can't run FF in 32-bit SPARC OpenBSD, but I can run it (barely, but it'll run) in Solaris 9 for 32-bit SPARC.

But for my i386 (Windows, Linux, OpenBSD) and PowerPC (Linux and OS X) hardware, at least there's a browser that works consistently across all of these architectures and operating environments.

It's the announcement we've all be waiting for, one that Google at one point in the past said it wouldn't make.

But it did:

Google will release its own PC operating system, Chrome OS, to leverage the company's Web-based Google Apps and bypass Microsoft's Windows operating system entirely on not just netbooks but every PC platform from the smallest ARM ultraportable to a full Intel-based desktop.

(See CNet's Webware post on the announcement)

In a very-much related move, Google made the symbolic move of removing the "beta" tag from its core Web-based apps for Mail, Docs, Calendar and Talk. Not that anything has changed about those apps in the past day or so, but according to ZDnet, the move from "beta" to what can only be assumed is production-ready status, whether real, imagined or long overdue, makes those applications attractive to the corporate/enterprise customers Google hopes to attract to Google Apps and now the Google Chrome OS.

And while the Google Chrome OS will be based on the Linux kernel, it could very well end what little preloading of other Linux-based OSes is left in the netbook space. Nobody outside of the fanboy contingent knows what Ubuntu (or any other current Linux distribution) is, and that doesn't seem likely to change, my 1,000+ blog posts on the subject notwithstanding.

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light.

Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble.

I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon.

Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with.

The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings).

If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

Don't get me wrong. Searching for free software for Windows computers is something I do, too. Not often, but I do it. That's how I found some of my very favorite applications on any platform, including the terrific image viewer/editor IrfanView, the fast AbiWord word processor and Notepad++, the best Windows-native text editor ever.

Even though I do a lot of work in Firefox, where Chris Pedrick's excellent Web Developer add-on helps me code, whenever I'm doing "casual browsing," working in Movable Type, Google Docs, Gmail or any of the various Web-based programs I rely on that allow it, I use the Google Chrome browser.

Why? Speed.

Even though I think a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM is adequate for Windows XP, there's no denying that Chrome is faster to load and run than Firefox (and Firefox leaves Internet Explorer 7 way back in the dust). Chrome is right up there with the Opera browser when it comes to speed, but already Chrome does better in terms of rendering pages.

And basically Google Chrome is a nice, lean, uncomplicated browser.

I made it my default browser because every time I click on a link in an e-mail (usually in Thunderbird, by the way), the machine would open that link in Firefox. And on this box, while I am using Firefox for development, I'm happier doing the rest of my browsing in Chrome.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to run Firefox 3.1, which is supposed to be much faster than 3.0.x.

So what if Chrome had a tool like Web Developer? And what if Chrome ran (and ran well) in non-Windows environments (Linux, BSDs, Mac OS)? Just more world domination for Google (and a faster box for me).

Web Developer or Firebug?: I should probably try to familiarize myself with the Firebug extension for Firefox. Having more than one tool to help with Web development (and I need all the help I can get), isn't a bad thing. I guess I use Web Developer because it was the first of the two that I was able to get working the way I needed it.

Related:

Google Chrome: What does it offer developers?
Chromium Developer Documentation

I've been getting deep into Google's many services, and today is no exception. First I discovered a bunch of features in Gmail (Web version, print version) that are turning out to be really helpful.

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I'm using the Google Chrome browser again on my XP box today, since I'm working on our Google fire map and feeding it data from a Google Spreadsheet.

I'm also going to be looking into creating a private Web page for company use at Google Sites, which is targeted as an easy-to-use alternative to corporate Intranets. It's also a place where you can set up a site just for your family, friends or whoever. If you wish, you can control who gets access to the pages, a feature I will be tapping for this project.

Back to Google Chrome. It's still incredibly fast, and I can't wait until it's ported to OS X and Linux. As I've said, it doesn't have quite the feature set of, say, Firefox, but for the most part I don't need any of those features and will easily give them up for increased speed on the 99.9 percent of stuff that Chrome does so well.