Google Chrome logo
Google released its entry into the browser wars Today. I’ve been playing with it all day. I like how it puts the tabs in line with the minimize / maximize / close buttons. I’ve wanted this in a browser for years. They have a long way to go to enable other features, but it’s blazing fast and minimalist, which are two big pluses in my book.
Chrome has a new Javascript engine so it’s fast. Goofy fast. Melt your face fast. It’s running on Webkit so it’s pretty. Kate Bosworth pretty. Kate Bosworth in 21 pretty. I tried to get it to run on Linux using WINE and, while I got it to load, it didn’t work well enough to render any pages without crashing. It puts Firefox to shame in the coolness category, and while it has a ways to catch up when it comes to community and available plugins, it’s still faster and sexier and what I’ll be using until Microsoft puts IE8 on the ground.
Some auctioneers, as well as my sister, have claimed that Chrome runs slower than Firefox and IE. Some speed tests have claimed that Firefox may be just as fast, though I haven’t see this behavior. If you’ve seen Chrome running slowly, let us know in the comments.
By Google recommends Chrome download from main page | AuctioneerTech 8 September 2008 - 7:16 pm
[…] today, seemingly confident enough about their new browser, posted a link on their homepage for the […]
By Rob 9 September 2008 - 4:50 pm
Chrome is running PDFs very slowly.
By Rob 9 September 2008 - 10:50 am
Chrome is running PDFs very slowly.
By Aaron Traffas 9 September 2008 - 10:50 pm
Hi, Rob. Are you using Adobe Reader or Foxit PDF Reader?
By aaron 9 September 2008 - 4:50 pm
Hi, Rob. Are you using Adobe Reader or Foxit PDF Reader?
By Secunia checks your PC for vulnerabilities | AuctioneerTech 9 September 2008 - 8:47 pm
[…] of the vulnerabilities in that older version. I wasn’t able to get the program to run under Chrome. Since Chrome requires the lastest Java 6 update 10 release candidate, it’s not all that […]
By Proxibid on Chrome | AuctioneerTech 12 September 2008 - 7:29 am
[…] and fellow auctioneer Don Hamit pointed out to me at the KAA auctioneer contest yesterday that the recently-released Chrome doesn’t work with the recently-funded real-time Internet bidding platform Proxibid. I […]
By warren 13 September 2008 - 12:53 am
I just installed Chrome today, September 12th, 2008. I have an ADSL Interlaced connection that averages 2582 kbps with an average PING of 40ms. This is very consistent and on a stable connection.
Google Chrome loads web pages very, very slow.
-I would estimate 20% of pages never load at all, before they time out, or I receive a Google page claiming “This webpage is not available” or that “It appears to be a broken link.” Of course, they aren’t broken links and a refresh normally loads them successfully.
-I would estimate that 60% of pages load very, very slowly, taking 5 to 10 times longer to load than Firefox or IE. Load speeds are typical of a 56k dial up modem. The page will be blank for 30+ seconds, then parts of it will pop up, and over the next 30 seconds, some images and text appear. Then the page either takes another 30 seconds to complete the loading (approaching 2 minutes load time) or it stops loading with only a partially loaded page.
-The remaining 20% of the time, web pages pop up almost instantly. Faster than any pages have ever loaded on Firefox or IE.
-Also noted, the spell check feature does not work properly. Often for mis-spelled words, there is not a correction suggested upon right click–even when words are one simple letter off.
Honestly, i don’t know what’s wrong with Chrome and I don’t see any reason I should spend hours in over-my-head tech stuff, trying to fix what they did wrong to begin with. if my settings are off, it’s because they didn’t program Chrome to set them upon installation. But my settings have always worked great with Firefox, IE and Opera.
So I thin they messed something up, Chrome is very, very slow and not fast like you all claim.
By warren 12 September 2008 - 7:53 pm
I just installed Chrome today, September 12th, 2008. I have an ADSL Interlaced connection that averages 2582 kbps with an average PING of 40ms. This is very consistent and on a stable connection.
Google Chrome loads web pages very, very slow.
-I would estimate 20% of pages never load at all, before they time out, or I receive a Google page claiming “This webpage is not available” or that “It appears to be a broken link.” Of course, they aren’t broken links and a refresh normally loads them successfully.
-I would estimate that 60% of pages load very, very slowly, taking 5 to 10 times longer to load than Firefox or IE. Load speeds are typical of a 56k dial up modem. The page will be blank for 30+ seconds, then parts of it will pop up, and over the next 30 seconds, some images and text appear. Then the page either takes another 30 seconds to complete the loading (approaching 2 minutes load time) or it stops loading with only a partially loaded page.
-The remaining 20% of the time, web pages pop up almost instantly. Faster than any pages have ever loaded on Firefox or IE.
-Also noted, the spell check feature does not work properly. Often for mis-spelled words, there is not a correction suggested upon right click–even when words are one simple letter off.
Honestly, i don’t know what’s wrong with Chrome and I don’t see any reason I should spend hours in over-my-head tech stuff, trying to fix what they did wrong to begin with. if my settings are off, it’s because they didn’t program Chrome to set them upon installation. But my settings have always worked great with Firefox, IE and Opera.
So I thin they messed something up, Chrome is very, very slow and not fast like you all claim.
By aaron 14 September 2008 - 10:33 am
@warren – Hi, Warren, thanks for posting your experience. I’m getting a lot of traffic from search engines with queries like “Chrome is slow” and “Chrome java slow” so it seems you’re not the only one having problems with it.
I’ve noticed it being a memory hog, with each tab using 20-30 MB or more, it’s easy to use up all available physical memory in a hurry. Hopefully future releases will do a better job with speed and memory management.
By Aaron Traffas 14 September 2008 - 3:33 pm
@warren – Hi, Warren, thanks for posting your experience. I’m getting a lot of traffic from search engines with queries like “Chrome is slow” and “Chrome java slow” so it seems you’re not the only one having problems with it.
I’ve noticed it being a memory hog, with each tab using 20-30 MB or more, it’s easy to use up all available physical memory in a hurry. Hopefully future releases will do a better job with speed and memory management.
By David 2 October 2008 - 4:49 pm
I too am finding Chrome very slow to load pages. The bottom bar says resolving proxy… Some pages don’t load at all. what’s up?
By David 2 October 2008 - 11:49 am
I too am finding Chrome very slow to load pages. The bottom bar says resolving proxy… Some pages don’t load at all. what’s up?
By Aaron 2 October 2008 - 2:31 pm
@David –
I’ve noticed the hang when it says resolving proxy. Google Chrome does something called DNS pre-fetching where it will actually translate the domain name of places it thinks you might go into IP addresses so it has those addresses ready should you decide to go there. It’s supposed to save a quarter of a second each time you tell the browser to go to a different page, but I’ve wondered if this practice could have something to do with the hang-up when it says resolving proxy.
By Aaron Traffas 2 October 2008 - 7:31 pm
@David –
I’ve noticed the hang when it says resolving proxy. Google Chrome does something called DNS pre-fetching where it will actually translate the domain name of places it thinks you might go into IP addresses so it has those addresses ready should you decide to go there. It’s supposed to save a quarter of a second each time you tell the browser to go to a different page, but I’ve wondered if this practice could have something to do with the hang-up when it says resolving proxy.
By Aaron Traffas 2 October 2008 - 8:30 pm
I recently found a suggestion in a Google Chrome forum. Try going to the Google Chrome Options and, in the ‘Under the Hood’ tab under the ‘Security’ section, un-check the ‘Enable phishing and malware protection’ option and see if you get a speed increase after reboot. My copies of Chrome still seem to be pretty speedy, so I can’t test this work-around. If you do, post back here so we can know that there is a fix for Chrome being slow.
By Aaron 2 October 2008 - 3:30 pm
I recently found a suggestion in a Google Chrome forum. Try going to the Google Chrome Options and, in the ‘Under the Hood’ tab under the ‘Security’ section, un-check the ‘Enable phishing and malware protection’ option and see if you get a speed increase after reboot. My copies of Chrome still seem to be pretty speedy, so I can’t test this work-around. If you do, post back here so we can know that there is a fix for Chrome being slow.
By Olivier 11 October 2008 - 1:21 am
@ Aaron-
I tried your suggestion with the un-check the Enable phishing and malware protection and it did not make a difference. Do you have any other suggestion?
The pages load really slow, this is nothing close to IE. They often come up broken. I don’t want to knock Google, but for beta version this is not good.
By Olivier 10 October 2008 - 8:21 pm
@ Aaron-
I tried your suggestion with the un-check the Enable phishing and malware protection and it did not make a difference. Do you have any other suggestion?
The pages load really slow, this is nothing close to IE. They often come up broken. I don’t want to knock Google, but for beta version this is not good.
By Aaron 13 October 2008 - 9:16 pm
@Olivier –
Unfortunately, I don’t have any other suggestions. I wonder if perhaps the lackluster performance and slowness of Google Chrome is causing its reported drop in market share. It’s now behind Safari in the browser rankings. I’m finding it tough to use because you can’t backup through forms and the spell check doesn’t work very well.
By Aaron Traffas 14 October 2008 - 2:16 am
@Olivier –
Unfortunately, I don’t have any other suggestions. I wonder if perhaps the lackluster performance and slowness of Google Chrome is causing its reported drop in market share. It’s now behind Safari in the browser rankings. I’m finding it tough to use because you can’t backup through forms and the spell check doesn’t work very well.
By Sandman 15 October 2008 - 4:44 am
Used to use Chrome… but after so many times when I found I could open Firefox, load my desired page, and close it again before Chrome even finished its load that had started first?
Chrome’s not ready for my prime time.
By Sandman 14 October 2008 - 11:44 pm
Used to use Chrome… but after so many times when I found I could open Firefox, load my desired page, and close it again before Chrome even finished its load that had started first?
Chrome’s not ready for my prime time.
By Ilya 28 October 2008 - 2:07 pm
For all those “slow” comments, i found that 1 day i needed to set my proxy because of the connection i was using.. Before this i was running very fast. Once i moved connections and forgot to clear the proxy i was crawling! I mean pages took minutes to load on a fast connection. Once i turned off the proxy it was back to normal!
By Ilya 28 October 2008 - 9:07 am
For all those “slow” comments, i found that 1 day i needed to set my proxy because of the connection i was using.. Before this i was running very fast. Once i moved connections and forgot to clear the proxy i was crawling! I mean pages took minutes to load on a fast connection. Once i turned off the proxy it was back to normal!
By Sean B 3 November 2008 - 9:07 pm
Yes, Google Chrome runs very slow. I went back and forth between Chrome and Firefox. Chrome is a super turtle. Firefox crashes on my banking website so I am looking for a new browser. Only Netscape worked and that is gone I guess. Internet Explorer gives the classic error message everyone is getting and it sounds complicated to fix (something in the registry maybe), who the heck is going to do that???!!!! Suggestions please?
By Sean B 3 November 2008 - 4:07 pm
Yes, Google Chrome runs very slow. I went back and forth between Chrome and Firefox. Chrome is a super turtle. Firefox crashes on my banking website so I am looking for a new browser. Only Netscape worked and that is gone I guess. Internet Explorer gives the classic error message everyone is getting and it sounds complicated to fix (something in the registry maybe), who the heck is going to do that???!!!! Suggestions please?
By Aaron 6 November 2008 - 12:33 pm
@Sean B –
You might be sure you’ve installed the latest Java 10 release candidate. It may fix Chrome on your banking site.
By Aaron Traffas 6 November 2008 - 5:33 pm
@Sean B –
You might be sure you’ve installed the latest Java 10 release candidate. It may fix Chrome on your banking site.
By Saurabh 9 January 2009 - 11:43 am
Its crawling on my machine (Dell D620). It appears that it caches large amount of data and lacks recycling this cache. As a result, in trying to load a cached page from a LARGE cache the time taken is more than what it would to just get it from the damn web-server. This is ridiculous.
By Saurabh 9 January 2009 - 11:51 am
This helped me. Perhaps this could help you too http://www.paulbenetis.com/2008/09/02/improve-g…
By nikolai 13 January 2009 - 11:12 am
first it worked like a dream, after i while, i had some speed troubles
By Stevozoid 21 January 2009 - 12:26 am
I can't figure it out. Chrome is slower than FireFox. Not to mention the bugginess. I can't view Hotmail or TheWeatherNetwork with this thing. It is sexy…but where's all this lightweight speed I keep hearing so much about? Suggestions? Perhaps it has something to do with resolving my proxy?
By Aaron Traffas 22 January 2009 - 10:01 pm
I agree that it was fun at first. The problem I found with it is that it prompts you to resubmit every form-generated page when you hit the back button. I haven't found a way to turn off that prompting like you can with IE.
By Aaron Traffas 22 January 2009 - 10:20 pm
What happens when you try to view Hotmail or TheWeatherNetwork? I can see Microsoft using browser detection to prevent Chrome users from accessing Hotmail, but I'll be it has something to do with JavaScript. I noticed that some of the JavaScript I've used at work didn't work properly with Chrome tonight but it worked flawlessly with IE.
By wk 24 January 2009 - 3:52 pm
Google browser is slow in loading pages………
By Bryan 28 February 2009 - 5:01 pm
I downloaded chrome and it was very fast for the first week. Then suddenly it went very very slow. Anything up to an hour to download a page. Back to using firefox all the time now.
By hgfxdfgsdsdsd 12 March 2009 - 6:07 pm
Fire fox sucks. Google chrom is so slow i thought it was going to be fast but now i just use normal google
By collardsx2 27 March 2009 - 2:23 am
Chrome was fast initially, but isn't so fast anymore. I'm not sure what's happened … i have two Vista computers … the same on both. i'm disappointed
By Topkat 29 March 2009 - 3:00 pm
Google Chrome runs PAINFULLY slow for me. IE8 blows it out of the water and so does FF. I'm getting rid of it.
By Uneeke1 24 April 2009 - 2:45 pm
I am also finding that Chrome takes a long time to resolve the proxy before displaying content
By Q 26 May 2009 - 3:42 pm
I have tried Chrome. Looks like I will be going back to Firefox, because it takes a long time for pages to load with chrome.
By Jonathan 1 June 2009 - 11:54 am
I have the problem that it comes back ALOT saying the the website has returned null, normally after only a very short amount of time, granted i am using a fairly laggy broadbad connection i.e. 150ish ms ping to a speedtest server in the same city as me, but still is not good enuf with laggy connections
By Jim 12 June 2009 - 12:56 am
Google Chrome is very slow to load and navigate. What's the problem here?
By Eze 19 June 2009 - 4:36 am
Chrome was fast at first, but this shtuff slowed WAY down after using it as my default browser. I suspect Big Brother is peekin in more often now on my internet navigation.
By ok 30 June 2009 - 7:15 am
i have been using it a lot but all of a sudden now it's going really really slowly for some reason
By Aaron Traffas 28 July 2009 - 12:28 pm
The version of Chrome in the developer channel is now at 3.0.195.1 and I've been using it for a few days. It seems to be quick and responsive. You can switch to the pre-release versions here:
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-ch…
By thomase 31 July 2009 - 12:03 am
I was a hardcore google chrome fanboy. It was faster than blazing hell and I loved it. All of a sudden google with their incredibly stupid we-don't-inform-you-that-your-browser-is-updating program updated me to version 2.0. It was so slow that I thought my connection was bad. I literally thought that my router finally kicked the bucket. But low and behold Firefox runs at break-neck pace. I now pray for the day that Chrome is fast again on my computer because I love google and the original program pre-suckage.
By Avalon 27 August 2009 - 8:32 am
I have been using it for a while however, in a amazing touch of irony, the most used pages that comes up when you open a new tab. If I try to open google from there it takes forever and just locks the entire browser. Other sites load just fine and google loads perfectly in other browsers.
I guess it is like that joke from some random TV show “If you google google you can break the internet.”
By Name 26 September 2009 - 12:52 pm
It started out fast a couple weeks ago and now at first load up it takes about4x longer to display a page than firefox. i didnt change anything or update it or mess with it just one day it took like 5 seconds to display my homepage-google and then it has stayed tha way ever since.firefox is instantaneous i run them both.
By Name 26 September 2009 - 12:59 pm
oh and i tried the dns fix mentioned that made it worse. it is nice and light-looking but runs like its having a heart attack.
By Name 26 September 2009 - 2:52 pm
It started out fast a couple weeks ago and now at first load up it takes about4x longer to display a page than firefox. i didnt change anything or update it or mess with it just one day it took like 5 seconds to display my homepage-google and then it has stayed tha way ever since.firefox is instantaneous i run them both.
By Name 26 September 2009 - 2:59 pm
oh and i tried the dns fix mentioned that made it worse. it is nice and light-looking but runs like its having a heart attack.
By wbeard6142 15 November 2009 - 12:45 pm
It is so slow……Firefox has memory leaks, Chrome is slow. Microsoft is getting their way because IE seems better and better
By tom moles 15 December 2009 - 3:20 pm
for some reason this browser is the slowest browser i have ever used. Like 98 explorer statues… if anyone knows why let me know
By tom moles 15 December 2009 - 8:20 pm
for some reason this browser is the slowest browser i have ever used. Like 98 explorer statues… if anyone knows why let me know