Friday, October 09, 2009

Chrome and the Mac

I've been waiting for Chrome for quite some time now to be released on the Mac. I've been fairly curios to see how it would stack up there compared to it's sibling Safari, as they share the same WebKit core. It's been available as a dev preview since back in June but there where many things that where not complete and crashes where reported aplenty.

Many have been reporting, as of recent, about the increased stability and additional support for things such as Flash etc. I decided to give it a try today from within Snow Leopard. The download link can be found here.
(hehe I'm blogging this post from Chrome and inserting the previous link does not work from Bloggers editor).

Installing went without issues, and it loaded up no problem. I tried out a few sites and it seems to be working great thus far. I even went to ChromExperiments.com to push it a bit. I used the experiment called Voxel Spacing as that one was really slow in Safari a few months back. Chrome ran it much faster than I remember Safari being able to cope from before. I decided to try it again to see if Safari had improved at all. Coincidentally it had and both Chrome and Safari where running it at almost identical FPS, Chrome having an . Firefox couldn't be let off the hook here so it had to be tested as well. It was actually the slowest of the three.

Chrome 18 fps/average while moving
Safari 17-18 fps/average while moving
Firefox 11-12 fps/average while moving (another issue was that Firefox wouldn't allow me to hold down the arrow key, it had to be spammed to keep it moving)

Some other things I've noticed is that almost all of the AJAX for Blogger doesn't work, or has issues (the auto-save fails, and quite a few of the buttons for font, links, etc don't function correctly)
It seems to use a pretty consistent 100% cpu process at idle.
I had to copy/publish this post from another browser because Chrome didn't like the 'PUBLISH POST' button

I do like it so far though and I'm sure they'll get some of these issues resolved, it isn't even beta yet so it's working better than expected already. :)

1 comment:

BlackTigerX said...

I've been using Chrome on windows for the last 3 weeks, it's pretty good, another user away from Firefox :)