September 2, 2008

Get it here.

Amusing installation process, works great until the bookmarks and profiles are transferred - then there is a period of silence for about 30 seconds before it launches. The browser is quick. Really quick. There is a tangible difference in rendering time on JS intensive pages. Clearly the V8 JSVM is serious and competes well with TraceMonkey.

The browser opens one-process-per-page. Although I did get into situations where I saw more processes running than tabs. Regardless of the scenario though - Chrome cleans up after itself when all instances are closed, which is good. My guess is that one chrome.exe is a monitor process and then it spawns one per tab from there. If the tabcount=0 it kills everything including the monitor itself.

Here’s a screenshot of the browser in action. Showing a couple of tabs, the Windows Task Manager and also one window running YouTube in incognito mode. Flash video plays instantly, seems like if you have flash installed on your FireFox installation - it just inherits and uses it.

On average, each tab occupies between 15-70mb of memory. So, there is some potential here for memory hogging.

Google chrome in action

Full Screen 1920x1200 resolution here.

Overall, I am impressed with this first stab, have to try HTTPS performance and some more sites before I make a decision in regards to FF3 or IE8.

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