Where is the chink in Google Chrome's armor?

Question

While browsing with Chrome, I noticed that it responds extremely fast (in comparison with IE and Firefox on my laptop) in terms of rendering pages, including JavaScript heavy sites like gmail.

This is what googlebook on Chrome has to say

1. tabs are hosted in process rather than thread.
2. compile javascript using V8 engine as opposed to interpreting.
3. Introduce new virtual machine to support javascript heavy apps
4. introduce "hidden class transitions" and apply dynamic optimization to speed up things.
5. Replace inefficient "Conservative garbage colllection" scheme with more precise garbage collection scheme.
6. Introduce their own task scheduler and memory manager to manage the browser environment.

All this sounds so familiar, and Microsoft has been doing such things for long time.. Windows os, C++, C# etc compilers, CLR, and so on.

So why isn't Microsoft or any other browser vendor taking Chrome's approach? Is there a flaw in Chrome's approach? If not, is the rest of browser vendor community caught unaware with Google's approach?

Answer 1

Chrome's approach is difficult to write, and requires forethought from the developers. IE and Firefox are both attempting to move to a process-per-tab model, but due to backwards compatibility are not able to transition quickly. Chrome, being an entirely new browser build on a clean rendering engine (WebKit), was easier to write in this way.

Answer 2

They have crossed over from a web browser as a tool to view web pages, to a tool optimized to work for web applications. There may be some flaws in this initial release, but they are changing the game.

Answer 3

IE8 uses a similar individual process per tab module, though they do not use a single process per tab, but instead spread all tabs across a process pool.

Answer 4

@pix0r but they added a little thing in the bottom right corner so you can expand the text box any direction you want, which I love because I use a wide display and prefer to type in a wider screen.

Thats actually a WebKit feature, Chrome just inherited it.

Answer 5

Virtually all of these features existed in other browsers before Chrome. IE8 had process isolation for tabs. Firefox / Safari had most of the JavaScript stuff. Most browsers do their own memory management.

Chrome has a few unique features (hyperrestricted render processes, etc) which are difficult to put into other browsers due to add-on/application compatibility concerns.

The primary thing Chrome has going for it is an extremely hardcore focus on minimalism and high-performance. By focusing on these as their competitive advantages, they can appeal to users who find this area of focus compelling.

Answer 6

As time passes, I'm sure you will see the homogenization of features as the browsers attempt to one-up each other.

In the meanwhile, I still stick with Firefox over Chrome for the simple reason that Firefox is (i) non-profit and has a (ii) huge addon community. Addons such as NoScript and AdBlockPlus are almost essential for me.

Answer 7

One chink in Chrome's armor is the fact that it renders these darned textareas on StackOverflow are so small that it's making my eyes bleed!

Answer 8

One chink in Chrome's armor is the fact that it renders these darned textareas on StackOverflow are so small that it's making my eyes bleed!

Yeah. I mentioned this on uservoice and got declined because the current size is evidently the default under webkit. Every other site I've tried with Chrome that uses textboxes to compose content manages to have a decent sized font. The default definitely doesn't work, but there's obviously some way to override it. Jeff needs to fix this!

Edit: Jeff was nice enough to point out how to fix this problem yourself.

Answer 9

@pix0r but they added a little thing in the bottom right corner so you can expand the text box any direction you want, which I love because I use a wide display and prefer to type in a wider screen.

I also wanted to point out that Google completely built Chrome from the ground up, with the exception of using webkit, so they have some of the advantages of not having to not deal with old-code. And of course there is the INSANLELY cool/smart developers.

Answer 10

The biggest chink I've found is its lousy proxy support compared to IE, FF and Opera. So it's pretty much useless at work, render pages at random, and requesting authentication for the proxy, where the others pass it seamlessly.

That said on my home machine it works great, if it wasn't for the OTT EULA I'd use it now.

thing2k

Answer 11

One "flaw" about Chrome is that it uses more memory upfront than all of the other browsers. I'm just guessing that this is due to the overhead associated with all the separate tab management.

After it's been open for some time, however, it doesn't use more memory than other browsers.

Answer 12

Many companies play a game of "What's the least we can do to get the leg up?" Marketing creates a laundry list of features needed to be better than the competitors. Project management ensures engineers stick to those features for fear that the project will exceed the time allocated... which of course it will. There's not a whole lot of room in such a system for a big picture leap-ahead. The incremental improvements you see in products, and browsers, is a consequence.

Answer 13

You have to keep in mind that Microsoft primary business is Rich environement (GUI) Application. Web tool is a threat to them as it is platform independant (not promoting they main product).

Of course the IE team probably had figured something like that but... Microsoft definetly won't invest a lot of money in IE if what they are selling is a Rich application platform.