Google Chrome is… not Chrome-y
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL, Geekin' Out
At the behest of a friend or two, I decided to give Chrome a try a few weeks ago as my primary browser. I had it loaded already, I just didn’t use it that often. I know about all the claims that say it’s supposed to be faster than IE9 or Firefox, and I know that Google gushes about it all the time for the other features. I loved the bookmark sync tool and for the first time in a decade, I made a valiant effort to syncronize my bookmarks between all the PCs that I use. It worked, and I was happy to be using the same exact set of bookmarks everywhere, even on my phone.
But then I got to know Chrome better, and some of the “charm” was quickly evacuated into deep space faster than you can say “Event Horizon.”
One of my biggest pet peeves was the fact that Chrome was supposed to be this lean mean social surfing machine. Sure, if you use it like 99% of the population SEEMS to. Facebook, Google tab or two, maybe your Email. Not here. This geek loads up his browsers in full-on browsing warfare. I build myself fast computers, and I expect them to perform as quickly as I built them to be, but Chrome was not helping the situation. It would spawn additional threads as necessary, which was nice, except that I ran into two issues with that. Firstly, the extra threads didn’t serve to do much other than eat up rows in my task manager and spike the CPU graph every so often. I didn’t ever see a tangible benefit to the “spawn more overlords” …er I mean -threads-, scheme. I looked closer at those threads and realized a more horrific truth. Those additional threads were eating up gobs of memory. I thought maybe I had an issue with my PC, so I repeated my inspection on two other machines – my laptop, and my work PC. It’s noteworthy here to mention that my work PC didn’t run with any extensions or addons, while my laptop and desktop at home did. Chrome ate memory up like a fat kid in a Waffle House on Chicken & Waffles special day. Odd. I knew Firefox could be equally as ravenous on RAM usage, so I fired up the same test pages with Firefox, and discovered that while the program did use a sizable chunk of ram, it still used 90-120 MB LESS than Chrome did with all of the spawned threads. What’s up with that?
The complete deal breaker however came when I noticed a behavior that was unbecoming of a browser. Maybe Firefox spoiled me, and this is how they are supposed to be, who knows. Chrome could not handle multiple concurrent tabs, especially if they were loading.
I love Break.com. I love the galleries they post of images from all over the web, it’s like a mini “best of imgur” in one place most of the time. So I got into the habit of, much to Break’s server admins distress I’m sure, opening the tabs all at once. I’d open a gallery page, and then either Control-Click or mouse-click on every link in the gallery to have it open in the background while I looked at the prior tabs. For some reason, Chrome handled it like a horse trying to choke down a Volkswagen Beetle full of obese clowns wearing skunk spray aftershave. Many times, on the smaller galleries, I’d only notice lockups and occasional freezing. But the larger galleries would bring the party crashing down in an instant. The larger galleries would cause extensions and even the core Chrome operating environment to halt. You’ve probably never had to deal with it, but the “dead man” face Chrome throws up when it can’t run for some reason sucks. Really sucks. And the glorious auto-recovery that both Chrome and Firefox have is useless in Chrome. You can end the program, but if you chose to open Chrome again, it tries to restore the same clusterfuck that you were trying to load in the first place.
I thought that last part was just me, so I had a friend try it out on his computer, with no extensions or addons to speak of. He used dual monitors, running on the same computer to give both browsers even more of a workout. Sure enough, when he tried to open the same assortment of tabs in Chrome as he did in Firefox, Chrome would spit up and spew binary bits all over the place. Firefox, through whatever magic the browser coders whipped up, knaws through the page loads without a problem, every time. I performed the same test on my system, where both browsers have a few addons installed (Chrome: AdBlock, Firefox: Adblock, DownThemAll, TACO) and it still ended the same way. One other problem surfaced as well – Chrome would have kittens on multiple tabs with flash content. Woah, wait a sec. I know Google, Adobe, Apple and Steve Jobs are all on the “I HATE UR GUTS” stage right now, but give me a break. It’s pretty obvious when a platform neutral company (Mozilla) makes a browser compared to one that thinks Flash should die a horrid death, reserved for those who try to choke down VW Bugs and clowns who masticate too much.
Google, WTFBBQ?
I should note that I don’t hate Chrome, I just prefer to use Firefox. Since I did all the hard work with consolidating my bookmarks, the import into Firefox was all the much sweeter. Firefox’s sync has been just as good to me as Google’s feature in Chrome was. Bummer G-Team. The bottom line is that you should use the browser that fits your surfing style, and just read this knowing that Google has to do some more fine tuning on their browser before I’ll give it another shot (and I will, in the future for sure.) After all, this is just a blog – who said my word was law around these parts? 
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