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Google Chrome 27 Is Out: 5% Faster Page Loads 195

Posted by Soulskill from the still-winning-the-version-race-against-firefox dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google on Tuesday released Chrome version 27 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version features a big boost to page loads (now 5 percent faster on average) as well as significant updates for developers. The speed improvement is thanks to the introduction of 'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,' according to Google. Starting with this release, the scheduler more aggressively uses an idle connection and demotes the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets."
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Google Chrome 27 Is Out: 5% Faster Page Loads More

Google Chrome 27 Is Out: 5% Faster Page Loads

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  • Golly, Mr Wizard. I'm gonna pitch Firefox now.

    • Re:Holy Mackerel (Score:5, Funny)

      by rcjhawk ( 713563 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:13PM (#43790255) Homepage
      Loaded 27 onto my laptop. It was so fast, the computer launched itself out of the house at FTL speed and is now tweeting from somewhere around Alpha Centauri.
      Guess I'll replace it with a Chromebook.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        Page used to load really fast in 1990s in mosaic then, Netscape as long as you had something like a T1 connection. Now, funnily enough, the software layer involved in serving dynamic content and all the xml, third party sites and what not network calls the browser has to make before actually counting the page as loaded make it seem like the software layer has become the bottle-neck. This sounds silly to me, maybe we over did a bit?

        • Re:Holy Mackerel (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ILongForDarkness ( 1134931 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @10:18AM (#43793645)

          I think Google and FB and others like them have a lot of blame to share for the web needing a 10X fatter pipe to get the same speed: if every freaking page didn't have to talk to Google Analytics, send your cookie to FB for tracking etc either before (likely) or during page load perhaps you could actually enjoy the content you are there for in the first place on a slow connection. Now you need the fast pipe just to get all the preamble out of the way to all parties interested.

          • I think the proper person to blame for embedding GA and FB tracking is the webmaster, not Google and Facebook.

            • Re:Holy Mackerel (Score:4, Interesting)

              by ILongForDarkness ( 1134931 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @11:20AM (#43794349)

              True but claiming to save 5% of load time by making a browser while at the same time marketing products that slow down the page load in the first place seems kind of circular.

              • True but claiming to save 5% of load time by making a browser while at the same time marketing products that slow down the page load in the first place seems kind of circular.

                Without the shitty marketing products Google and Facebook would cease to exist.

                Money makes the world go round and neither of these companies would exist without some way of making money, however great Google search and Facebooks social network is. They both now need huge internet pipes and servers which does not come cheap.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Krojack ( 575051 )

            You could always install "ScriptSafe" for Chrome (or NoScript for FF) and blacklist JS from those domains.

            • Not sure if it would be granular enough. I use Google products and would want js to work but only when I'm actually browsing to one of their sites. Similarly with others: blocking JS that only comes from and points too things internal to the site I choose to browse too I'm okay with. Generally it is when they bounce me around/send data elsewhere I'm not aware of that I don't like. After all viewing donkey porn is obvious to the site you visit but that doesn't mean you want eBay knowing about it.

        • Well back in the 1990's the common web page was text with a few hyper links, and if you were really fancy you had a picture.
          The bottle neck was the speed of the line.

          However html has transformed from a way to displaying documents, to more of an application platform.

          Complain if you like about it, but it is here to stay, and modern heavy html has solved a lot of problems. Such as platform independent programs, universal access to a program, easy deployment, etc...

          Yes we have sacrificed speed for convenience,

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            However html has transformed from a way to displaying documents, to more of an application platform.

            I know this obviously, I just asked if we had over done it? Never ask a question for which you do not already know the answer. The answer is yes, we have over done it, mostly not paying attention to code optimization at the core. More memory and faster CPU cycles is nowadays cheaper that efficiency at the core of program logic.

            Complain if you like about it, but it is here to stay, and modern heavy html has solved a lot of problems. Such as platform independent programs, universal access to a program, easy deployment, etc...

            Yes we have sacrificed speed for convenience, but I think it is worth it.

            I never complained about anything. My OP was merely an observation of what had happened; We got lazy, not everybody can code efficiently and it is cheaper to rely on more horsepower t

      • Nah it would never leave your house. Otherwise how is Google going to collect all that analytics data?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sure, if you like Google knowing what you're browsing. I just dumped Chrome after several years for Firefox.

      It's too easy to use Google for everything.

      • Re:Holy Mackerel (Score:5, Informative)

        by kthreadd ( 1558445 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @01:49AM (#43790965)

        If you want a Google Chrome like browser I would recommend Chromium, which unlike Google Chrome is open source and doesn't track you as much as their proprietary product. You will miss out on some of the extra features available only in Google Chrome, but most of it should be the same.

      • I just started it to test it. I went to google news. I scrolled down and started to read a link. I was interrupted three times in less than a minute by two updates to the page and a pop up. I am trying to read and the screen is flashing with updates and pop ups. It is very annoying. At least put a button on the screen that would change color when an update is available so I can decide if I want to view it and for pop ups make them show up before I start to read because if I am reading I will become

  • I'd rather have a 10x faster connection. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:10PM (#43790231)
    Come on, USA! Catch up to the rest of the world.

    • You could be a lot worse. In my country (Venezuela) the average broadband download speed is 1.3MBits.

  • 5% (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

    CPUs are magnitudes faster today than they were 10 years ago. Why is it that pages still take seconds to load? Go back 10 years and they still took the same amount of time. Why?

    • Re:5% (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anpheus ( 908711 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:17PM (#43790287)

      Latency. The world isn't getting any smaller.

    • The same reason that Angband ran faster than Far Cry 3; modern webpages are doing more than the text-and-occasional-link of 10 years ago.

    • CPUs are magnitudes faster today than they were 10 years ago. Why is it that pages still take seconds to load? Go back 10 years and they still took the same amount of time. Why?

      I'd assume that web devs(and their bean-counter overlords) are calibrating to user demands, not to the absolute objective of cutting down load times.

      More bandwidth? Hey, we can replace all those 256-color .gifs and solid backgrounds with non-crunchy jpegs! More still? How about some Flash videos? Ooh, faster CPU? If we just load 20kb worth of javascript we can do all kinds of things without the old forms/refresh dance by doing xmlhttprequests and twiddling the DOM...

      If you were content with the web page of

      • Re:5% (Score:5, Funny)

        by noh8rz10 ( 2716597 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @02:10AM (#43791049)

        given that much of what we have today is a nearly proper superset of ten years ago, there wouldn't be much stopping you from doing 10-year-old page styles on modern browsers

        [blink]i disagree![/blink]

    • Re:5% (Score:5, Informative)

      by immaterial ( 1520413 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:25PM (#43790341)
      Same reason applications that used to fit on a floppy and launched in 5 seconds on a 33 mhz computer now require multiple DVDs and still take 5 seconds to launch: more features (whether necessary or not) and better graphics and other resources. Pages in 2003 probably used more highly-compressed graphics and didn't rely half as much on externally-loaded fonts and all sorts of Javascript garbage (including 3rd-party-loaded material such as Facebook "Like" buttons that allow Facebook to track your every move around the web).

    • Re:5% (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Andrio ( 2580551 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:26PM (#43790345)
      Pages are magnitudes more complex now. The average page will be 1 to 3 MB in size with thousands of lines of js. If you disable js websites become incredibly fast.
      • Web pages without scripting are really fast when they don't show you anything at all.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GNious ( 953874 )

          I run Firefox/Aurora with NoScript - even basic pages showing a single picture (IMGUR and its friends) doesn't work.
          Somehow, being given a unique URL and showing the related picture requires client-side script in order to load said picture.

          Meanwhile, to get a faster internet, add Facebook and select Google domains to your internet filter (in router, AdBlock or whichever you prefer), and surfing suddenly gets more than 5% faster for most of the internets.

          • Somehow, being given a unique URL and showing the related picture requires client-side script in order to load said picture.

            More likely to try and stop you copying the image without permission. After all, it's not like there's a local cache or tools such as Fiddler.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Absolutely, thanks to all the spyware scripts like:

        http://google-analytics.com/trackme.js
        http://scorecardresearch.com/wetrackyou.js
        http://iamgoogleandiwantyourinfo.com/youreanidiot.js
        http://pleasesayfuckyoutoyourprivacy-google.com/youvebeenraped.js

        All of which are automatically included in each page you view with Chrome.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        We need a way of selectively blocking Javascript on web sites. Adblock doesn't seem to be fine grained enough and only focuses on ads. It should be possible to block pointless eye candy crap that makes the page take a long time to load.

    • Why? Because you forgot to install Adblock and Ghostery.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stms ( 1132653 )

      Because most places have the same internet they had 10 years ago.

    • Re:5% (Score:5, Interesting)

      by HCase ( 533294 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:10AM (#43790573)

      Try loading a page that hasn't changed for years.
      I will offer as my suggestion, the Space Jam movie homepage:
      http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm [warnerbros.com]

    • CPUs are magnitudes faster today than they were 10 years ago. Why is it that pages still take seconds to load? Go back 10 years and they still took the same amount of time. Why?

      The two major updates so far this week: Google Chrome, which now renders faster, and flickr, which has significantly more complex and larger graphics. As things get able to and display process more, more is asked of them. We aren't targeting 580px wide simple HTML, no CSS and 15 color gifs. Nor are we targeting a single platform and the simple display of information. Even if you're just displaying stuff, if you're doing it right, you're divorcing content from presentation and sending a handful of files

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by csumpi ( 2258986 )
      Ads. User tracking. Just look at the simplest page, it will probably have thousands of lines of javascript code, ping facebook and 15 other anti social networks and also load huge images and html5 video at the same time.

    • 10 years ago did every frigging page talk to a dozen different sites about your browsing history before loading? How about having lots of video? There is still more developers would love to cram in but there is about 0.5/2s window where you can load before people get bored and leave we just load more crap and do more client side processing now to use up the bandwidth and CPU. Oh yeah and latency as others mention: you still got to push the electrons around.

      • There is still more developers would love to cram in but there is about 0.5/2s window where you can load before people get bored and leave we just load more crap and do more client side processing now to use up the bandwidth and CPU.

        Contrary to the popular belief on slashdot us professional web developers do not sit around thinking of ways to use new browser features to make sites as slow as shit.

        Instead clients come to us as some graphic designer has mocked up this amazing new site for them with tons of flash animations they created, psd files that represent all aspects of the site with each layer representing a different page and some notes on which bits of the site need to be easily editable by the client, which bits obtain dynamic

        • I think once you've become a webdeveloper you've already shot yourself in the head ;) Server side is the place to be :)

          • I think once you've become a webdeveloper you've already shot yourself in the head ;) Server side is the place to be :)

            Not really sure what you mean as i write mostly server side code even as a web developer.

            If you mean being a server admin then I do that too but it doesn't pay as much as I would like.

  • So... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:17PM (#43790285) Journal

    Is "'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,'" a codeword for 'not loading huge fucking flash objects from shitty overloaded ad servers'? Because that really helps with load times...

    • In that case, it wouldn't provide much of a benefit over what I already use: an extension that enforces a click-to-play policy on plug-ins. Such extensions go by names such as Flashblock.

      • Re:Flashblock (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:00AM (#43790525)

        Extension? Chrome and Firefox both have that capability native these days.

        Firefox: Go to about:config and search for click_to. Turn it to true. (It's really neat and even tells you what type of content you'll load before you click.)
        Chrome: Go to chrome://settings/content and select Click to play for plugins.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by csumpi ( 2258986 )
      That's not chrome's fault. User error, as always, for browsing the web without adblock, flashblock and plugins on autoload.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        That's not chrome's fault. User error, as always, for browsing the web without adblock, flashblock and plugins on autoload.

        ..why do you think google got into browser game if not for shipping a browser that doesn't block their ads and tracking _by_default_.

        • Umm ALL browsers allow ads and tracking cookies by default.

          Well, IE10 asks nicely for servers to not track you, but we have yet to see how well that will work in the long run.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by csumpi ( 2258986 )
          I know it's the thing to do to call google evil and whatnot. Maybe they even do some evil.

          But what if they got into the browser support partly because they thought all the other browsers out there sucked?

          And what makes you think that Apple, MS, and Mozilla not "track" you? They all do. Even slashdot does. Don't like it, don't use it.

    • Also, I think Google Chrome is first browser to implement click to play flashblock in browser, and that is a good thing.

      Settings -> Content Settings -> Plug-Ins and select "Click to play". You can also make exception like PDF reader to allow always.

  • I Tried It, But It Was Still Ridiculously Slow (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:36PM (#43790383)

    The hideously poor performance that I observed had nothing whatsoever to do with Chrome or the browser, the problem was that in order to paint a simple page, my browser was also sent to the following hosts: a.fsdn.com, b.scorecardresearch.com, ad.doubleclick.net (47 times), fls.doubleclick.net, ajax.googleapis.com, www.google-analytics.net, libs.coremetrics.com, edge.quantserv.com, js.bizographics.com, ad.yieldmanager.com, r.twimg.com, and several connections to facebook and twitter, which are really puzzling since I have no facebook or twitter account. After about 3 minutes, something in the world of TCP/IP finally closed a couple of the doubleclick connections and the browser painted the page!

    • Re:I Tried It, But It Was Still Ridiculously Slow (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:11AM (#43790583)

      This is a browser problem because the browser should not wait for all of those sites to be contacted before painting the page

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pspahn ( 1175617 )

        Alternatively a problem with the scripts, caused either by the developer loading them in the head instead of after body close, or by the authors of the scripts for writing them so that they only work when placed in the head.

        Scripts go after body close. If you don't like that, enjoy your high bounce rates.

      • Chrome has optimizations for that, so it's likely whoever built the site either used some weird TheDailyWTF worthy method of rendering their page with JavaScript, or otherwise did not properly test their page with Chrome to ensure this Chrome feature could properly handle their page.
    • Grab the ScriptSafe extension. It's the Chrome equivalent to Firefox's NoScript. Every JS script starts out blocked and you can whitelist domains as you go, avoiding those that have the suspicious names that don't actually add content to the page.

  • RAM usage is big issue, not CPU (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @12:07AM (#43790563)

    Its memory usage that is such a great problem for me, not really the issue of CPU time. If chrome is constantly cuasing disk caching because of the enormous memory usage, that is going to cause massive speed degredation, which is far greater than any 5% decrease in CPU time by an algorithm. I wish Chrome had a feature for not storing uncompressed copies of image if they are off screen and would fix the massive memory holes. Really no reason a browser should use more than 5-10 MB of RAM per open tab.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by csumpi ( 2258986 )
      Buy more ram. It's cheap. You'll be much happier, and not just with chrome.

      On the other hand, what memory holes? I run chrome for weeks, no issues whatsoever.

      • Re:RAM usage is big issue, not CPU (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Lincolnshire Poacher ( 1205798 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @02:10AM (#43791047)

        Buy more ram. It's cheap. You'll be much happier, and not just with chrome.

        Buying more RAM only makes sense if there is somewhere to put it.

        Of three laptops we have, one is limited to 8 GB and the two ultraportables to 2 GB.

        • And why is that? Because people see laptops as disposables. There is little pressure for an OEM to spec a motherboard with a few extra SO-DIMM sockets, when people aren't planning to upgrade their laptops most of the time, or are going to buy a new one when they do (which will come with the more RAM).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          I run Chrone on a 4GB laptop, typically have 30+ tabs open with peeks over maybe 80+ and don't see any memory issues. Are you opening 20 copies of Farmville or something?

          I think people need to recognize that some web sites chew RAM. The browser can do nothing about it, they just have that much content that needs to be rendered.

          If you can't add more RAM try and SSD. At least then swapping will be near instant (500MB/sec reads).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      ram isn't much of an issue on a desktop.

      I got "just" 8 gigs and pretty much never go over 75% usage for extended periods of time.. even eclipse just takes 766mbytes!

      • Good for you. There are some people out there for whom 2 GB of email storage space is enough, or a 32 GB SSD is big enough. Or 32-bit processors are good enough.

        Technology, progress in life, is driven by people for whom the status quo was not good enough. We have 64-bit processors because some people decided that 32-bit processors simply wouldn't do. This is the same reason we use light bulbs, instead of candles, to illuminate our homes, and why you don't spend most of your life being chased by something bi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 )

          I was pointing out that I would use more ram if it brought things to work otherwise faster. even eclipse.
          I could do with 100mbytes of email storage. my laptop isn't maxed out on ram, if there was an advantage of getting another 8 gigs I would.

    • From reading the MemShrink blog, firefox will now discard uncompressed images you can't see. Not sure when that will hit a release version though.

  • Build-in flash module crash so frequently it isn't funny.

  • My hat has just sploded off my head! 5%

    Let's start a chant .. Google Google Google Google Google Google

    Yaaayy GOOGLE!
  • Yes, it does appear to be snappier. But hey, what would I know? (please don't answer that)
  • I'm sure google's Internet tracking software still eats up a pile of memory and in interface still eats balls so I'm still going to treat chrome like Eric Schmidt treats his wife.

  • Once again, they didn't address the real 2 problems of Chrome:

    - On demand loading of pages (at least) like Firefox does. Many of us have lots of pages open in the browser. Firefox only loads those that we visit upon starting, from what I read Opera is working on that... Chrome chokes and slows to a crawl and ramps up the memory usage of the system.

    - An usable tab manager? Please? Is that so complicated to understand? How the hell are we supposed to use a browser that keeps shrinking the tab handlers until

  • My major issues with Chrome is, it is a resource hog. When google drive wants to sync, or when google talk plug in misbehaves it drags the whole computer, not just the browser down. When some stupid site writes a ridiculous javascript all hogging cpu, Chrome isolates it to a chrome process and allows me to bottle it. But who will bell the cat, when Chrome itself hogs the mouse pointer or locks the event queue stopping refresh, mouse clicks and focus changes?

  • Last time I looked, you could enable playback of opus [opus-codec.org] audio by starting chrom(e|ium) with a special command-line switch, but they were refusing to enable it by default until there was opus-in-webm support (a format that as far as I know still doesn't even exist).

    Meanwhile, Firefox has played .opus for about a year now...

  • Glad to see some serious ripping of Chrome here.
    It sucks and not just a little.

    Like Microsoft, Google is trying to be all things to all people and this just makes for shit software.
    Why the fuck do they need to use so much memory?

    Try http://www.crazybrowser.com/ [crazybrowser.com]
    as an example of the size a browser should be
    does not work for some pages so its the lesser of an evil for now anyway.

    but seriously, Google is doing so much shit in the background that you need to give up mo

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