Chrome the Lightweight Browser
This is not the first time I came across Chrome, in fact I must be the first among my friends to use it early last year.
It was a nice acquaintance, the interface was clean, fast yes it was fast, I was excited to throw away my Firefox but one thing in Chrome was missing the equivalent of Firebug, a debugging add on which will make web application development more exciting every programmer should use.
Thus, I ended still using my reliable Firefox browser.
A Merry Christmas
Just an aside we were working on a project prototype last year for a big web database application, well we got lucky, after series of presentation and proof of concept application we finally got the approval, that makes our Christmas a little merrier.
Mission Critical Project
We are excited about this project but we have also mixed emotions. To give you a background this is something we haven’t done before, I mean we had big projects similar to this, but this one we are using new technology in the bleeding edge including Java, PHP, Apache, Postgre, Dojo (practically no limitation here) on one occasion we have to wait for the “nightly source update” of Dojo to check if it would fixed a bug we suspected.
Anyway, during our initial development one of the primary issue we take into consideration is stability, security and speed.
Performance Issues
Web application performance is affected by the server, client PC, memory, internet bandwidth and program execution speed.
Anyway during our program testing we encountered “loading” delay of the program, specifically loading of Java Scripts. This would not be acceptable.
Seventy percent (70%) 0f load time was involved in loading the Java Scripts. We browse the web of the possible solutions. Some talk about memory, hardware, internet bandwidth, compression, Java Script builds etc. Then I came across a new http protocol they call it SPDY (read speedy) as a replacement or enhancement to TCP/IP? The problem is it still in the early stage and still not implemented in current browsers, except (as mentioned in one forum) Chrome and Safari.
Chrome Revisited
Thus I immediately downloaded the latest version of Chrome and tried our web application on it. Wow! The result is amazingly fast.
Using Chrome initial application load time is approx 3 to 5 secs compared to Firefox 3.6 which would take almost 30secs. Reloading a page is a snap 1 to 2 secs compared to Firefox at 10-15 seconds. I tried Safari but I gave up it was too slow I don’t really know the reason was, perhaps it was not aware or optimized for Java Scripts.
A new development tool is also available similar to Firebug.
The Verdict
I am very happy of the test results, as I would not (for now) delved on JavaScript optimization issues. Thanks to the people behind Chrome.
Anyway, by virtue of the power I have over my Compaq I hereby set my default browser to Chrome.