Google Chrome Makes OnTime Scream
With the release of Google’s Chrome browser, one question comes to mind:
How is this kind of performance possible?
With browsers now being a 15-year old technology, how is it that a newcomer to the game can radically change the performance of a browser by nearly doubling the normal performance? Google’s achievement with Chrome is absolutely remarkable. It would be similar to a relatively new car company making a sports car that all of a sudden performed at 400 MPH rather than the typical 200 MPH obtained by Ferrari and Lamborghini.
For applications such as Axosoft’s OnTime, Google’s Chrome is heaven-sent. I am absolutely thrilled with the performance of OnTime under the Chrome browser. In generally, nearly ALL operations are twice as fast. Everything from applying a filter to changing a project to adding or editing an item is very noticeably faster with Chrome. This translates to an exceptional user experience. While Chrome is still a V1.0 Beta browser, it has already made it to our list of “must-work-with” browsers for OnTime’s testing.
The above chart provides a short sampling of the amount of time (in seconds) various operations take in OnTime with Internet Explorer 7, FireFox and Chrome (smaller numbers means faster load-time).
My prediction (and a bet with a colleague) is that Google’s Chrome will easily enjoy > 25% market share by the end of 2009. I think that number is actually very conservative.
[...] Here’s an interesting article from Hamid Shojaee, founder of Axosoft. At work we use their OnTime software extensively to track Bugs/Defects/Feature Requests/Incidents – and even as a simple project management tool. [...]
Performance boost with Google Chrome? « Iain’s Blog
September 22, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I love Chrome: I’ve been using it since the day it came out. I have had some problems, mostly display issues, using it with our OnTime 2008 implementation, v. 8.1.1.7806.
Does 8.1.3 handle Chrome better? I didn’t see any specific mention of Chrome in the release list.
Tom.
Tom
September 22, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Try a nightly build of Safari and you’ll see even better performance I’d wager. Apple’s been working on a new version of their JavascriptCore called SquirrelFish and now SquirrelFish Extreme.
Bill Brown
September 22, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I’ve also been using Chrome since day one and I’ve only had good things to say about it. I’m looking forward to OnTime being supported on it.
Tom
September 23, 2008 at 5:43 am
Firefox 3 also has a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that is supposed to outperform Google’s V8. They were even jokingly thinking of calling it V10 instead of TraceMonkey. :)
Sameer Alibhai
September 23, 2008 at 6:03 am
I doubt the 25%+ figure… Firefox 3.1 (NOT the current Firefox 3) will have an improved Javascript engine called TraceMonkey that will at least be on par with Google Chrome’s V8 engine. It may have further improvements in the future, but that can also be said about V8, of course. I also wonder what Opera is working on.
What they have in common is a new kind of Javascript engine paradigm with actually compiling the code. I’m looking at this as a new kind of browser war. I wonder if Microsoft plans on getting on the train. There’s absolutely zero indication of that so far, unfortunately. IE 8 has slightly improved performance, but nowhere near V8 or Tracemonkey.
Anyway, I think Firefox will retain its market share and Google will climb more slowly, perhaps to 10% max in 2009.
Jonas
September 23, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Jonas, don’t forget that FF enjoys its current market share largely because Google has been promoting FF. Once Google decides to put its marketing machine behind promoting Chrome instead of FF, it’s game over for FF. I think FF will start to bleed users to Chrome very very quickly. Already, only after 3 days of Chrome being out, nearly 4% of Axosoft site visitors were using Chrome. 14 months from now (end of 2009) is a long ways away.
Hamid Shojaee
September 23, 2008 at 2:20 pm
>> nearly 4% of Axosoft site visitors were using Chrome.
Axosoft is the key word. Not your standard target audience. I’m amazed how certain product vendors / IT-based forum participants continally assume they represent your average internet user..
Chrome will be lucky to have 5% within 2 years since browser share has pretty much bugger-all to do with product performance or features.
(Mind you – anything that speeds up OnTime’s woeful web interface components has to be a god-send..)
Andrew
September 23, 2008 at 4:02 pm
This whole article smells of a ploy to cash in on people googling chrome…
Anonymous
September 23, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Well, but chrome is very basic so far, and does not much of what the now famous cartoon made us think it would feature… Easy to be quick when you don’t do much…
Now, may be others do too much…
Xavier
September 24, 2008 at 2:40 am
what chrome seems to lack, and what makes FireFox so awesome, are the extensions that do all kinds of nifty things.
Scott Nelson
September 24, 2008 at 5:15 am
Are you happy with the way Chrome handles popup ? opening a pseudo popup headed at bottom of the window, and you have to click on it to actually get the popup window ?
that’s awful… Especially to use with OnTime (we renamed it TimeOut, by the way).
I’ve just tried the nightly of Firefox 3.1 : It’s as fast as Chrome, with OnTime.
Wonderful !
Xavier
September 24, 2008 at 9:24 am
We’ll see if your predictions are right, but since it doesn’t come in Mac flavor, it won’t be replacing Firefox for me. And despite me setting up a brand new PC running XP at work, Chrome won’t install due to bugs. I wonder how fast they can fix them all?
Dread Pirate Robert
September 25, 2008 at 9:20 am
I’m a sw developer (microsoft platform) and my browser of choice is Safari because IE is painfully slow and I’ve found Firefox to be buggier than safari and IE. I use OnTimeWeb a lot and avoid cancelling out of editing a ticket because in Safari I get the error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” when clicking cancel, and then I have to delete the lock on the ticket that gets left on it. I installed chrome and it’s nice and fast and btw I get the same error in chrome when canceling out of an edit.
az
October 15, 2008 at 3:02 pm
it will be interesting to see if Chrome can get as much market share as Firefox; for now they seem to have leveled off…
coffee
January 4, 2009 at 10:10 am