Mac: Chrome versus Firefox

2718.us — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:04:26 +0000

Seeing the announcement of Chrome 3 on Ars Technica reminded me of my desire for Chrome on the Mac. I’m not unhappy with Firefox, especially with the processor-specific-optimization builds, but it’s still slow and it just gets slower the longer I keep it open, constantly churning the CPU doing something and occasionally pausing for no apparent reason. (I dislike the interface and the feel of Safari, though less so with 4 than earlier versions.) So, I Googled Mac Chrome and found that they’ve got a developer preview up for Mac and I just had to download and install it. Both on my Macbook Air and on my Mac Pro, the SunSpider benchmark performance of “Shiretoko” intel-optimized Firefox 3.5.2 was 3-4x slower than the Chrome developer preview 4.0.207.0 (in which I am writing this post). This is huge. When I switched to “Shiretoko” from stock Firefox, I ran the SunSpider benchmarks and found a slight and significant improvement, but not even close to 2x, let alone 3-4x. I can’t wait for a final Chrome (or at least a Chrome that supports SOCKS proxy settings so I can securely browse over WiFi).

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Mac: Chrome versus Firefox