Opera parodies Google's Chrome speed tests mercilessly (video) | Hacker News Reader

Opera parodies Google's Chrome speed tests mercilessly (video)

engadget.com

110 pointsGhost_Noname31 comments

'mercilessly'

That's modern media for ya - any opportunity for hyperbole, confrontation, and/or controversy. Even when it's not. It wasn't merciless, it was just funny.

Yes, because old media weren't keen on hyperbole...

Say, the Hearst papers...

The Chrome "speed tests" really were ridiculous. Oh, so when connected to the world's most gigantic internet connection on a computer that isn't doing anything else, your browser can render pages very quickly? Well, gosh. Are you going to show any other browsers in this video for comparison? No? Oh well then. I will remember to definitely browse the web using your browser instead of the giant ear full of paint/tesla coil combination I was using before, since that's the only thing you've shown it to be faster than.

Dude, it's marketing. It's meant to paint a strong picture and create an association between Chrome and speed, which I think it accomplishes well -- since Chrome <i>is</i> in fact faster it seems like an honest ad. Do you disagree? Or is your beef just that the ad is unscientific? An ad featuring a double-blind study could probably be made to be interesting, kind of like the blind Coke vs. Pepsi taste-tests... but that's not what they made.

>since Chrome is in fact faster it seems like an honest ad.

Opera has a faster JS engine than Chrome.

Wow, I was about to call BS on this comment, then I went to grab a recent Opera build... it's not really that much faster, but it does edge out Chrome on my machine with SunSpider.

Kudos for taking the time to check. :)

Kudos from me as well. Not enough people take the time to test their assumptions. I guess it says something about the relative quality of comments, when you are surprised when someone takes the time to actually do some minimal research.

Wow, I wouldn't have guessed that.

Rendering != JS.

This is true. But as more and increasingly complex webapps are written in JS, JS performance becomes more and more important.

They were pretty obviously meant to be ridiculous - that was the joke.

I don't think they were meant to be funny. Light-hearted, certainly, but they weren't supposed to be a joke. They were supposed to be an eye-catching marketing exercise that associated Chrome in the public mind with "speed". And they're great at creating that association, but the actual tests themselves were completely irrelevant to demonstrating that speed. Which, as a nerd, irritates me.

Yeah, they should have just shown the charts for the benchmarks right? that'll get 2M views...

The pages were actually cached locally for the chrome tests. The point of the test (besides being cool) was to show the rendering speed of the browser.

I welcome the Browser Promo Video Wars.

When an exception is thrown in Opera, crashing it, can it potentially be exploited? Or is it only exploitable when you get a windows error?

I'm rooting for Opera as an underdog, but I can't honestly say I'd ever choose to use it over Chrome (or even Firefox).

As an Opear user, I'm curious - why? It's performant (well, maybe not on memory usage, but I have plenty of memory), highly configurable, has a lot of features, and looks pretty.

> It's performant (well, maybe not on memory usage, but I have plenty of memory)

I was a die-hard Opera user for years, back when it had the smallest memory footprint and the smallest download size--less than 2MB at one time.

Opera made fast, multi-tab browsing possible on older machines. I guess they have gotten away from that in recent years!

I think for me it was that when I first tried it it was adware and didn't support javascript. Also, the linux version I tried hadn't received much UI polish.

I can't speak for the Linux version, but the rest of what you're saying is a bit like not wanting to use Windows 7 because you didn't like Windows 98. Opera has come a long way...

That is true. I downloaded it the other day but in my 30 seconds of usage didn't see any reason to switch to it from Chrome. Do you have any thoughts on reasons to switch?

I like that I can completely rebuild the UI however I want. I also find tab thumbnails to be a nice productivity boost, totally worth the vertical space they take up (to enable them, just drag the bottom of the tab bar down). The native mouse gesture implementation seems snappier than the Firefox plugin I tried (haven't tried in Chrome).

tl;dr: Features and configurability.

That said, Chrome has its own strengths; it's a good browser, and it's the one I use on the rare occasion that something doesn't play nice with Opera.

I feel the same but without the rooting part -- there are enough dogs in the race.

I think I'm missing a previous video to get it, right? Anyone care to share it? Thanks.

The second video on that page is the original.

Thanks... I still have issues watching video on my mobile, and it shows =S.

I wanted to laugh at it.

It's a shame you didn't find it humorous. I laughed loud enough to startle my nearby co-workers. I mean come on... the potatoes just kind of roll into the bucket. I wasn't sure what to expect from the commercial. It could be that because I thought the video was going to be serious I was caught off-guard. I've seen that potato ad a hundred times on Hulu so it made for a good laugh.

Well I saw it here for the first time, and the link title said "parody", so I didn't expect it to be serious. It was silly but somehow not funny.

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