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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Wow, I wouldn't have guessed that.

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.

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.

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