New Chrome 3 beta with 30% improvement | Hacker News Reader

New Chrome 3 beta with 30% improvement

chrome.blogspot.com

6 pointsnreece14 comments

The headline is missing 22%!

(For those curious but not curious enough to read the article, it's a 30% improvement in the V8 and Sunspider javascript benchmark scores.)

Also: windows only, no OS X or Linux binary for this beta. Sigh. I want to think they're serious about being cross platform, but stuff like this tells me that "everyone" in the developer group is on windows and the other platforms are still just sometimes-updated ports.

Not everyone, just the vast majority of chrome developers are on Window and develop in Visual Studio. There are a few people working hard on the Linux and Windows ports, but Windows is the important port.

"Not everyone, just the vast majority of chrome developers are on Window and develop in Visual Studio. "

Wow. I'm guessing this is because Google really wants this on Win PCs, not because the developers are such VS fans.

Right, that's why I put "everyone" in quotes. Obviously there are people on the team tasked with maintaining the secondary platforms, and they're no doubt working hard.

But the point was more architectural: clearly Chrome is a windows program. With a little porting work, you can make it run elsewhere. So that's the development model they've picked. Do the work on windows, then hand it off. There's no simultaneous work going on, and features travel in only one direction. If a windows developer commits something that breaks Linux or OS X, it's "someone else's" problem to fix during porting.

Contrast this to Firefox, for example, where (the occasional glitch notwithstanding) the assumption is that every build works on every platform. People on Linux care about regressions on windows, etc... The model is that the software is portable first, and not "a port".

A nice example of this is the recent Face as the close button bug report.

The improvement really is quite noticeable. Just check out:

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/balldroppings/

Run it on the current stable Chrome, then try the new beta.

I suppose, given that Google Chrome OS is being built on the Linux kernel, the Linux port must enjoy quite a high priority as well.

Yeah, the headline is really stupid. 30% improvement… of… something.

30% improvement in branding! :) On Linux it now defaults to not have your window manager paint the boarder and handles it all by itself (what could go wrong?) so that Chrome looks the same everywhere even if it really doesn't fit into the rest of the Linux desktops.

I'm just waiting for a more stable OS X version. Preferably with flash support.. :)

Side note: I'm using Safari 4 and anytime I am viewing a gif my browser beachballs and crashes. Does this happen for anyone else?

"Preferably with flash support.. "

Same for Ubuntu. I find it funny that I use a Google browser to view a Google site (YouTube) but can't see the videos.

Run it with --enable-plugins and it will pick up the plugins you have installed for Firefox. I assume the same works on the Mac build.

Very cool. Thanks, I'll try that.

safari crashes are sometime related to corrupt preferences files in ~Library (do a search for 'safari') and start deleting them. good luck

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