Review: The Latest Exploration of Chrome

Introduction:

Click to download Chrome 

 On 3rd September, 2008, Google released its latest product Chrome browser meta version; on 11th December, 2008, Google announced that testing state of Chrome browser was over, and released 1.0 official version; on 9th January, 2009, 2.0 testing version was released; on 27th May, 2009, Google released the latest 3.0Dev version at lightning speed. 3.0 version was released in less than a year, from which we can see that the update by Google's browser development team is really fast, and Google attaches unparalleled importance to this browser. According to Google, 3.0 will be more fast, steady, secure and mature compared with previous versions.

1. Download and Install

Users can download it directly from Google's official website, and the installation is very simple. But you should notice that what you download from Google's official website is an install Bootloader. You have to run it before you download the real install program from the Internet and install it.

2. Interface and Main Functions

Compared with previous versions, Chrome changes nothing in the layout and display of the interface, maintaining the previous super simple style.
What's more, some important functions of Chrome, for example, label, bookmarker, startup mode and webpage thumbnail, have been the same as the previous state and have no change.

3. Safety Feature (pop-up blocker)

There are all kinds of disgusting advertisements popped up from the website, for example, pop-up window, web page dialog box, message box, involuntarily started IE window and so on. To avoid it, browser development companies develop many corresponding technology to deal with those advertisements in the way of blocking them.

4. Standard and Compatibility Test

Standard and Compatibility Test can be called one of the most important indexes in assessing the functions of a browser. Now we will use Acid2 and Acid3 to test Chrome practically through professional test website.

Figure: Acide2 Test; Chrome passed it perfectly 

Figure: Acid3 Test; Chrome passed 100 test items out of 100

5. Performance Test

Peacekeeper is a free browser benchmark test tool released by the famous Futuremark Company. It almost supports all popular browsers but is limited to Windows platform.Peacekeeper measures your browser's performance by testing its JavaScript functionality excluding other features and security functionality. Besides, it does not check for W3C conformity, nor does it test external components such as Flash. It won't be influenced by your internet connection speed or latency. The whole test is composed of five parts: Array, DOM, String, Render and Community, and each part consist of sub items of different number. The final score is the geometric mean of the five test scores.
Test Result: Chrome operates really fast using JavaScript, far faster than IE.

Notice: to get a more precise score, you'd better open one test window only during the test and close all the other windows and tab pages.

 
6. Resource Occupation

A good browser should be at least "fast, steady, convenient and safe". However, it's very hard to illustrate quantitatively with precise numbers when it comes to resource occupation. The author here can only give a general test result. For the convenience of illustration, the author will do a contrast test using Chrome and IE, who has the most market share.

Test Result: From the above test we can see that when we open a same page, Chrome put forth two more processes than IE. Under steady state, both of them still occupy a big proportion of the system resource, in which they have almost the same CPU occupation, but Chrome is a little better than IE in memory possession.

Assessment Conclusion:

After the test, the author feels that compared with the previous version Chrome has little change and no innovation from interface to function. If there is any change, it focuses more on the underlying aspects, for example, improving the steadiness of plug-in, especially for the video; perfecting JavaScript engine so it will be faster to open web pages; and adding newly many more small languages support.