Chrome: Faster Than Safari?

By  |  Friday, December 18, 2009 at 9:10 am

Now that the first beta of Google’s Chrome browser for OS X is out, Google is telling Mac users about it. At the moment, it’s doing so via a promotional dialog box which I’m seeing near the upper right-hand corner of the Google home page in both Safari and Firefox. One that’s about as splashy and pushy as anything Google ever puts there.

Faster than what? The logical assumption is that Google’s saying it’s faster than the browser you’re using now. I haven’t seen any browser benchmarks from the company–comprehensive or otherwise–but when I ran the SunSpider JavaScript test on all the major OS X browsers, Safari performed best. As I said in that story, it was essentially a wash with Chrome (Firefox 3.5 was considerably slower). The test only tells you so much about browser performance.  And maybe Google, like Microsoft, is saying that “fast” is about more than traditional speed tests.

But I remain curious: Is Google specifically saying that Chrome for OS X is a faster browser than Safari? (Apple still touts Safari as “the world’s fastest browser,” although as far as I know, it hasn’t compared Safari to the Chrome beta.)

 
10 Comments


Read more: , ,

9 Comments For This Post

  1. Chris Heath Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 9:19 am

    I’ve seen that upper right hand homepage promotion of chrome before on windows machines when visiting with IE. That’s been happening for a while now.

  2. rob Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 11:26 am

    @Chris, you might want to try it out.. It’s fast indeed!

  3. Shannon Love Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    I’ve been using Safari for years and Chrome is noticeably faster especially when loading images.

  4. lrd Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 2:15 pm

    If I were Apple, I’d turn the tables on Google buy simply making the iPhone Apps themselves the source of ads for the iPhone.

    For example, many companies have already submitted apps to the the App Store that are nothing more than an adverstisment of their product or service. Well, Apple could go one step further and make it so that you don’t need to be a programmer to slap a complete ad for your company by just using a template builder.

    Using this approach would insure Apple that people going searching on the iPhone App Store and not all over the place by using Google.

    Apple may even be able to make an ad section within the App Store.You make it and people will populate it with all sorts of stuff.

  5. Dab Says:
    December 20th, 2009 at 4:22 pm

    Although Chrome does seem faster in some respects such as downloading images, scrolling around in the page with heavy graphics is definitely slower and noticeably so.

    Makes Safari my choice for now.

  6. grant Says:
    December 23rd, 2009 at 3:13 am

    chrome is not consistently faster than safari on my machine. chrome wins about 30% of the time. however, both beat firefox.

    2007 mac mini core 2 duo snow leppard

    anyone else having the same experience?

  7. aileen Says:
    April 2nd, 2011 at 9:13 am

    im gonna go with google chrome i tried safari but it was too slow for some reason i just dont feel like handling the hassle

  8. Smith Bill Says:
    February 2nd, 2012 at 5:05 am

    Yes !!! Google chrome is best to others browser.

  9. Smith Bill Says:
    February 2nd, 2012 at 5:07 am

    Yes !!! Google chrome is best to others browser.Pls visit 2ezasia wesbite.

1 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. mysocialbrain: 19-12-2009 : protagonist Says:
    December 19th, 2009 at 10:20 am

    […] Chrome: Faster Than Safari? probably not […]