03 September 2008

Google Chrome


Last night I was perusing Cougarboard.com, the fount of all knowledge, and came across a poster talking about Google Chrome. I'm a sucker for anything Google does, and so once I found out it was a new browser, I downloaded it and gave it a shot.

In short, it's fast. My friend Jimmy was quick to point out that this is because it's based on Webkit, or the same application framework used for Macintosh's OS X and Safari web browser. Jimmy is kind of an Apple fanboy.

Anyway, my page load times are at least twice as fast as they were in Firefox 2 and 3, and it seems to take less system memory to run. It's like I doubled my internet speed for free.

Can't argue with that.

Download it here if you'd like.

In other computer news, my five-year old laptop has been giving me bluescreens with messages about "unmountable boot volumes" lately, so I've been thinking about a backup solution. I wasn't really interested in a giant external hard drive, so I decided to give Carbonite a shot.

Carbonite is a program that uploads the files on your home computer to an off-site server. It's nice because the process is automatic, and therefore very low-maintenance. Plus it's only $50 a year, less than $5 a month.

Since upload speeds are ridiculously slow compared to download speeds with residential internet, the initial backup can take several days. Once that's complete, however, daily backups only take a couple minutes.

I'm running a 15-day trial now, and I'll post an update on how it's going in a week or so.

4 comments:

Josh said...

Hey Brandon! How did you get it to say, Next game?

LaPaube said...

Yeah, I'm sure there are lots of factors that go into loading speed, but my experience with Chrome has been less positive. I tried it at work, where we have a blazing fast connection, and it was noticeably slower than Firefox 2. It was faster than IE7, but that's like being faster than Greg Ostertag.

From what I understood of the Google launch vid (I had some free time today), the underlying programming of Chrome should be very beneficial as websites evolve even if it isn't too obvious now. Seems like a good idea to build a new platform from the ground up, which Google claims hadn't been done since the days of Netscape.

Jimmy said...

Firefox 3 is slow on your notebook because it's old and has a very junked XP install on it. Firefox 2 is slow because of that AND it caches every linked page it sees. You need to reinstall Windows on your notebook.

Brandon said...

Like Jimmy said, my laptop is old and does not have many free resources on any given moment. While the memory requirements between Firefox 3 and Chrome do not make a difference on a higher-end machine, on my laptop they do.

Reinstall of Windows coming up one of these days.