“Google Inc.’s new Web browser, called Chrome, does much of what a browser needs to do these days: It presents a sleek appearance, groups pages into easy-to-manage “tabs” and offers several ways for people to control their Internet privacy settings,” Peter Svensson reports for The Associated Press.
“Yet my initial tests reveal that this ‘beta,’ or preliminary release, falls short of Google’s goals,” Svensson reports.
“At work, I often have 40 or 50 tabs open in Firefox, grouped in different windows depending on which topic they pertain to. Frequently, Firefox would slow down all the other applications on my computer, then seize up completely,” Svensson reports.
“At first I thought JavaScript was to blame, and blocked it from running. But that made many sites unusable, and it didn’t help: The browser still froze,” Svensson reports. “It turns out the culprit is not JavaScript but another technology used to make Web pages more interactive: Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash plug-in.”
“Flash is a tremendous resource hog in Firefox, eating up processor time to the point where there is nothing left for other programs. It does this even if you’re not actively doing anything. Merely having a YouTube page open on your screen will suck power from your computer’s central processing unit, or CPU. This is outrageous behavior for a browser. It’s my CPU and I want it back,” Svensson reports.
“Luckily, there’s a small add-on program for Firefox that lets the user prevent Flash files from running automatically when a page loads, and it turns Firefox into a stable, efficient browser,” Svensson reports. “What does this mean on Chrome? Well, it has the same problem. It lets sites running Flash take over your computer’s resources. It doesn’t hog the CPU quite as bad as with Firefox, but in a way, it’s more serious, because unlike with Firefox, there’s no way to stop Flash from running.”
Full article, in which Svensson inexplicably fails to compare Chrome to the Internet’s #3 and growing dual-platform Web browser, Apple’s Safari (which goes completely unmentioned) here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “The DataDude” for the heads up.]