How has chrome's performance changed over time?

Question

Chrome has always claimed to be about performance. The super fast browser I installed years ago does not seem that super fast anymore.

Is there some list of benchmarks under different versions of chrome, so that I can compare chrome 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 etc. to each other? The "improved speed/performance" in the release notes isn't helping, because they never write "decreased speed/performance" or by how much.

Answer 1

When Chrome first came out, it was the fastest browser, but yes, over the years it has come to be known as a memory hog.

Chrome has both a 32 and 64-bit version, as far as CPU performance is related, which many people don't realize (when it was first released, it was 32-bit ONLY).

Also, the more extensions you are running, the more memory is being consumed by Chrome. By default, Chrome runs a new process for each tab that you have open, and in the past, it has not been very quick to cleanup after itself, which I have heard has been improved in some of the latest or upcoming releases.

There are also many options that you can enable or disable in the chrome://flags URL that will affect the way Chrome behaves. It tends to always run a process in the background, which I believe will quick-launch any Chrome apps you have installed or something. Someone may want to clarify this answer, but these are the basics.

In a nutshell, Chrome is not what it once was.

From my personal experience, 32-bit Chrome seems to be less of a memory hog (and obviously less of a CPU hog) than the heftier 64-bit version, and there is also the open source Chromium Browser, as well as Google's own bleeding-edge Chrome Canary, which doesn't boast stability by any means, but will always have the latest and greatest experimental features of upcoming Chrome releases.

I would also like to see some recent CPU/memory benchmarks of the latest browsers.