Comments on: Opera CEO reacts to Google Chrome browser

By: Haggi

Haggi — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:37:05 +0000

I think it’s funny that so few people realise what a memory hog Chrome is. This whole “new” concept of creating a new process for each additional tab may have some advantages, but the only two browsers that currently implement it (IE8 beta & Chrome beta) are wasting so much memory that it’s just not funny anymore. And if it wasn’t for flash and other crappy plugins, which constantly crash even the most robust browser, you wouldn’t even need a concept like that.

Especially now that these so called “Netbooks” are become more and more popular, I wonder how Chrome and IE8 (and even Firefox with a bazillion addons, with which lots of FF users can’t live without) perform on these machines. I guess you can run into problems if your browser is already taking up 500MB RAM and you’ve got flash and javascript driven sites running in 4 different tabs at the same time (youtube, myspace, gmail, whatever) and are running Office in the background.

By: Reabow

Reabow — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:54:00 +0000

I like the tabs in title bar, but nothing new.

By: Roberto

Roberto — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:12:09 +0000

I do not see Chrome as a competitor for Opera, neither by IE because it is not an Enterprise product, then, FF is the target, I wonder what are those folks thinking since they get the most of their money from Google.

By: Steve Barker

Steve Barker — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:26:59 +0000

A well thought out response Mr Tetzchner, I like common sense.

By: peh

peh — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:07:31 +0000

Apple’s focus is definitely speed. They don’t have a whole lot of features to work on, so the spend all their time tweaking Safari’s speed. Apple is focusing heavily on the browser.

By: Chuck Monroe

Chuck Monroe — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:02:50 +0000

What puzzles me a bit is that Opera’s flagship (or only?) product is being beaten in speed by companies like Apple and Google whose focus isn’t browser (although I do realize that webkit is a third-party open-source engine, not their creation).

Opera 6.06 is unusable in today’s web ecosystem, but is still one of the fastest browsers I’ve ever used (I can’t tell if it is faster than Chrome or not). I hope the Opera team can beat this new benchmark. Opera 9.5 is not slow by any stretch, but top speed would be another selling point for O.

NetApplications is tracking Chrome usage: http://tinyurl.com/5ejrsy – I don’t know if that 1% is temporary or not. Anyway, I look forward to Opera’s future work.

By: Farnia

Farnia — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:12:53 +0000

It seems to be a fast browser but It has nothing new.

By: h143570

h143570 — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:33:06 +0000

Interesting thing is that they used webkit instead of gecko. But webkit is the other most standart compilant rendering engine on the market, beside Opera’s so it shouldn’t be that a big suprise. Finaly a player whose has enough marketing capability to realy hurt IE market share. If others are pursuaded to switch, they might try out other alternatives as well. I hope we don’t get a second ms in our neck too soon.

I welcome gears integration, it would be great to know some timeline as well. Silverlight is working most of the time with an user javascript, but a native and more stable support would be better.

By: media boy

media boy — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:56:00 +0000

despite the rumors, i’m finding Chrome’s speed to be inconsistent; it seems to alternate between going lightning fast and then hanging for no apparent reason…