You may already know this but I thought I would share this for people who hasn’t noticed.

Usually when you don’t want to lose the current page, you right click on a link and select open in a new tab or window. But then you need to open and close many tabs or windows. This opening and closing costs a lot of system resources espcially in Chrome where each tab is a separate process. But Chrome has a better method. Drag and drop links in to a tab or window.

Let’s say you are on a web page. You see a link you want to open. You can drag the link to the top of the window and drop it on to the + sign or any other tab. The link will open in that tab. You can go back the page and drag and drop another link the same tab or a new + sign.

It is also possible to drag a tab out of the browser to create a new window. Likewise you can drag tabs between two different windows.

You can also rearrange the tabs by dragging them to new locations.

Now you know why I decided to ditch internet explorer. Forefox couldn’t do that even with it’s better standards conformance. Of course, Internet Explorer is the most experienced person in the block, so I need to go back there whenever Chrome craps out. Like when I wanted to download the DVD image of Open Suse 11.1. My clicks were vaninshing in to thin air. No error message, nothing. IE started the download but crapped out at 320 MB. I got through using FlashGet and IE. But that is another story.

Chrome wins again?

I clicked on a link from Google search in Chrome and got the following error. It detected that the site has malware linked to it. I opened the same site on IE and it just showed me the site. No detection, no warning, nothing. Another question I have is, if Google already knows (it has indexed the site) there is malware hosted on the site, why it is appearing in the search list? At least there should be a warning. That way users from other browsers would know that it is not safe to click that link. Do no evil doesn’t mean do no good either. Damn competition. Anyway, it doesn’t look like anything was harmed. 

All day I was clicking links in Chrome to see how it handles malware. Here is a real malware almost blocked by Chrome. It would still go ahead if I gave permission. Avast detected the malware too.

I am a developer. I use many different versions of Visual Studio. I also use different browsers, beta versions etc. When I install a beta version of IE, I am not expecting my production version of Visual Studio to break down. But sadly, that is the case. I can fix it, but that is not the point.

If you haven’t noticed, there is a king of browsers. It is called Google Chrome according to ExtremeTech. I am not a big fan of a browser from a company that sells ads over browser. Microsoft does that too but that is not their bread and butter. One good thing about Chrome is that it is open source. People can look at the code to figure out if Chrome is calling home. 

I am writing this post from the Chrome browser. Why? Don’t know. I want to experience the new browser. After all it comes from a reputed company. 

So what do I think about Chrome? Not much yet other than the installation experience. This is a Vista PC. The installer was definitely innovative. Don’t remember another application with that approach. After I clicked “run”, the installer started and I thought it finsihed downloading a complete installer and would start the download of Chrome. But the complete Chrome installation was complete. It was that fast which means the whole browser is a pretty small download.  Impressive. 

IE 7 looks better in my eyes but Chrome looks classic Google. Simple. No eye candy. I like both approaches. There are days when I like to look at a simple interface and then there are days when I want colorful crazy eye candy. Of course a large performance gain could tilt my preference towards one browser. That could become my default browser. 

I experienced for sure that iGoogle loads way faster in Chrome. MSN home page loaded pretty much same speed. This website loaded correctly and faster on Chrome. All versions of IE loads this page either incorrectly or slower. As you may notice, this web site XHTML 1.1 compliant and CSS compliant. IE doesn’t like that. Of course FireFox, Safari and Opera all can handle this site equally well. It is just the IE. 

Also, remember, unlike Chrome BETA, IE 8 BETA is not stable. If you install it you are sure to run into problems. Chrome or other browser betas you can uninstall and everything would be fine. Not with IE BETA. It never was. There never was a possibility of clean rollback to previous versions. Hopefully Chrome will follow the FireFox tradition of clean uninstall of beta. Browser is too important these days to be screwed up.

This is a test conducted on Windows XP 64 bit edition.

Browsers tested

• Internet Explorer 7
• Opera 9.21
• FireFox 2.0.0.5
• Safari 3.02 for Windows

The test

You need a mouse with scroll wheel to do fast scrolling.

Open each browser and load http://www.jamespaulp.us/.

Open Windows Task Manager. Switch to Processes tab. Make sure Image Name and CPU columns are listed. If not go to the menu View->Select Columns and select CPU Usage column. Click on CPU column header to sort it by CPU Usage. Make sure you are at the top the list by clicking the home button. Keep the task manager window always on top.

Now switch to one browser at a time and start scrolling up and down in quick successions. Just move your finger up and down on the scroll wheel. Watch the CPU usage.

The Result

With Internet Explorer and Opera, you can see the CPU usage climbing above 50% very quickly.

Both FireFox and Safari remains below 10% level all the time.

Now that I have all the popular web browsers on my Windows XP 64 PC, I can do many side by side comparisons. See my previous post for a kind of performance test. Here is another one.

I opened all browsers and opened 5 tabs with same set of pages. Navigated through those sites for a while. Left it open overnight. Browsed a bit more. Set all browsers to the same 5 web pages on each tab. Look at the picture below for memory usage.

Internet Explorer: 136 MB main memory and 300 MB VM Size.

Safari: 78 MB main memory and 83 MB VM Size.

Firefox: 55 MB main memory and 42 MB VM Size.

Opera: 53 MB main memory and 53MB VM Size.

Overall, FireFox is the clear winner here. Based on previous performance test and this test, FireFox is definitely the overall winner. The last time I used FireFox which was more than 2 years ago, my experience with performance was not that good. I stopped using it. Now I see that it improved a lot.

This is a test conducted on Windows XP 64 bit edition.

Browsers tested

• Internet Explorer 7
• Opera 9.21
• FireFox 2.0.0.5
• Safari 3.02 for Windows

The test

You need a mouse with scroll wheel to do fast scrolling.

Open each browser and load http://jamespaulp.wordpress.com/.

Open Windows Task Manager. Switch to Processes tab. Make sure Image Name and CPU columns are listed. If not go to the menu View->Select Columns and select CPU Usage column. Click on CPU column header to sort it by CPU Usage. Make sure you are at the top the list by clicking the home button. Keep the task manager window always on top.

Now switch to one browser at a time and start scrolling up and down in quick successions. Just move your finger up and down on the scroll wheel. Watch the CPU usage.

The Result

With Internet Explorer and Opera, you can see the CPU usage climbing above 50% pretty quickly.

Both FireFox and Safari remains below 10% level all the time.

I use IE most of the times because many of the sites I visit support only IE. MSN, the default home page in IE has nothing to offer to me except the hotmail link. I almost never click on any other link than the hotmail link on MSN home page.

I am not always searching the web, so the plain Google is not the best home page either. But it has one advantage. It loads faster than almost anything else

What is your home page?

After having a lot of compatibility issues between Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and Stardock Object Desktop, I installed Windows XP x64 edition. This is so far working OK. I have a bunch of issues with Object Dock though. Definitely not designed with secure computing in mind.

Today I was trying to download the beta from Adobe using IE7 64 bit edition. Since I did not have an adobe id, I needed to create one. On the first page I entered my email id, check the button that says “create one” and clicked the next page button. IE says it cannot display the page. I tried several times before I installed the already downloaded copy of Opera. Opera is not perfect. I am having trouble right now with wordwrap in opera.

But it did not have a problem registering at adobe and downloading the beta. I went back to IE7 and I still have the same problem. So, it was not a temporary problem with adobe site.

Remember, this is a problem with IE7 64 bit edition. Have not tried with IE7 32 bit edition.