Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast?
blog.chromium.org
blog.chromium.org
Assuming that other browser makers try to keep up with chromium's speed, then that's what is funding the chromium development.
I know full well that the .1 second that Chrome may be faster is negligible, and largely irrelevant. It's that IE took forever and Firefox wasn't significantly better, Chrome however was a dream, any load or delay from that point on was never associated with the original painstaking load.
I was with you for a long long time. But I think Chrome avoiding addons for so long was a brilliant move. I haven't really missed them since moving exclusively to chrome (which was a shock to say the least!) and I think a big "performance boost" exists there too.
I spend most of my time online, and only use my browser for viewing web pages, and sometimes testing during development. I rarely ever bookmark anything, and if I do, it's a link I "really" go to a lot and just put it in the bookmark toolbar. Basically, I use tabs and hot-keys.
In a nutshell, start up speed and browsing speed is most important to me. Take it with a grain of salt though, as I don't mind viewing documents online in lynx/w3m/etc.
Hell, forget about admittedly niche things like vertical tabs. Chrome gets so many basic things wrong, from scrolling to text selection, that it's just a poor joke of a browser.
I also usually have lots of tabs with API documentation open, so it's important to maintain state such as the position of the scrollbar. Keeping tabs open is a much easier way to maintain this state than creating bookmarks for every function in the API.
As an aside I'm surprised you can survive with FireFox and 200 tabs. Once I get above about 50 the memory usage and lag just gets too much for it to be usable. Any tips?
As a side note, untill chrome is ported to linux (with a usable state) and untill adblock is ported to chrome, this browser does not exist for me :)
... and lazy competition. IE is satisfied with incremental performance improvements every 5 years, firefox is arguably still burdened with the luggage of AOL's Netscape rewrite from ages ago (though they've been making tremendous progress with each release), and safari on windows is an after thought.
By shifting people's expectations of speed, security, stability and capability in a browser upwards they also move the lower bound that Microsoft can lag behind (in order to prevent the internet undermining their monopolies) without publicly embarrassing themselves.
It's like a technical version of the Overton Window:
They also have a very good incentive to improve JavaScript performance, since Mobile Safari also runs on WebKit/Nitro.
If it's slow on OS X, perhaps you view a lot of sites with Flash content. The OS X Flash Player is pretty awful (I use ClickToFlash [1] to block it), and a frequent harbinger of the beachball. I also tend to disable the "initial 3D eyecandy", because it does slow things down, and for me at least it's pretty pointless.
In my opinion it's better to invest in a robust performance profiling infrastructure that gives you the ability to find out the parts of code that make the biggest contribution to the performance (or lack thereof) of your product. From there you can allocate dedicated performance improvement time budget to improve performance as much as possible. I suspect that with such a model you'd be more likely to end up with better performance at less cost and on a more dependable schedule.
Obviously this only works with collective code ownership, but you should probably have that anyway, since it makes refactoring so much easier.
Anywho, I wish there were more data for this sort of thing. Performance tuning is still somewhat of a black art, even performance testing is, to a lesser degree. My personal opinion is that a generally reliable, fast, unit-test-like performance regression testing system combined with solid profiling and making performance improvement (not just absence of regression) a priority are probably the best way to go about it. But there's so little data out there it's hard to back up any opinion with anything other than anecdotal evidence.
These organizations redirect failed lookups to their own search pages and sell the traffic on for a price or show their own ads.
The alternative is a clean failure which gets handled by the browser. I believe that most browsers send you to the default search in those cases - which is usually Google.
There's a kickback involved in that case too (searches from Firefox earn Mozilla a small fee for example) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was cheaper.