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Virtualised Chrome (Win7) is faster than Safari on my MBP i5... :(

P

parajba

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 19, 2008
515
269
I just installed Parallels 6 and virtualised a brand new Win 7 OS. I then installed some basic sw (e.g. antivirus, firewall, Chrome etc) and am ready to test Win 7 and Chrome.

First comment: browsing in Chrome, even if it's virtualised, is faster (!) and snappier, than Safari 5 on my i5 MBP.

How on earth can that be. Gutted.

Scrolling up and down a page, of course, is smoother on the MBP, in fact scrolling in the virtualised environment is choppy, but everything else (e.g. downloading, accessing pages etc) is definitely faster in the virtualised Chrome.

A bit disappointed really. :(

The MBP is the base i5. Safari is 5.0.2. Chrome is the latest as of today.

Not sure where I'm going with this thread but I thought I'd share my experience with you.
 
well...why don't you try chrome for OSX ? maybe you'll find out that the gap in performance is due to chrome and not windows :)

ciao!
 
cili0 said:
well...why don't you try chrome for OSX ? maybe you'll find out that the gap in performance is due to chrome and not windows :)

ciao!
Click to expand...

Ciao Cili0,

Grazie del consiglio ;-)

I thought so, but I was hoping that Apple would come out with a fast browser to compete with Chrome. Unfortunately scrolling/browsing in Chrome (either platform - Win or MacOS) is not as smooth as in Safari on MacOS.
 
i run chrome 7 beta on my mbp15 in OSX. I must say that it beats safari hands down in most everything. it is snappier, it starts faster, it syncs everything including extensions in the cloud, the extenstion framework is more mature but most of all i cannot browse without the omnibox anymore.

How often i don't try to search in the address bar of safari only to have it tell me it cannot find the page. Aaarrgghh! the way it searches (with google instant), autocompletes, tab-to-search a site, incorporates browsing history and favourtires in the omnibox is all just too awesome to ignore.

not even to mention that from an end user perspective tabs on top is so much more logical with the address bar being part of the tab.

safarai looks fancy and does cover flow but otherwise it is no where in the same league as chrome, even though they both use the webkit engine.

If i couldnt use chrome, opera 10.7 would be my second choice before safari and firefox. It feels faster then chrome, but doesnt have the omnibox.
 
I'm running Chrome 6 right now on OS X and it's spanking Safari 5 on speed. :eek:

I ran a speed test on my MBP through Peacekeeper... (see attached). This was on my laptop: Early '09 15" MBP 2.66Ghz C2D 4GB RAM 512MB VRAM OSX 10.6.4

I ran the same test on my iMac (2.66Ghz C2D, 4GB RAM, OSX 10.6.4, ATI Radeon 128MB) and the Chrome test was well over 7000pts.

Lastly, I ran a Sunspider benchmark earlier yesterday and Chrome 6 beat it by 10s of milliseconds on the iMac, Safari won on the MBP by a hair.
 

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cili0 said:
well...why don't you try chrome for OSX ? maybe you'll find out that the gap in performance is due to chrome and not windows :)

ciao!
Click to expand...

Yep.

Chrome is unbelievably fast, and it gets faster all the time without you knowing because the updates happen in the background.
 
I thought so, but I was hoping that Apple would come out with a fast browser to compete with Chrome. Unfortunately scrolling/browsing in Chrome (either platform - Win or MacOS) is not as smooth as in Safari on MacOS.
Click to expand...

I would've totally agreed with you when I first opened my Mac. Now, after reinstalling, Safari's scrolling is noticeably laggier than Chrome's. So I don't even know what that means or how that could happen. But Chrome performs great now in OS X on my Mac.
 
tested both under 10.6.4. Chrome almost twice as fast.
 

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Here's a copy of the sunspider benchmark, it's the only one I've seen where Safari 5 comes close (in this case, dead even). All other tests show Chrome 6 in the lead.

(Chrome is on the left, Safari is on the Right)
 

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One thing to know about Chrome - if you have it open, it will cause your macbook pro to stay switched to the nvidia graphics. It will reduce your battery life a fair bit. I use gfxstatus to force it to stay on Intel, and don't notice any degradation in Chrome performance that I care about. But, my battery lasts significantly longer.

I'm just more used to chrome, and prefer it. Safari is also too monochromatic (somewhat of a pun there) in its tab colors, etc.
 
Well, I went back to Safari 5... Chrome developed a nasty habit of crashing on launch on both of my Macs.

I turned off extensions and cleared the cache/cookies/etc. but it didn't help. Chrome is a really nice browser but it apparently has some books to work out.
 
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