Ajax-heavy Applications on Google Chrome
September 3, 2008 – 6:02 am by coachwei | Category WebDev, google |“This is the best browser so far” is that I can say after being a Chrome user for one day.
First of all, I was glad to find out that I haven’t found Chrome breaking any web application yet, especially Ajax applications. I was a little concerned about this, given that the Chrome cartoons say “Javascript runs in its own thread”, which is different from the threading model today.
For example, Razor Profiler is a fairly Javascript-heavy web application that I wrote to perform JavaScript profiling and Ajax performance analysis. It includes tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript code on the client side, and employs a lot of “tricks” to make a web application deliver similar performance characteristics to native applications. -Razor Profiler works well on Chrome.
I also tried a few applications on Dojo, ExtJS and jQuery. All worked well without a glitch.
After the initial concern eliminated, now I was able to see the noticeable performance improvement comparing to any other browsers. I am a constant user and tester of Safari, FireFox and IE. Chrome beats any of them hands down.
a. It is clearly faster and smoother to open browser window, close browser window, navigate to new sites, etc on Chrome than any other browser. Chrome delivers a very smooth browsing experience.
b. For Ajax applications, yes, Ajax code runs much faster on Chrome. For example, Razor Profiler needs to serialize collected profile data on the client side. There are a lot of data to serialize, typically creating a few hundred kilo-bytes of JSON stream to the server. This serialization process can easily take 5 to 10 seconds on any other browser. On Chrome, the amount of time is probably half of that.
So overall, Chrome is impressive! It certainly raised the bar.
2 Responses to “Ajax-heavy Applications on Google Chrome”
Google Chrome is very fast, but with Firefox there are a lot of extensions so… i keep my Firefox.
By Saint Germain on Sep 4, 2008
My web app is very Ajax heavy and porting to Chrome was easy. Fundamentally, the work I needed to do to support Safari was all I needed to do to support Chrome - minor detail changes and finding a solution to not having access to XSLT from client-side JavaScript. All in all I spent 4 days working on support for both Safari and Chrome.
Overall, while I think that the hype surrounding Chrome has thus far been absurd, it is a very nice browser. Very clean, smooth, and fast. I hope it stays that way. I don’t add extensions to any browser as I find they only overload the browser and make it cumbersome. I hope Google is able to resist the urge to compete on that.
By GCV on Sep 19, 2008