Poll: Are you currently having problems with Chrome?

[Ketchup]

Been seeing a lot of problem threads with Chrome lately. Wondering if we can get enough responses for a reasonable percentage on this.

 

[Dulanic]

For windows, no. For mobile, yes.

 

[bbhaag]

On Windows no but on Mint 17.1 its being a bitch. Constant crashing and taking forever to load a page are becoming a drag.

 

[Berryracer]

For Windows, scaling sucks, webpages scale fine to my 125% scaling in Windows, but the bookmarks toolbar icons ignore the entire scaling setting so they look tiny.

Other than that, my banking website doesn't display correctly again due to wrong scaling.

Firefox FTW

 

[Charlie98]

FWIW, I'm having problems with crashing in IE all of a sudden, including right here at AT. I believe it's the popup ads, because they are loading and displaying differently now, but elsewhere on sites that have heavy popups, too. I wonder if Chrome is having the same issues...?

 

[Ketchup]

I turned off ABE (Firefox) and the pages are taking longer to load. I haven't had a crash yet though.

 

[Cerb]

On desktops, I use Chromium-based browsers, for my PCs, and have had no problems. I've also had no issues with work-related PCs using Chrome. On Android, it's been slower than previously, crashing when loading new tabs, and often not going to secure sites until killed and restarted. My father has had problems with the tab list not showing up (the counter will show, but nothing else).

 

[ClockHound]

You mean other than the standard draconian google EULA?

Yes, chrome has gotten slower on the winduhs desktop...prefer the non-google webkit builds (Opera) and Pale Moon/Waterfox/Firefox. On android, I use chrome occasionally, mainly, Firefox tho.

 

[TheRyuu]

Yes, chrome has gotten slower on the winduhs desktop...

I'm curious how people measure this because "feeling" slower is not objective or a useful guide. Is this with addons? Is it slower than other browsers on the same system given a similar situation?

I've been using Chrome for a long time now and I can't say it feels any different since it's always been fast enough. If anything it's gotten faster since I've switched over to uBlock instead of ABP (which can be measured objectively). I also wonder how much of this observed "slowdown" in Chrome can be attributed towards other factors that are not related to Chrome (system, router, internet) because I really doubt that the developers sat down and said "How do we make Chrome slower today?"

 

[ninaholic37]

because I really doubt that the developers sat down and said "How do we make Chrome slower today?"

Some possibilities:

1. They could be only trying to make it faster on new computers while leave old ones in the dust
2. They care more about performance on ChromeOS than Windows
3. They mostly (or only) test their latest Windows builds on Windows 8.1.1
4. More tracking / ad data mining bloatware / hidden cookies / NSA :twisted:
5. Performance is usually not part of their focus or main objective and most of their teams are fooling around with other things
6. Gotta add something to keep the version number going up every 6 weeks!
7. Updating over and over leads to more bugs in install and profile over time
8. Page layouts getting needlessly more complicated (especially Google sites)
9. Hardware and browser working together for planned obsoleteness (side effect of Chrome on Chromebooks) :biggrin:
10. The developers sat down and said "How do we make Chrome slower today?"

 

[nemesismk2]

i have no problems with google chrome 41

 

[corkyg]

Chrome was insidious in taking over my system. It took some doing, but I finally got rid of it.

 

[Ketchup]

For windows, no. For mobile, yes.

So did the mobile version ever work correctly? or did an update make it worse?

 

[ninaholic37]

Time it takes to open browsers at the library after a reboot:

Firefox 35: 4 seconds
Chrome 40: 38 seconds

Not sure what's up with that. I looked at the specs of the computer and it's an Atom D2500 @ 1.86GHz, 4GB RAM, running Windows 7 Professional SP1 32-bit. Needless to say I won't be using Chrome on this machine (I never use it anyway).

 

[Morbus]

As USUAL, anybody having problems with a major browser has one of three problems:
- problems with add-ons (i.e. extensions or plugins, like Flash, or even malware plugins)
- problems with the antivirus
- problems with a corrupt browser profile (this is way way rarer than the first two situations)

I appreciate that people DO have problems with their browsers, and will jump around and switch depending on which browser works for them, but let me put it to you this way: the problems you're having with Chrome/Firefox/whatever? They're simply the consequence of something completely unrelated to the browsers themselves. And that completely unrelated thing WILL follow you into your next browser, and some time in the future it WILL bite you in the ass again.

Back when Chrome reached 1.0 and people started switching over from Firefox, claiming their Firefox was slow and crashy and whatnot, I told plenty of people this: "the problems you have with Firefox are a symptom of your browsing habits/security consciousness/other software, and any browser is just as susceptible to those as Firefox, so don't expect Chrome to work well forever if you leave stuff like this unresolved".

Sure enough, a few months down the road, (some) people started switching over from Chrome because it was too unstable or whatever...

Guess what? They have always been perfectly fine and stable and fast, it's just their users that couldn't care less for computer maintenance.

I am a long time Firefox user, I've switched to it from Internet Explorer 6, and over the years I've faced a few serious problems with Firefox. There was a time when Firefox would totally freeze for five minutes, half an hour after I started. There was a time when Firefox would keep deleting my session. There was a time when Firefox would blank out and show solid white pages, ALWAYS. Lately there was a time when Firefox would not let me close (or see) tabs, at random.

What I've learned from dealing with those situations is two things:
- complexity breeds problems, so if you have many extensions or plugins, you've GOT to be ready to deal with the problems that will inevitably arise
- whatever problems appear, they are never easy to find and are never something that's gone wrong with the browser itself.

Once it was my antivirus, more often it has been a faulty add-on. But I'm a geek, I've got no problem spending time troubleshooting my computer. I respect that other people won't think like me on that regard, but, honestly? I have no sympathy for those people.

Yeah, I'm not a sympathetic person.

:EDIT:
Also, for reference, my Firefox has upwards of 50 installed extensions, a couple of which I've written myself for my own needs, it's constantly running dozens of tabs at the very least and eating up 1GB of RAM.

It takes 2 seconds to start up right after I boot up the computer. It's a meaty machine, for sure, but it's nothing out of the ordinary. Any 1200$ laptop will be about as fast as my computer.
I'm running Windows 7 SP1. You can see the specs on my signature.

 

[ninaholic37]

It takes 2 seconds to start up right after I boot up the computer. It's a meaty machine, for sure, but it's nothing out of the ordinary. Any 1200$ laptop will be about as fast as my computer.

Apparently a 3.4GHz i5-4670 has a 15.8x better Geekbench and 19.2x better Passmark score than Atom D2500, among other things, so if Chrome takes 38 seconds to boot on an Atom D2500 then I think the same task taking 2 seconds for your 3.9GHz i5 is not far fetched (not even considering that you have SSD).

This is probably why you have so much faith in browsers and their programmers, you can't "see" the bottlenecks as clearly when they appear so you think your PC is always working great when it isn't. Hiding malware on an i5-4670K is probably a lot harder to notice and your computer might be compromised already :awe:

 

[Morbus]

(not even considering that you have SSD).

Yeah, I think that's the single biggest factor, to be honest.

But I wasn't disagreeing with you or attacking your argument. I was just saying.

This is probably why you have so much faith in browsers and their programmers, you can't "see" the bottlenecks as clearly when they appear so you think your PC is always working great when it isn't. Hiding malware on an i5-4670K is probably a lot harder to notice and your computer might be compromised already :awe:

It might, but it's probably not. I'm security conscious enough to know what I'm doing, and security aware enough to know that there's always a possibility.

But anyway, I've seen both Chrome and Firefox, on specific versions, bog down on weak machines, and it's invariably about something else.

That said, I'm not excusing either Mozilla or Google. I'm just saying.

:EDIT:
Oh, and for the record, I do NOT have faith in browsers and their programmers. I actual fact, it's pretty much the opposite.

 

[us3rnotfound]

On Newegg, I experience crawling slowdowns followed by Chrome-reboots. Not sure why these happen.

 

[Mushkins]

Every time i've tried to give Chrome a fair shake, it's given me enough problems within an afternoon to ditch it.

That and it doesn't properly reassign file associations when uninstalled, has been a known issue for god knows how many years now. Every time someone sneaks an adobe reader update in at work, Chrome jumps on board and jacks up all of their html associations (which makes all of their IE only business websites not work) and then I have to dig through the registry after uninstalling Chrome to get it all back in order.