...they suck.
I got into this because I originally needed Google Body at uni as a reference, and neither the Firefox 3.6 nor IE 8 that was on my University's computers at the time (they still are, unfortunately) cut the mustard. So for the time being every time I started a session on the computers I would download and install Google Chrome. Without admin rights the browser would run, but it wouldn't save anything on my account. So while I did this I started thinking of ways I could improve on this.
A few days ago two things happened. I read an article in Ars, I think, about the productivity available purely in a web browser with Google Apps. I also read that there was a Portable version of Google Chrome out there. It took a while for 2 and 2 to come together since a lot was happening in my life at the time, but afterwards I thought how great an idea this would be. Solve my Google Body problem AND my dropbox problem by using Google Docs!
So I download it, install it onto a 16GB USB flash drive which is no slouch by any stretch of the imagination, if only by virtue of its size, and I test it out on my laptop for a few days before taking it to uni. It starts out okay, but in general, it's really, really SLOW. During my research I find that Firefox 4 and Opera 11 are also portable. I try these two. Both are still slow. In order of speed, fastest to slowest: Opera, Chrome, and Firefox, trailing by a mile.
I don't know whether it's because I got used to the SSD in my desktop, or because USB2.0 is too slow even compared to a SATA hard drive, or because there's some extra things going on in my laptop that are slowing down a Portable install more than a normal one, but none of the browsers are as fast as their normal equivalents. Opera and Chrome are the closest; I'd classify both those as being close to IE8 in speed. Firefox 4...oh dear. With no exaggeration whatsoever, I'd expect a desktop installation of IE6 to be faster. That is how god-awful it is.
I would like to point out that just by virtue of the fact that I can have addons, WebGL, HTML5, bookmarks, etc. on these browsers makes them infinitely better than using the browsers built in on my uni workstations; it's just that I feel they could be a whole lot better.
I got into this because I originally needed Google Body at uni as a reference, and neither the Firefox 3.6 nor IE 8 that was on my University's computers at the time (they still are, unfortunately) cut the mustard. So for the time being every time I started a session on the computers I would download and install Google Chrome. Without admin rights the browser would run, but it wouldn't save anything on my account. So while I did this I started thinking of ways I could improve on this.
A few days ago two things happened. I read an article in Ars, I think, about the productivity available purely in a web browser with Google Apps. I also read that there was a Portable version of Google Chrome out there. It took a while for 2 and 2 to come together since a lot was happening in my life at the time, but afterwards I thought how great an idea this would be. Solve my Google Body problem AND my dropbox problem by using Google Docs!
So I download it, install it onto a 16GB USB flash drive which is no slouch by any stretch of the imagination, if only by virtue of its size, and I test it out on my laptop for a few days before taking it to uni. It starts out okay, but in general, it's really, really SLOW. During my research I find that Firefox 4 and Opera 11 are also portable. I try these two. Both are still slow. In order of speed, fastest to slowest: Opera, Chrome, and Firefox, trailing by a mile.
I don't know whether it's because I got used to the SSD in my desktop, or because USB2.0 is too slow even compared to a SATA hard drive, or because there's some extra things going on in my laptop that are slowing down a Portable install more than a normal one, but none of the browsers are as fast as their normal equivalents. Opera and Chrome are the closest; I'd classify both those as being close to IE8 in speed. Firefox 4...oh dear. With no exaggeration whatsoever, I'd expect a desktop installation of IE6 to be faster. That is how god-awful it is.
I would like to point out that just by virtue of the fact that I can have addons, WebGL, HTML5, bookmarks, etc. on these browsers makes them infinitely better than using the browsers built in on my uni workstations; it's just that I feel they could be a whole lot better.
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