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I'm running Win7 and using Firefox and IE9.

I'd like to start testing Chrome. Would that slow my machine down?

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Nope.

I have three Internet Browsers that never slow my PC down for years.

Just the opposite - while using Chrome, browsing should be far faster than either IE or FF.

Gekko71 wrote:Just the opposite - while using Chrome, browsing should be far faster than either IE or FF.

I can't quit Firefox because it is a furry. Hehe! I mean I personally prefer the hot Internet browser because I've used it for many years. I still love it.

Chrome has the current fastest rendering time out of any of the browsers. I also find that it starts up quite a bit faster then FF. I have FF installed just for browser compatibility.

Whether or not you consider tomshardware reputable is another thing, but most of their tests actually put IE9 ahead of Chrome (for performance/rendering speed). That will probably only hold for another version or two of Chrome though - they seem to come out every couple of months.

That may be - IE9 uses hardware accelerated rendering. The current version of Chrome Beta does as well though, so we'll see when they both actual release it.

You know, in the end the only thing that matters is what you prefer and what works well for you.

In ALL of the benchmarking and comparisons of the different browsers (by unbiased parties if they can be found) ... there are places where each and every browser lags behind others. There is no such thing (currently) of a web browser that is markedly faster than the other browsers in all ways. Also, with ALL browsers there are components, add-ons, extensions, etc. that are added to the browser either at the time of install (because the stuff was already present on the system) or after the initial install (often at the preference of the user or due to sites the user frequents) ... and ALL of these things impact the overall ability and performance of the browser.

Therefore, what I said before applies. The only thing that really matters is what you (the end user) prefer and what works well for you.

For me...
- Chrome works and loads quickly, but is dog slow on some sites (Pandora, anyone?) when by all rights it should be fast on those sites. However Chrome does have it's good sides (but not the overly Spartan user options with no help provided).
- Firefox is 9 times out of 10 a good choice (for me) because it just plain works, is reliable, the optional add-ons are good, the user options are robust (and help is provided) and works relatively quick with nearly everything. The newest version (Firefox 4) seems to work pretty dang good and much quicker than previous versions.
- IE (for me) is what I turn to if sites don't do well in Firefox or Chrome. IE is just so susceptible to bad and/or malicious web coding that even the newest version isn't really very safe. It is an evil that is necessary if you run Windows. I avoid it if I can.
- Safari is ... well, it gets by. Steve Jobs says it's the best browser ever, but if that was true ... the browsers he's comparing Safari with must be pretty lame. Don't get me wrong. Safari isn't half bad and it has been getting better lately (there's even an Adblock add-on for Safari now!), but it fails to be my #1 choice even on a Mac.
- All the others ... are "also rans". If one of them works well for you, then enjoy it, mate!

I'm still playing with Chrome and wonder if anyone knows where the "profile" folder is?

With Firefox I'm able to copy from the following location the contents of the "default" folder and then paste those files and folders into the same location on another computer so that I have all the same tabs, add-ons etc. In other words second computer Firefox is a clone to the first one.

Here's the location of the Firefox folder: "C:\Users\Dell 580\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\s9ucgq9m.default"‎

Pasting the contents of the "default" folder into whatever name of the default folder on the other computer will "clone" all my Firefox settings.

Most browsers perform similarly and the main bottleneck is the speed/latency between the browser itself and the internet server pushing the page when it comes to flat HTML. The biggest improvements in recent history have been in javascript performance which doesn't show up in most pages, but can make an enormous difference in places that have a ton of AJAX or other javascripted content.

I once found a practical page I used that had about a thousand files and their details listed in AJAX, expanding the list would really tax a browsers javascript engine. So I decided to time it on various browsers: Chrome took 4-5 seconds, firefox (3.5 or 3.6 at the time) took 6-7 seconds, IE8 took 18-22 seconds. Mind you this was performing an operation on a cached page/data so this had nothing to do with the network performance. If the abysmal performance of IE8 was good enough for most people then outside of rare cases like that site I doubt most people ever notice the difference.

TechPro wrote:In ALL of the benchmarking and comparisons of the different browsers (by unbiased parties if they can be found) ... there are places where each and every browser lags behind others.

Yep, even Firefox 3.6 took away one "win", and it was long overdue for an update.

Security is a tough call. I suspect most attacks go through vulnerable plug-ins (notably Flash or Acrobat) rather than targeting the browser itself these days because it's easier. IE6 is still easy to attack, but it's not as common as it used to be (might be enough so that it's worth attacking, regardless). IE9 is a lot more difficult, and doesn't have significantly more market share than Firefox so I'm not sure how much longer that argument is still going to hold, if it even does any more.

(Just in case it's not obvious, I'm not advertising IE9 either. Firefox is my primary browser at home because of the extensions it has available, especially ABP, which makes the web look a lot better than it actually is; but IE is far from embarrassingly awful these days, and actually I wish Firefox had the same tab isolation. I rather dislike things being able to lock up multiple windows + ChatZilla all at the same time.)

Firefox is the safest browser not because of its own built in security (which isn't any better or worse than most competitors) but because of addons like noscript, adblockplus, flashblock, and request policy. It is pretty hard to drive-by exploit a browser that blanket blocks/disables active content, blocks/disables anything to do with Adobe by default, and blocks off site requests.

Krom wrote:Firefox is the safest browser not because of its own built in security (which isn't any better or worse than most competitors) but because of addons like noscript, adblockplus, flashblock, and request policy. It is pretty hard to drive-by exploit a browser that blanket blocks/disables active content, blocks/disables anything to do with Adobe by default, and blocks off site requests.

This is a reason why I use Firefox.

thewolfe wrote:I'm still playing with Chrome and wonder if anyone knows where the "profile" folder is?

With Firefox I'm able to copy from the following location the contents of the "default" folder and then paste those files and folders into the same location on another computer so that I have all the same tabs, add-ons etc. In other words second computer Firefox is a clone to the first one.

Here's the location of the Firefox folder: "C:\Users\Dell 580\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\s9ucgq9m.default"‎

Pasting the contents of the "default" folder into whatever name of the default folder on the other computer will "clone" all my Firefox settings.

Check %appdata%\..\local\google\chrome\user data

Thenior, that was it, thanks.

In Chrome go to
Wrench icon>options>Personal Stuff tab>Sync.