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Google Chrome: how does it stack up to the competition?

by Parm Mann on 3 September 2008, 12:17

Tags: Chrome, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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The five challengers

Google Chrome has been available for public use for just a matter of hours, and it faces stern competition from some long-standing browser giants. We're putting it up against Microsoft's Internet Explorer (v7 and v8) - a browser which first appeared in 1995, Mozilla's Firefox - in the running since 2004, and Opera - available since 1996.

The competition, clearly, has the edge on experience, and Google may have its work cut out with its first browser attempt.

For our test, we're running all five browsers on an Intel Core 2 Duo desktop PC with the following specification:

CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 LGA775 (2.66GHz, 4MB L2 cache, dual-core)
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R
Motherboard BIOS F8e
Memory 4GB (4x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2 DDR2-800
PSU 520W Corsair HX Series
Graphics card 512MB Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600 PRO PCI-E
Graphics driver Catalyst 8.8
Hard-disk drive Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ 500GB SATAII
Operating system Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1, 64-bit

Browsers Version Installer package size (64-bit where applicable)
Google Chrome Beta (0.2.149.27) 7MB
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (7.0.6001.18000) 28.3MB
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta (8.0.6001.18241) 23.2MB
Mozilla Firefox 3 (3.0.1) 6.99MB
Opera 9.52 (10108) 8.51MB

We know you're itching to see Google Chrome's performance figures, and we'll get there, but first, let's take a closer look at the browser itself.