Browser Crashability
Bashing Chrome has become a kind of hobby for me, but I’ve begun to feel bad about it–there are quite a few really nice features. One of these is how it handles JavaScript. So I ran a benchmark to test it against Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7.
The Test
The test is simple: Open up this link (caution: It will crash your browser) from an email I sent to myself, open a new tab, switch between tabs a bit, and then close the problematic tab. Simple.
The Results
Firefox: Firefox started great–I was able to open a new tab and conduct a Google search after the crash page loaded. However, the browser crashed when I tried to close the crash tab. 3/5
IE7: By far the worst–as soon as I opened the link everything crashed, and closing it was even harder than closing the dead Firefox. 0/5
Chrome: I was hoping that I would get an infamous “Sad Tab.” I was wrong. The crash tab did nothing to affect performance–I opened a new tab, used it, switched back to GMail, closed the crash tab, and nothing happened. It was very exciting. 5/5
Conclusion
So this pretty much says what we knew already: Chrome is great at JavaScript, Firefox is great at everything else, and IE7 is terrible.
But I will be very excited to either have Chrome adapt the usability of Firefox, or Firefox to adapt the solidity of Chrome–the utter nonchalance with which Chrome handled the test is still blowing my mind. I’m pumped.
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Hey there,
I came across your blog a minute ago, and upon seeing this particular post, I had to add that Chrome has never crashed Java on me. I was actually conducting a similar experiment not long ago. It finally gave me the sad tab when I went behind the scenes and clicked a whole bunch of buttons. I still have no idea what I actually did, but it seemed to work for my purpose.
Yours,
Avery