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.