Faster than sound. Faster than lightning. Faster, even, than taters.

May 6, 2010 10:51 AM

Our fastest beta to date... On Tuesday, Google released Chrome 5.0.375.29 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux, promising enormous speed gains for its popular browser. Just how fast is it? Let's watch at 2,700 frames per second.

Behind the scenes. (Chrome's speed, previously on MetaFilter.)

posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis (80 comments total)

It's a marketing stunt, but a wicked cool one. I'm not affiliated with Google, I'm just a sucker for high-speed photography.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 10:51 AM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

This new version is definitely faster than Safari. Is this new beta less stable than the previous version? I find Chrome hangs up on JavaScript- and Flash-ad heavy pages more often with this newer version.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:53 AM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Good for them for finding an excuse to get the boss to pay for that automatic french fry device.
posted by amethysts at 10:56 AM on May 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I watched this earlier today. It's pretty cool all right. Although notice how much slop is built into the tests. It's also a bit dishonest to imply that this will be a user's experience, since most users don't have a 15MBps link.
posted by DU at 10:59 AM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Seems like google is making a big push to make the web work as fast as a local applications.
posted by delmoi at 11:02 AM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

OK, that's badassed, and I want to make another potato gun.
posted by jquinby at 11:02 AM on May 6, 2010

gotta love google!
posted by HuronBob at 11:04 AM on May 6, 2010

It's also a bit dishonest to imply that this will be a user's experience, since most users don't have a 15MBps link.

But isn't the point that relative speed is better regardless of what your d/l speed is?
posted by OmieWise at 11:04 AM on May 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'm posting this tomorrow, but I'm on the new chrome beta... you may see it today....
posted by HuronBob at 11:04 AM on May 6, 2010 [8 favorites]

And *SNAP* just like that, your privacy is gone.
posted by Muddler at 11:05 AM on May 6, 2010 [11 favorites]

But isn't the point that relative speed is better regardless of what your d/l speed is?

Even if that is their point, it's still wrong. If you render a) progressively and b) faster than you download, it doesn't matter which browser you use (well, except for cached pages).
posted by DU at 11:06 AM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Seems like google is making a big push to make the web work as fast as a local applications.

Nah, that couldn't be it... what reason would they... .

OH MY GOD!
posted by odinsdream at 11:06 AM on May 6, 2010

I'm so glad for Chrome. It gives me the same feeling that Phoenix (now Firefox, of course) gave me when I first tried it: So uncluttered, so fast. If not for Chrome I'd be a Safari user right now, I think. Bloatfox is a distant memory.
posted by kryptondog at 11:06 AM on May 6, 2010 [6 favorites]

And *SNAP* just like that, your privacy is gone.

It's cute you think you have more privacy with other web browsers.
posted by Caduceus at 11:07 AM on May 6, 2010 [14 favorites]

I like this ad a lot. I'm still going to spend a lot of time in Firefox, mostly because I'm a web programmer.

Somewhere between firebug, yslow, adblocker and greasemonkey I am hooked on ad ons, even if it makes things slow.

Those fries will have too much starch on the surface and come out too dark and not crisp enough. I would eat them anyhow for being wicked cool. Avoid too much starch with an ice bath. A salad spinner is great for drying them after.
posted by poe at 11:08 AM on May 6, 2010 [3 favorites]

Heh. It was actually slower then their lightning. And. their "Sound" test didn't measure anything like the speed of sound.

Firefox's autocomplete bar works a lot better then chrome's for me, since you can type any part of the URL, not just the beginning.
posted by delmoi at 11:10 AM on May 6, 2010

I find Chrome hangs up on JavaScript- and Flash-ad heavy pages more often with this newer version.

Ah, so it's not just me, then.
posted by briank at 11:12 AM on May 6, 2010

That was one sick ad.

Not surprising, since it was made by an advertising agency with a web research arm.
posted by codacorolla at 11:12 AM on May 6, 2010 [8 favorites]

I've been using the latest Chrome on my Mac as my default browser, replacing Firefox. I like its speed and UI, but there are some shortcomings which make me occasionally want to switch back. Chrome seems to use more memory than Firefox, and also weirdly uses my external USB hard drive (that's what OS X says when I try to unmount the drive). Also Chrome uses large amounts of either memory or disk, and occasionally fails to load / render pages when it runs out (and displays an "oh, snap" error message that suggests the problem is with the network).

Yeah, yeah, it's Beta. On the whole I like it - enough that it's remained my default. Once someone ported Adblock to Chrome, I had no compelling reason to switch back to Firefox.
posted by zippy at 11:13 AM on May 6, 2010

does this mean if I use Chrome I can also use it as a weapon and shoot shit?
I tried that with FireFox and nothing happened.
posted by Postroad at 11:13 AM on May 6, 2010

Even if that is their point, it's still wrong. If you render a) progressively and b) faster than you download, it doesn't matter which browser you use (well, except for cached pages).

That is false. Rendering is merely one of several major performance areas in a modern web browser.

The new Chrome is still much slower than it should be. Much slower than Firefox on handling UI events. Subpar, really.
posted by thesmophoron at 11:14 AM on May 6, 2010 [3 favorites]

I do hope that Chrome eventually allows addons to affect more than just page displays, though, because right now the way all the different adblocking things work is that the ads still download and then are hidden-- they're still slowing down my page loading.

I still love Chrome, though.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:17 AM on May 6, 2010

thesmophoron: “The new Chrome is still much slower than it should be. Much slower than Firefox on handling UI events. Subpar, really.”

This is true. It's odd; I really wonder if "speed" makes any sense at all any more as a benchmark for a modern browser. It's give and take at this point.
posted by koeselitz at 11:19 AM on May 6, 2010

...and also weirdly uses my external USB hard drive (that's what OS X says when I try to unmount the drive).

That's just Google indexing your stuff. Pay no attention, citizen.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:19 AM on May 6, 2010 [6 favorites]

I'd be on Chrome if I could run AdBlock. Til then I won't change. Every now and then I accidentally see the web without AdBlock and get a quick reminder of why that is not a viable option.
posted by Babblesort at 11:19 AM on May 6, 2010 [8 favorites]

Well, loading 70 webcomics in tabs at once crushed chrome. Firefox is fine.

Had to force quit.

Single pages appear to load really fast, though.

I hope they can make it work for complicated cases like that. I'll switch then.
posted by poe at 11:21 AM on May 6, 2010

If you look closely when the potato zooms by the screen, Chrome is actually rendering pages from local disk.
posted by mrbill at 11:21 AM on May 6, 2010 [9 favorites]

I would like chrome if it would work with Google Maps and Youtube without dieing on me.
posted by rebent at 11:22 AM on May 6, 2010

Was that a Back to the Future homage during the lightning test?
posted by dsword at 11:24 AM on May 6, 2010

> It's also a bit dishonest to imply that this will be a user's experience, since most users don't have a 15MBps link.

Most users don't have a propane-fueled potato gun shooting across their monitor and into the fryer at their shoulder. It's one of those things that would be really awesome but also bad because, hey, FRESH FRIES EVERYTIME I RELOAD A PAGE combined with disfiguring scars from all the splashing hot fryer oil and the occasional blow to a head when you're leaning forward over the keyboard.

So I'm using Safari, is what I'm saying. It's a better browser when you're on a low-carb diet.
posted by ardgedee at 11:27 AM on May 6, 2010 [5 favorites]

Meh, they loaded the pages from locally saved files.
posted by madman at 11:27 AM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'd be on Chrome if I could run AdBlock. Til then I won't change.

Welcome to your shiny silvery new world.
posted by hippybear at 11:27 AM on May 6, 2010 [4 favorites]

if you render a) progressively and b) faster than you download, it doesn't matter which browser you use (well, except for cached pages)

Google is optimizing chrome for applications built in html5, which allows for a lot more things (like data) being cached locally.
posted by Mick at 11:28 AM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also, AdThwart.
posted by The Mouthchew at 11:29 AM on May 6, 2010

am i the only one who thought, when noticing that they were loading pandora for one of the tests, "oh my god, they're willing to test it with a FLASH site?!"
posted by shmegegge at 11:29 AM on May 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

Seems like it's faster for me (vs FF 3.6 on Mac OS10.5). I like it!
posted by Mister_A at 11:30 AM on May 6, 2010

Well knock me down with a feather. I guess it might be time to try Chrome again.
posted by Babblesort at 11:32 AM on May 6, 2010

PepsiBlewPastMeAt300m/s...


I also think this is cool, but I'm starting to become a Google fanboy, since their clean UI aesthetic feels so right.
posted by BrotherCaine at 11:35 AM on May 6, 2010

I loved the sound design on this. I'll keep using Firefox though ta very much.
posted by yoHighness at 11:37 AM on May 6, 2010

Meh, they loaded the pages from locally saved files.

Isn't that the point of it being a render-speed test, as opposed to a bandwidth test?
posted by kafziel at 11:41 AM on May 6, 2010

I find Chrome hangs up on JavaScript- and Flash-ad heavy pages more often with this newer version.

Same here, and I don't think it's as stable or as secure as Firefox either. It got so bad I ran something called Ccleaner (Free - Cnet) and it's gotten rid of a lot of useless temp crap in the cache.

The thing I like about Chrome is that it's so nimble with multi-tabbing and uses much less memory than Firefox (especially with all the great add-ons for FF, many I've had to disable), and it (Chrome) doesn't take forever to start up. Whereas with Firefox, it is soooo slow coming up.

NB: I have an older computer running XP and with a double core or a mac, I imagine that's not an issue.
posted by Skygazer at 11:44 AM on May 6, 2010

I just want to say that in college, I was your go-to guy for potato guns. I made a double-barreled gun that shot Skyy vodka bottles perfectly. We took out a couple of boards from a rotting privacy fence with it.

In Physics we had to construct a device capable of launching a tennis ball 10m and hitting a target on the ground (and we had to calculate all the forces on the ball, the trajectory, etc). My partner and I (yo Andrew, whattup!) built a potato gun (well, tennis ball cannon is more like it). Ours was the only device with a negative initial trajectory angle. We even got a new rule made for future classes! (combustion no longer allowed)
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 11:45 AM on May 6, 2010 [4 favorites]

Maybe I'll give Chrome a shot at home. I don't know if it's Firefox 3.6, or something with Flash, or an aging iMac, or what, but Firefox on OS X 10.4 has seemed especially pokey in the last three months or so.

Here at work, though, Firefox is doing just fine. Maybe I'm just used to the UI, but Chrome just feels odd to me.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:46 AM on May 6, 2010

I should clarify, that I ran Ccleaner also because some weird left over bug had changed things so that Chrome crashed everytime I wanted to check one of the right-wing sites like Drudge, Free Republic etc. And it did some sort of righteous mojo in the HKEY area or somesuch...

I do that occasionally for the entertainment value of what new mindfuckery they've come up with...
posted by Skygazer at 11:47 AM on May 6, 2010

Also, have we entered a new golden age of Rube Goldberg contraptions, and how great is that, even if they have fuck all to do with browsers (head scratch).
posted by Skygazer at 11:50 AM on May 6, 2010

Skygazer, I thought IE6 was run by string and mice? Or is it not a true Rube Goldberg machine if there isn't a cannon at some point?
posted by Hoenikker at 11:56 AM on May 6, 2010

NB: I have an older computer running XP and with a double core or a mac, I imagine that's not an issue.

No, Safari and Firefox take ages to start up on a Mac, too. With Safari, I think there is some RSS feed and other caching that is pulled up. Once it gets started, it's okay, but it's an issue Apple would do well to address, I think. Clearing the cache helps reset things to "ground zero" but after using it for a few weeks it's back to where it was, speed-wise.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:59 AM on May 6, 2010

I like this ad a lot. I'm still going to spend a lot of time in Firefox, mostly because I'm a web programmer.

Somewhere between firebug, yslow, adblocker and greasemonkey I am hooked on ad ons, even if it makes things slow.

You know that all of these exist for Chrome, right? For Firebug and yslow, there's the built-in inspector (does script debugging, CPU tracking, network tracking, etc.), and there are extensions for AdBlock and Greasemonkey. I am also a web developer, and the speed advantage of Chrome is definitely a major win.

This new version is definitely faster than Safari. Is this new beta less stable than the previous version? I find Chrome hangs up on JavaScript- and Flash-ad heavy pages more often with this newer version.

I find using Safari for even the most mundane of tasks to be almost unbearable, because it's so slow. Once you get used to the speed of Chrome, all those little pauses that other browsers have rendering a page, or opening a tab become a lot more annoying.

You may have gathered that I love Chrome, but I too have noticed a reduction in stability with Javascript and Flash in the latest version. It seems to hang or freeze more often than before. Since it's only been single tabs though (and not the whole browser), I'm still using Chrome.
posted by !Jim at 12:04 PM on May 6, 2010

Just how fast is it?

Only as fast as my internet connection. [sigh]
posted by fuq at 12:06 PM on May 6, 2010

Once you get used to the speed of Chrome, all those little pauses that other browsers have rendering a page, or opening a tab become a lot more annoying.

Definitely.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:06 PM on May 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

Ouch! She doesn't like the Flash at all, Cap'n! Until the next release, I bid you adieu.
posted by Mister_A at 12:14 PM on May 6, 2010

Yeah, no. To the people who say there is ad blocking on Chrome, you are missing two very important things:

(1) Ads are still downloaded, wasting bandwidth and generally slowing things down

(2) The adblocker DOES NOT WORK. It doesn't. It is broken. Look. I go to my Facebook profile and it has these little gray boxes "Add Basic Information" and "Add Likes and Interests" (I don't put much on my profile because I'm privacy-conscious and their privacy system has been broken and buggy recently). I go to the Adblock button and click "Block similar elements" and go to one of the nagging gray boxes. Hovering over it, it says "Class: pam emptyInfoSection gray-box noborder" so I click it. A little dialog comes up saying "Block this elements [sic]: HTML[id="facebook"][class=" "]>" which is only part of the rule it's proposing, which is an entire fucking DOM model of inanity and obfuscation. I press enter and everything stays the same. It's only after I copy the text out of the tiny one-line text field, put it into TextEdit, remove everything but the element I actually want to block, enter that text back into the one-line text field, and press enter, that anything happens at all.

So no, this isn't a case of "But it has all the advantages of Firefox now!" and won't be until something like the Element Hiding Helper comes along that isn't totally galactically stupid.
posted by thesmophoron at 12:15 PM on May 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

I am not sure what is up with that Greasemonkey addon. I am using the dev build of Chrome and it has GM support built in. However, it barely works. None of the addons that source jquery (such as Plutor's mefi scripts, for example) work at all. The Mefi Scroll Tag one seems to work but loses its place once you close the tab, I guess because it has no concept of persistent local storage. Facebook Purity manages to work, so that's a bonus, but mostly it's just severely broken.

Other complaints:

1. It crashes a lot. A lot. I am as likely to have Sad Mac screen than anything else. I realize I am using dev version but this hasn't improved one bit over the past month I've been testing it out -- has in fact gotten worse.

2. View Source on a window that has dynamic content generated from a form POST is broken. It'll actually re-fetch the pre-submission page and display that rather than allow you to see the source of what you have on your screen. This can't even be a bug, it seems like a design decision to reload a fresh version of the page when you try to view its source. It is so hostile to development it is just jaw-dropping that they would do it.

3. There are various adblockers, I've gone through them all, they suck and barely work. It seems like the tools to do this right aren't there yet. Even safari's adblocker which uses the worst kind of hack possible to implement does a better job.

But yeah, it's pretty fast and has a clean UI. I love some design decisions they have made, such as each tab being its own process you can kill if need be. But it's really far from complete right now.
posted by cj_ at 1:02 PM on May 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

I almost didn't check this out. Then I read something about a potato gun. Not really sure why they've got the double-bend of a pnuematic launcher on an explosion-based model.

In college, we used walkie talkies to call for fire from one guy's off-campus apartment, dropping all manner of vegetative matter over one row of lab buildings on to unsuspecting people lounging about in the quad. Good times

(also somehow got away with shooting one into the Grand Canyon twenty years ago...ranger stopped by and just calmly said, "Please put that away. It's probably a Federal offense.")
posted by notsnot at 1:06 PM on May 6, 2010

I am pleased to note that this new beta has, for me at least, roughly the same average number of Goats Teleported as the previous one. Seems as if the bug has been resolved!
posted by Skrubly at 1:08 PM on May 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

I love Chrome, and use it more than anything else right now, but as far as I can see it's still got some very serious problems. Especially on a Mac.

For one thing, more often than not it crashes all tabs associated with a website whenever I paste text into a textarea. This is a major inconvenience for me, because it means I have to use Firefox for any task that involves pasting into textareas (which I do a LOT of when I'm building out content on websites).

Every now and then, it just slows to this absolutely glacial pace, and I have to go in an kill groups of tabs group by group until I can get it running well enough to prune the tabs. (It gets so slow, yea verily, that I can't actually make it close tabs.)

Between ten & 20 times per day it pops up a dialog asking me if I want to kill the 3-6 pages it's showing me in this dialog, because they're no longer responding. I find that kind of disconcerting; it's also a bit of a crap shoot, because 9 times out of 10 I can click "Wait" but on that 10th time it does what I talked about in the previous paragraph.

(Note that Safari does the slowdown thing, too. Where Chrome is superior is that I can actually get my damn session back after I force-quit it.)

All in all when it's working, I find it much, much faster and more pleasant to deal with than Firefox, and its crash recovery mode is way better than safari. So it's the best of three relative evils from my perspective, right now.

I also have to say that I'm kind of in awe of how quickly they've built up their add-ons library. And I absolutely love being able to install an add on and then, you know, actually use the thing without having to restart the browser.
posted by lodurr at 1:34 PM on May 6, 2010

I did one of these videos myself of a massively satisfying ejaculation shooting past a loadup of www.ftvgirls.com you guise wanna link?
posted by turgid dahlia at 1:47 PM on May 6, 2010

I love Chrome, and use it more than anything else right now, but as far as I can see it's still got some very serious problems. Especially on a Mac.

Yeah, the Mac version is a good year behind the Windows version in terms of development. I love my Chrome on Win 7 but I'm keeping to Firefox on OS X, at least for now.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:49 PM on May 6, 2010

Is it faster than the new Opera?
posted by five fresh fish at 2:04 PM on May 6, 2010

Hoenikker: Or is it not a true Rube Goldberg machine if there isn't a cannon at some point?

Yes, a projectile must be fired or shot or squirted or splashed see Turgid Dahlia's comment above for reference.
posted by Skygazer at 2:21 PM on May 6, 2010

Meh, I'm still waiting on browser nirvana. Chrome dominates my Win 7 desktop. On OS X, Firefox already fills the need for a klunky but extendable browser that doesn't play well with the operating system, and at least it can be reskinned to put the close tab control on the proper side. Opera is sweet but still has problems with Google Docs (which is another case of good enough but not ideal). OmniWeb seemed to have a problem popping up windows for cookies and tracking bugs when I last checked it out and has glacial development.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:32 PM on May 6, 2010

I always like how the Google release notes included "Enhanced version number" as a new feature.
posted by four panels at 2:44 PM on May 6, 2010 [3 favorites]

...a projectile must be fired or shot or squirted or splashed...

"Whizzed"
posted by turgid dahlia at 2:47 PM on May 6, 2010

Holy crap, this new Chrome is hang-tastic. It's hanging like a picture on a wall. It's hanging like John Wilkes Boothe. It's hanging like Mr. Cooper.

It took me about ten minutes to get back to Metafilter to say this. I'm on XP, but still - this is ridiculous.
posted by koeselitz at 2:57 PM on May 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

Clearly I've been doing my chip frying/ear waxing/Van de Graaf generating all wrong. Firefox, you are SO history.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 3:05 PM on May 6, 2010

> Meh, they loaded the pages from locally saved files.

I don't want to rain on the Hardy Boys' parade, but why speculate when the description right on the video says quite straightforwardly how the pages were loaded?

Chrome Browser vs. Potato:
We used a a version of web page of allrecipes.com that is accessible with website login. About four hours into the Potato Gun shoot we decided to use a locally loaded version of the web page to enable more precise synchronization with the potato gun. We finally got the shot we were hoping for after 51 takes.

Chrome Browser vs. Sound:
We loaded an artist page from Pandora.com, a streaming internet radio service directly off the web on a 15Mbps internet connection.

Chrome Browser vs. Lightning:
We used a locally loaded version of weather.com that was legally approved for use in this video (and all the standard website permissions procedures that goes into making videos!)

While we had a super fast 15Mbps internet connection in the studio, any live internet connection introduces quite a bit of variability. To run speed tests on page rendering times, saving locally and loading from the local disk can help reduce this variability.

posted by churl at 3:22 PM on May 6, 2010

Fucking stupid.
Fucking fantastic.
posted by klanawa at 3:48 PM on May 6, 2010

Not really sure why they've got the double-bend of a pnuematic launcher on an explosion-based model.
They explained that the straight model was too long to fit in the frame, so they use the double bend to fit the whole thing in the shot.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 4:23 PM on May 6, 2010

Another reason render/execution time matters a lot independent of download speed is that a big target is AJAX/client heavy applications (Gmail, Google Docs, etc). Javascript and DOM execution time will be a bigger factor in these than download speed if you use them for any length of time. Combine that with caching via HTML5 or other means and the idea is to speed up web-based client apps (which Google has obvious interest in).
posted by wildcrdj at 4:53 PM on May 6, 2010

Metafilter: It's probably a Federal offense.
posted by Barry B. Palindromer at 4:57 PM on May 6, 2010

Chrome: Faster than a potato!
posted by ooga_booga at 5:26 PM on May 6, 2010

madman: "Meh, they loaded the pages from locally saved files."

Browser tests measure how fast the browser renders the page, not how fast it downloads a page from the Web; there's a difference.
posted by ShawnStruck at 5:28 PM on May 6, 2010

I find Chrome hangs up on JavaScript- and Flash-ad heavy pages more often with this newer version.

Ah, so it's not just me, then.

Having the same problems myself. Since this update I've had Chrome hang and make my Mac completely freeze up for up to and sometimes over a minute. Really driving me crazy.
posted by rbf1138 at 5:38 PM on May 6, 2010

Well, whatever you say, two sites that I find frequently pokey - rottentomatoes and metacritic - loaded a helluva lot faster after I (just barely) installed the beta version.

Hell, even my gmail and google docs pages popped faster.

I'm naive to be sure (who isn't a market-hound these days), but it feels like Google (whatever they offer) is for the we, the people (whereas iapple is for them, with macs).
posted by kneecapped at 5:59 PM on May 6, 2010

Meh, they loaded the pages from locally saved files.

Well, obviously your browser can't do anything about how quickly pages download! Chrome is faster (when it is faster) because of its optimized HTML rendering engine, not because it magically speeds up your Internet connection. And the best way to test the speed of your HTML renderer is to eliminate variation from other sources, like connection speed or server speed, and the best way to do that is to render locally-saved files.

I mean, obviously this is just an ad and not a controlled benchmark test or whatever, but a genuine test of Chrome's speed would also use locally saved files.
posted by magnificent frigatebird at 6:36 PM on May 6, 2010

Those corporate dickheads, they should have used the potato gun to cap the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.
posted by storybored at 7:40 PM on May 6, 2010

With adblock and the ability to load Greasemonkey scripts, I finally switched to Chrome on OSX tonight. Happy so far.
posted by mrbill at 11:28 PM on May 6, 2010

I, too, find that how fast my browser renders a page is the limiting factor in my Internet browsing.

Well, ever since I paid for gigabit Ethernet directly from the local Internet POP to my bedroom anyway.
posted by srt19170 at 6:09 AM on May 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's actually kinda funny, but in a webapp I work on, we actually had to re-jigger some of the way we do things since Chrome is so much faster. Luckily, the javascript debugging tools aren't that bad.

The only real quirk about chrome is the way it handles popop windows. Firefox and the like actually prevent the popup from opening. Chrome on the other hand, loads them into some kind of secret layer that you can't see. You can still hear flash and whatnot from it... even pop up alert messages.

... Leads to some unexpected behavior.
posted by ph00dz at 7:00 AM on May 7, 2010

Just a followup, looks like they really improved the Greasemonkey support, at least in dev line. The ones that wouldn't work for me now do, so yay.

I am still grumpy about the page reloading when you try to view source.
posted by cj_ at 8:14 PM on May 8, 2010