Well, if you’re like me, you probably love Google Chrome browser. And although the latest version of Firefox (3.6) is much improved in speed, it launches fast and browses quick, I still like Chrome better now that I am used to it. Especially now that it’s got my two favorite extensions, Lastpass and mouse gestures.
Anyway, to the point. Using Chrome 4.x. (It did say Beta still? weird?) Chrome has been acting kind of laggy lately on my desktop system. It opens quick, but then is slow to show any pages and on mouse clicks they pause for a second before any action. First I thought, disable any extensions. Ok, did that. Relaunched Chrome, same thing. Alright, this time I’ll remove all the extensions. Relaunch and same thing.
At this point I thought, is there some sort of weird proxy or dns thing going on here? No, not DNS. If it was, my laptop would be slow too, right? We all use the same DNS. And I even benchmarked it with DNS Benchmark at GRC.com. (search for that at that site to download, cool little tool!)
Firefox and IE don’t exhibit the same issues. Hmm… not sure about this one. Ok, fairly quick test. Uninstall Chrome, completely, including any saved/cached data. Make sure I don’t have any profile data in c:\users\username\appdata\google\chrome folder. If there is, delete that folder. (keep in mind, you will be deleting EVERYTHING saved in chrome, FYI) No big deal though, I have all my bookmarks synced on my Gmail account and I use Lastpass to store passwords and sites.
Reboot the computer, find and download Chrome again, run the installer. Get my two favorite extensions and I am in business! Now Chrome is launching fast, like it normally does! And mouse clicks are responsive again.
Just a note, it says my version is now: 4.0.249.89 (38071)
And it doesn’t say “beta†anymore.
Maybe that’s what the issue was, there was something not upgraded automagically by Google and there was still older beta code used somehow. Whatever it was, problem solved.
By the way, this is one of my favorite reasons to use Firefox or Chrome over Internet Explorer. There are many others, but this is a big one, IMHO. You can actually remove the browser and all the settings and cached data from your system. You can’t with IE. Even with the options to delete any saved data in IE, the program is still on your system, doing who-knows-what in there. The only way I know of to really clear out any issues with IE is to create a new user profile on the system, login as that user and test if IE still has an issue. If it does not, your problem is in IE in your old user account. That’s really a huge pain! Much easier to remove the program and any associated data and reload it to clear out any bugs.