Why is Chrome so much less graphically performant than Safari?

Posted by Aslan11 on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @08:27PM
from the self-post dept.

Hey HN,

Front End Developer here, long time reader. I'm trying to identify why Chrome seems to struggle when it comes to animation performance while Safari is able to render everything without a hitch. Is this because Safari has hooks into the OS that Chrome does not? Is this because Google adopted blink in lieu of webkit? And most importantly is there a remedy out there?

Take the following site for example: http://scrollrevealjs.org/

In Chrome my scrolling gets choppy, however everything remains beautifully buttery in Safari. As a developer what can I do to improve the performance of my sites that rely heavily on animation?

Thanks!

( 4 comments | 4 points | on HN )

Re:Why is Chrome so much less graphically performant than Sa... by lsllc on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @09:28PM (#8496259)

It's a known issue, been around since retina MBP was introduced; see:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136555

For me, I have no problems with Chrome when running an rMBP with a external display, but once I switch to the built in retina display, performance suffers significantly.

I switched to Safari a few months ago despite preferring Chrome because I couldn't stand Chrome's poor retina performance.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Chrome so much less graphically performant than Sa... by Sarkie on Thursday October 23, 2014 @06:04AM (#8497403)

Try looking at this.

http://jankfree.org/

Chrome has some good tools and even has chrome://tracing to show you low level stuff inside Chrome.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Chrome so much less graphically performant than Sa... by Aslan11 on Thursday October 23, 2014 @05:17PM (#8500813)

Thank you Sarkie!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why is Chrome so much less graphically performant than Sa... by zwiteof on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @09:16PM (#8496219)

Your example looks fine in chrome for me.

[ Parent | on HN ]