This past weekend, after using a friend’s computer to book a flight and hotel, I was getting frustrated with how slow her computer is. She told me that she probably needs to get a new computer soon because it’s so slow. I decided to try out a few things to see if they made a difference. First, I noticed the computer was running Windows Vista - or possibly Windows 7, and was running what looked like Internet Explorer 8.
My first observation after clicking around on the desktop, start menu, etc., was that the computer itself was not slow, rather, browsing the web was slow - and I mean painfully slow. Since she was so used to running IE, I decided to try installing Google Chrome Frame - which is supposed to speed up browsing, and make more rich internet experiences to people with IE. After installing it, and browsing again (namely aa.com, and hilton.com), it was still painfully slow.
My next thought was to install Firefox, but since I’ve been having issues with it crashing ever since Mozilla updated to Firefox 4, I decided to avoid that headache.
I decided to install Google Chrome, which I use as my primary browser at home (not approved at work). Chrome installed easily, and will upgrade seamlessly in the background without bugging her in the future. Chrome not only sped up the browsing experience 20-fold, but it also gave her the perception that her computer was dramatically faster than it was before. Instead of her having to wait 15+ seconds for something as simple as American Airlines’ site to load, it went down to probably 2 or 3 seconds. At that point, I deleted the shortcuts to IE on the desktop and in the Taskbar, and replaced them with shortcuts to Chrome.
This absolutely amazed me that hundreds of millions of people are sitting out there thinking that their computers are slow, when in fact it’s just their web browser.
Here are the morals to the story:
