Why the frig is Chrome so wonky?

So over the years, Chrome has, IMO, become a standout browser -- fast page load, easy to use, and in general far more attractive and unobtrusive vs other browsers.

But the latest iterations -- on Windows, iOS phone and iPad are awful.  Crashes regularly.  Pages load bizarrely.

Not much experience with Edge.  And I truly despise Safari (wretched usability).   

What to use until this thing is fixed?

I haven't had any problems with Chrome.  The one time I thought I did was because of an extension I had loaded; once I deleted the extension, the problem disappeared.

I can't help thinking that Microsoft and Apple "tweak" their OSs in such a way to hinder Google's Chrome.  I've noticed that there are problems with Gmail if I load it on Chrome, for example.

A couple of years ago, there was a glitch in the Gmail app for iPhone, when Apple "updated" the iPhone operating system, that took a little while for Google to resolve.

Hmm.  I do find it better in Windows than iOS.  still I find myself using some apps in Edge, whose interface I'm not fond of - at least they work in that environment.  

Page load in iOS absurd.  Taking longer, and pages load to the bottom.  Unless there was some dire iOS incompatibility, can't believe a version like that was released.

I think the key to Chrome's success has been its speed of iteration. The downside is that sometimes things break in the process. It does seem to have hit notably rough patch lately, though - on my iPhone, I've been getting the problem with links opening in the middle of the page as well.

I updated Chrome last night, though, and so far today it seems to be working a lot better, so hopefully they've managed to address whatever the issue was.  Also, I do seem to be having fewer crashes than I used to (I suspect the crashes were due to javascript, especially ads, loading).

It's been pretty stable on my laptop.

Shorter version - I'd probably wait out the current issues, as they're likely to be fixed faster than it would take you to adapt to a new browser.

nohero said:

I can't help thinking that Microsoft and Apple "tweak" their OSs in such a way to hinder Google's Chrome.  I've noticed that there are problems with Gmail if I load it on Chrome, for example.

A couple of years ago, there was a glitch in the Gmail app for iPhone, when Apple "updated" the iPhone operating system, that took a little while for Google to resolve.

I should add that I use Chrome with Windows only -- Windows 10 most recently.

Actually, I started using Chrome when my gmail account would not load photos/attachments in Internet Explorer.  I was told at the time to use Chrome which was much more compatible, and I haven't looked back since.

Chome can use an astonishing amount of resources, especially if you keep lots of tabs open like I tend to do. I'm not sure Chrome is to blame as much as the websites themselves.

Due to the shared history I have been using Chrome on my phone (iOS) more often than Safari as well. Rarely have problems beyond the occasional crash which seems to be common to pretty much every iOS app these days.

We do use Google Apps at work, and I'm the sole IT person for almost 100 people that generally use Chrome to access their email, so if there was a major problem with it I'd be aware. As far as Chrome vs IE for accessing Gmail, there aren't too many major differences, but there are a few minor features that work in Chrome. That's the reason one would recommend it.

Google Apps users here as well. Right now, Google Apps is loading like a slug via Chrome (much better in Edge - which seems counterintuitive!!).   Once loaded, seems ok, though.  

I'm hoping the next iteration comes very very soon!

peteglider said:

Google Apps users here as well. Right now, Google Apps is loading like a slug via Chrome (much better in Edge - which seems counterintuitive!!).   Once loaded, seems ok, though.  

I'm hoping the next iteration comes very very soon!

To troubleshoot I'd log in as a different user (preferably with a clean profile) and see if it's any different. If it is then I'd see if rename the Chrome directory in C:\users\username\appdata\local\Google to something like Chrome.old would do the trick.

A malware scan also couldn't hurt, and check for any weird extensions.

You can also try experimenting with the 64-bit version or the beta version. The current version for the standard 32-bit line seems to be 48.0.2564.109m, 64-bit beta is 49.0.2623.47-beta.

You can check version under 'About' in settings. 64-bit says it's 64-bit, while 32-bit is quiet about any sort of bitness.

I have 83 tabs open in Chrome on my 2014 Macbook Pro. It should slow things down, but it doesn't. These new Macbook Pros are works of genius with the proprietary solid state storage. Virtual memory runs at almost the same speed as RAM. I can't feel the difference.

I find it difficult to abuse this machine, even when I try. It just keeps on ticking.

Tom_Reingold said:

I have 83 tabs open in Chrome on my 2014 Macbook Pro. It should slow things down, but it doesn't. These new Macbook Pros are works of genius with the proprietary solid state storage. Virtual memory runs at almost the same speed as RAM. I can't feel the difference.

I find it difficult to abuse this machine, even when I try. It just keeps on ticking.

How do you find anything among 83 tabs?  (I thought I was bad with a dozen or so open at a time.)

Our new SSD-based MacBook Pro tends to be fine with anything that a single user does, but when we log a second user on without logging the first user out performance tends to suffer. Neither user is actually doing 'anything' just browsing and maybe some Office-style documents.

Part of the reason we upgraded was because our old MacBook Pro acted the same even after upgrading the memory and SSD (it ran better, but not better enough). We even went to far as to only manually copy over files we needed and not use the OSX migration tool. Not willing to troubleshoot at this point (sound like work without getting paid for it!) so we just log the other out, but it's pretty annoying. Haven't had enough exposure to multi-logged-in-user OSX systems to know if that's normal, but I know Windows handles it well enough.

sac said:
How do you find anything among 83 tabs?  (I thought I was bad with a dozen or so open at a time.)

Well, I don't defend it as a good practice. Every so often I clean up. The 83 tabs are among 8 windows.