Use Chromium instead of Google Chrome to speed up OS X Mavericks
After upgrading to OS X 10.9 Mavericks I've found my system being unusually slow. It seems that all apps are running perfectly smooth with the new system, but the latest Google Chrome (Version 30.0.1599.101) is loading pages very slowly, the page scrolling is very laggy and even opening new tabs is painfully slow.
It turned out that in a few seconds after launching Chrome one of the Chrome Helper processes stopped responding. This process seems to drag the whole system down and made everything to be very slow.
This seems to be a known issue, and the Chrome dev team has already addressed it.
As an alternative I installed the latest version of Chromium - which Google Chrome gets the juice from anyway.
The latest Chromium version (32.0.1687.0 (231796)) seems to be completely stable on Mavericks, so the system is happy and fast, and I can carry on using my favourite developer and browser environment :)
Written by Robert Pataki
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7 Responses
Excellent observation, thanks for sharing! I thought there had to be something wrong with those frozen processes...
Seems it has landed in Canary too according to a comment on the Chromium issue:
76 agau...@chromium.org
this works fine in latest canary 32.0.1685.0 (Official Build 231471)
OS=Mac OS X 10.9,
I actually had to do the opposite and downgrade from Canary and Dev to the Stable. I did another clean install of Mavericks so maybe I can try going back to Canary and Dev.
Today I found that latest Chrome (Version 31.0.1650.48) is stable and doesn't crash as the version before. yay!
seeing similar issue with external display with Version 31.0.1650.63
I have Version 34.0.1847.131 installed and I am experiencing dreadful loading speed on initial page loads.
Any other thoughts or suggestions?
I've read that lots of users still have the same issue on Retina Macbook Pros, or when using an external display. It seems that the Chrome dev team has fixed and merged the original issue (unresponsive process in Activity Monitor - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=304860&can=1&q=app%20nap&colspec=ID%20Pri%20M%20Iteration%20ReleaseBlock%20Cr%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20OS%20Modified) .
There also seems to be a fix for the external display issue in the latest version of Chromium and Chrome Dev - more details: http://www.inertramblings.com/2014/03/13/is-google-chrome-running-obscenely-slow-on-your-obscenely-expensive-mac-pro-or-retina-macbook-pro-with-4k-or-uhd-monitor-fear-not/
Unfortunately it seems that the slowness is not the only issue with Chrome - I have noticed that pages in Chrome are extremely laggy when scrolling - I hope that in the new version they also addressed this bug.
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