Google's Chrome browser for the fastest browsing PC World has announced that in a drag race between Chrome and Firefox, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, Google's super-popular browser took first place Chrome is fast. But is it sophisticated?

To evaluate browser performance, PC World used three freely available benchmarking tools: Speedometer 3.0, Jetstream2, and Motionmark 1.3. testing, Jetstream focuses on assembly and Javascript, and Motionmark tests graphics within the browser.

PC World conducted its tests on a mid-spec PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti graphics, 16 GB of DDR4-3200 memory, and a Samsung 970 Evo SSD. Somewhat oddly, PC World chose Windows 10 rather than 11 as the OS platform for the test.

To cut a long story short, Chrome came in first in Speedometer and second in the other two benchmarks; Chrome's second place was a close second, and overall Chrome is clearly the fastest browser.

PC World notes that there is more to the browser than just speed. PC World says, "Google's business model is based on data processing, and the company has been repeatedly criticized for collecting a disproportionate amount of user data." PC World says.

What the test does not touch on is resource usage and efficiency. Regarding the former, Chrome has a reputation for being a memory hog. As I write this, my current instance of Chrome has multiple tabs, each individually consuming about 1GB of memory.

With a footprint like this, it does not take many tabs to consume 16 or 32 GB of memory. Similarly, Chrome is not necessarily famous for its efficiency, and it is usually agreed that if maximizing battery life is a really big issue, one should refrain from using it.

Of course, for many users, many of these considerations end up being academic compared to the convenience factor: if you are a heavy user of Google's various cloud services, such as Gmail or Google Docs, using Chrome instead of a competing browser The relative simplicity of the two is quite compelling on the surface.

And for most PC users, it is a "superficially" sufficient reason. For the author, who is surgically stitched into the Google ecosystem, using Chrome is a bit uncomfortable, but it is one thing he cannot resist.

Certainly, I don't want to use or manage multiple browser profiles. Nor do I want to go through the trouble of knowing that it is impractical to use a different browser for some tasks. Certainly, there are some jobs where Chrome is a must.

Like so many things in this digital life, by using Chrome, I'm giving my autonomy and agency to a giant corporation in exchange for a little convenience, and pretending not to notice the creeping hegemony.

As Orwell said, ignorance is strength, and if I hit the preview button to proofread this article before uploading it, it will render 0.02 seconds faster than it otherwise would have. It's worth giving up my freedom, right?