Opera parodies Google's Chrome speed tests mercilessly (video)

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/28/opera-parodies-googles-chrome-speed-tests-mercilessly-video/

by Ghost_Noname • 16 years ago

110 31 16 years ago

seldo2• 16 years ago

The Chrome "speed tests" really were ridiculous. Oh, so when connected to the world's most gigantic internet connection on a computer that isn't doing anything else, your browser can render pages very quickly? Well, gosh. Are you going to show any other browsers in this video for comparison? No? Oh well then. I will remember to definitely browse the web using your browser instead of the giant ear full of paint/tesla coil combination I was using before, since that's the only thing you've shown it to be faster than.

dminor• 16 years ago

They were pretty obviously meant to be ridiculous - that was the joke.

seldo2• 16 years ago

I don't think they were meant to be funny. Light-hearted, certainly, but they weren't supposed to be a joke. They were supposed to be an eye-catching marketing exercise that associated Chrome in the public mind with "speed". And they're great at creating that association, but the actual tests themselves were completely irrelevant to demonstrating that speed. Which, as a nerd, irritates me.

adammichaelc2• 16 years ago

Dude, it's marketing. It's meant to paint a strong picture and create an association between Chrome and speed, which I think it accomplishes well -- since Chrome <i>is</i> in fact faster it seems like an honest ad. Do you disagree? Or is your beef just that the ad is unscientific? An ad featuring a double-blind study could probably be made to be interesting, kind of like the blind Coke vs. Pepsi taste-tests... but that's not what they made.

endtime6• 16 years ago

>since Chrome is in fact faster it seems like an honest ad.

Opera has a faster JS engine than Chrome.

albemuth• 16 years ago

Yeah, they should have just shown the charts for the benchmarks right? that'll get 2M views...

mumrah• 16 years ago

The pages were actually cached locally for the chrome tests. The point of the test (besides being cool) was to show the rendering speed of the browser.

orblivion2• 16 years ago

I wanted to laugh at it.

coderdude• 16 years ago

It's a shame you didn't find it humorous. I laughed loud enough to startle my nearby co-workers. I mean come on... the potatoes just kind of roll into the bucket. I wasn't sure what to expect from the commercial. It could be that because I thought the video was going to be serious I was caught off-guard. I've seen that potato ad a hundred times on Hulu so it made for a good laugh.

orblivion2• 16 years ago

Well I saw it here for the first time, and the link title said "parody", so I didn't expect it to be serious. It was silly but somehow not funny.

mildweed• 16 years ago

I welcome the Browser Promo Video Wars.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

'mercilessly'

That's modern media for ya - any opportunity for hyperbole, confrontation, and/or controversy. Even when it's not. It wasn't merciless, it was just funny.

foljs2• 16 years ago

Yes, because old media weren't keen on hyperbole...

Say, the Hearst papers...

grandalf3• 16 years ago

I'm rooting for Opera as an underdog, but I can't honestly say I'd ever choose to use it over Chrome (or even Firefox).

frou_dh• 16 years ago

I feel the same but without the rooting part -- there are enough dogs in the race.

endtime6• 16 years ago

As an Opear user, I'm curious - why? It's performant (well, maybe not on memory usage, but I have plenty of memory), highly configurable, has a lot of features, and looks pretty.

pradocchia• 16 years ago

> It's performant (well, maybe not on memory usage, but I have plenty of memory)

I was a die-hard Opera user for years, back when it had the smallest memory footprint and the smallest download size--less than 2MB at one time.

Opera made fast, multi-tab browsing possible on older machines. I guess they have gotten away from that in recent years!

grandalf3• 16 years ago

I think for me it was that when I first tried it it was adware and didn't support javascript. Also, the linux version I tried hadn't received much UI polish.

ez772• 16 years ago

I think I'm missing a previous video to get it, right? Anyone care to share it? Thanks.

sp332• 16 years ago

The second video on that page is the original.

ez772• 16 years ago

Thanks... I still have issues watching video on my mobile, and it shows =S.

dawgr• 16 years ago

When an exception is thrown in Opera, crashing it, can it potentially be exploited? Or is it only exploitable when you get a windows error?

Opera parodies Google's Chrome speed tests mercilessly (video)

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