Speed up Google Chrome?

English Network/Internet
1

I have long preferred Google Chrome as my browser. But it has been getting slower and slower, it seems. My home page is the “New Tab” page which is a list of favorites and recently closed pages. It takes quite a long time to start up. Worse, I usually click the link to my gmail account first and it takes a very long time to load! I would think that Chrome would load google pages fastest.

I rarely use Firefox, but I did a speed comparison. Chrome took 20 seconds to get a usable page loaded where Firefox took about 12 seconds using gmail as my home page. Clicking the link to gmail in Chrome added another 20 seconds to get a usable page. I should add that I have FF set to open 4 tabs at once. So, it is about 12 seconds vs. 40.

I can only guess that there are some settings in Chrome which should be tweaked. Does anybody know of any? I have the latest versions of Chrome, FF and 11.4 with KDE 4.6.2. My internet download speed is many MBs. I presume they both use the same Verizon DNS server.

2

Try Tools>Preferences>Under the bonnet>Privacy>Learn more and see if you want to disable some of the settings. Not tried it myself but it looks the most likely place to find something.

3

The only thing that looks like it might have influence is the Proxy setting. It says I am using my system proxy. However, if I click the change button, the details say I connect directly to the internet; which is true. I have no proxy. Don’t know what to make of this.