Chrome a Priority for Web Performance Monitoring

This November, Google’s little browser that could, was able to.  Across the globe, Chrome usage (25.69%) finally surpassed Firefox (25.23%) – making it #2 after Internet Explorer (40.63%) as the most used browser on a monthly basis, according to StatCounter, a website analytics company.

While not surprising, as Google dominates in every other aspect of the market, it is noteworthy that people are choosing minimalism and speed—including Catchpoint users!  (Who knew they prefer speed?!)

Chrome was made famous by its simple UI, application performance, JavaScript processing speed, and the merging of the search bar and the address bar.  It keeps browsing stable by using isolated processing–allocating a separate process for each site and plug-in.  For those of you who keep a million tabs open, this prevents tasks from interfering with each other, so an error on one page will not affect the performance of a page in a different tab.

Chrome is also the only browser to support SPDY, a network protocol designed by Google to augment HTTP, to reduce page load time.  SPDY works by creating a new session layer in between HTTP and TCP that brings the ability of multiplexed streams –multiple streams of requests and responses over a single secure TCP connection – to the web. It features HTTP header compression and request prioritization to solve channel clogging.

Chrome’s steady usage growth and its ongoing innovation for a faster web were the 2 key reasons we launched web performance monitoring on Chrome browser with SPDY support in mid-November.  The freshly hatched Chrome agent allows our customers to properly monitor the complexities of webpages with browser-specific functionalities.  As the web is evolving, Catchpoint is adapting too.

Devan G.