Big tables slow in chrome

[TedCarron]

If you use javascript to create a table with 10 columns and 1000 rows (5 letters of text in each cell ) in a scrollable div in chrome it will create quickly and scroll slowly. In IE7 it will create slowly and scroll totally smoothly.

To be honest I prefer the snappy redraw of IE. People are used to waiting for web pages to load but they are intolerant of what seems like a laggy display.

Does anyone know
- why chrome is so slow scrolling big displays?
- do Google regard this as a problem?
- is there any plans to fix this?
- is there anything I can do about this?

It seems to me that right now chrome is great for applications with high processing needs but not so good if it has large scrollable displays - like spread sheets or many other business applications with big tables.

[sulasno]

Welcome to ChromeSpot

can you provide a url for me to test at my end ?

[TedCarron]

Here is a link to a test page.

http://www.significantdatasystems.com/SlowTable

I have used 3000 rows to emphasize the difference between the browsers. Even at 3000 rows IE is still easily smooth enough for a credible interface: chrome, unfortunately, is not.

It was only when creating this test page that I realized the issue seems to be the 'overflow:hidden' style on the table cells. Without this chrome outperfoms IE but with it chrome performs as in this test.

I am running chrome version 3.0.195.33

[sulasno]

using Chromium, the page doesn't loads instantly but it is not that slow

[TedCarron]

Load speed is not the issue.

The issue is the speed at which the table scrolls inside the div.

Try loading it in IE it loads slower but it scrolls almost perfectly.

In a trivial page like this the difference is almost tolerable in more complex pages the difference is much greater. I suspect there are other issues like this which add together to compound the slow redraw problem.

[sulasno]

ha ............
sorry I didn't read the whole post

scrolling at my end is fine; it could be because I installed the SmoothScroll extension
http://chromium.exxe.ath.cx/smoothscroll/

[TedCarron]

Do you happen to know if smooth scrolling will be built into the main version anytime soon?

Extensions are great for individuals but developers can't rely on people havingin them installed.

Do you know if you can install extensions on V3 of chrome? I have put the extensions argument in command line but get an error about permission[0] when I try to install the extension.

[sulasno]

extensions are not supported in the stable and beta Chrome at the moment

(I doubt smooth scrolling will be built in in Chrome though)

[PeterR]

In the current DEV version, it seems to scroll just fine, but it does take some time to load though.

As a rule, page elements that do not have a defined size tend to choke page loads. Early versions of chrome did exhibit slow scrolling, but normally only when some elements on a large page where still not finished loading. And in particular if many of the elements came from other domains. Something that is common of forums where all the users are using different image hosts and no size tags. But in my experience, this only happened the first time you scrolled to a particular portion of the page. Once you had been there, the rendered output was cached and the page scrolled much more smoothly.

Now I realize that this comment might seem a bit off point, but not so much as you might think. Most render engines will attempt to render the visible portion of the page while loading the remaining elements. I think what you were seeing was the result of the render engine trying to decide how the rest of the table would size, given the fact that there was no specified size to the table cells, either height or width.

Images without height or width tags have always caused load/render issues, even with the 2.x versions of IE and NutScrape. 2.x & 3.x Netscape used to show only a blank screen until ALL the images had loaded, if height & width were not specified. So while your issue with this table example might seem to be a chrome issue alone, I think it is really a pervasive problem with all browsers and their respective render engine's evolution. As a rule, the better information you can code into a page to properly and completely specify size and position of all elements, the less guess work the browser needs to do, and thus the better and more consistent behavior you will get across all browsers.

FYI - IE 5&6 both scroll badly on your test page. IE 7&8 both work the same as Chrome 6.x dev, slow to load but it scrolls ok. FF & Opera both load and scroll faster... ;-)