Why is Google Chrome’s Startup So Painfully Slow?
I’ve been a Chrome devotee since nearly day one. It’s a stable, reliable, lightning fast browser that handles today’s javascript-heavy pages with ease. It’s so fast, in fact, that I used to show off how I could use Chrome to look something up before Firefox would even start up – that’s right, I could click the Firefox icon, open Chrome, look something up on Wikipedia, and then close Chrome, all before Firefox even appeared on the screen. Like I said, lightning fast.
But that was then, and this is now. These days, it takes Chrome 10-15 seconds to start up on any of my computers, and I have no idea why. I open Chrome, it appears on the screen, sits there sorta locked up with a blank page for 10-15 seconds, then eventually finally becomes responsive. If I type a url into the location bar during this period, when Chrome does finally become responsive it erases that URL and goes to the Chrome Start Page instead.
This happens on multiple XP machines of mine, not just one.
And I’m not the only one having the problem.
I have:
- Turned off all firewalls
- Turned off all antivirus software
- Performed a full system scan for malware
- Uninstalled all of my extensions
- Made sure that the “Automatically detect proxy settings” setting is not selected
And the problem remains.
Chrome is fast once loaded, but the initial startup is painfully slow and sluggish. It’s been like this for months.
Google, what did you do?
February 13th, 2011 at 4:38 pm
Me too, and it’s driving me crazy.
February 14th, 2011 at 9:09 pm
That’s very strange. The only time I had issues like that was back when it was having problems with the windows dns drivers, but that would also cause it to freeze up for 10 seconds when trying to load new pages (once every few minute) and not just on startup, and that has since been resolved. Every computer I currently run chrome on (2 desktops, a netbook, and 2 laptops) still opens instantly. However, for all of mine I am running windows 7, which may be a difference. I’m also running stable version on some and beta/development on others, so that can’t be it. And I’m sure your computers have better specs than my netbook so that probably isn’t it either. Have you retried reinstalling? It’s strange that the only difference I can think of is XP vs W7, but I don’t know if anyone else still using XP to ask if it is a very widespread issue…
February 15th, 2011 at 11:02 am
Lee: Yep, I’ve uninstalled & reinstalled, to no avail. I’ve read about a lot of people having this problem, and for many of them, manually setting their computer’s proxy settings fixes the problem. For that reason I’m fairly convinced that it’s network related. Still, none of those fixes work for me.
Interestingly, IE uses the same network settings as Chrome, and IE doesn’t have a similar problem. I’ve seen no indication of whether it affects Win7 machines. If it is network related, I could see how it could only XP & not Win7.
I dunno. It’s annoying, to be sure, and I’d like the problem to go away, but if it only happens on startup I suppose I can live with it.
February 23rd, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Try clearing cache and temporary internet files. It worked for me.
If you dont know how to do that click the wrench and go to options under the hood and theres the button to clear browsing data there. You don’t have to delete your cookies tho.
Also you need to go to Internet Options in Control Panel and click the delete temporary internet files button. Again you don’t have to delete your cookies tho.
March 17th, 2011 at 9:14 am
It’s been happening to me for months and months as well. It’s driving me nuts! I am running XP, and have installed and reinstalled, unchecked the auto detect proxy setting, cleared my cache… nothing works!
Why Google.. Why?
April 12th, 2011 at 8:06 pm
I am having that issue right now, funny thing is when I first saw your comment a month ago i was like nah he must be exaggerating but it’s no joke, up to even 20 seconds I will wait Chrome is open and I can open new tabs but they wont search. the thing that pisses me off the most is however, the first page takes like 20 seconds while if I open a new tab right away I can get it to load in around 10, why does that happen? I just feel like it is very buggy lately.
April 27th, 2011 at 7:15 am
Yeah, two months ago, I could keeo 40 tabs open, switch between several windows, download fast, no problem.
Now, it’s a PAIN, ‘Chrome renderer’ takes 90% CPU resources after 4 tabs open, takes MINUTES to download and ‘render’ some pages, and usually ends up crashing, which is a blessing because at least you can select the page you want and ‘reload’ it.
Nothing has changed on my computer (mac mini, osx 10.6), Safari still works fine, and yes, I have cleaned the cache… Let’s not mention the ridiculous amount of time it takes to close the app, or load it…
Sometimes, the download of a page takes so much time, I think it’s my internet connection, so I open Safari, and, whooshhh, voilaaa, I get the page at normal speed.
Ah, oh, one more thing, when you bookmark a page (cmd-D), you have to sit there for 5 seconds before Chrome allows you to do edit the name …
On my laptop (Macbook osx 10.5), it’s become impossible to open any page, it seems it’s accessing the site, and then you get that ugly icon ‘aw snap, something went wrong’ …
Something IS very wrong.
Shame, really!
June 20th, 2011 at 6:29 pm
this worked for me..
June 20th, 2011 at 6:30 pm
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=106010
this worked for me.
August 26th, 2011 at 8:58 am
I just cleared my cache and now the browser starts up way faster.
September 16th, 2011 at 2:15 am
I FIXED the big delay in opening Chromium — after trying lots of suggestions online that didn’t work.
What did work for me was simply exporting the bookmarks, deleting them in Chromium, and then re-importing them. This worked for the problematic Chromium version 12: 12.0.742.112 (90304) — on Ubuntu 11.04, but may work for Windows or Mac as well. I have hundreds if not thousands of bookmarks, 2 MB worth, and something must have been garbled in there, resulting in a 10-second delay every time the browser started up.
One small problem remains. My Bookmark Bar shows the “Other Bookmarks” folder toward the right-hand side of the screen. It never opens; clicking it just causes a 10-second delay before you can do anything (even if the folder is empty). But the browser still works and starts up right away. And you can get to the old bookmarks if you need them.
Clearly there are various different causes of the startup delay, so this fix won’t work for everybody. But it’s worth knowing about.
October 18th, 2011 at 11:37 am
None of these helped. Very, very frustrating.
October 30th, 2011 at 5:06 pm
Same for me Ubuntu Linux user
November 18th, 2011 at 9:24 am
I’m having the same problem, and I don’t believe that it’s network related; it only happens on Chrome startup, and my homepage is a local HTML document that I’ve created, with no live content, only links. Chrome shouldn’t need to resolve a proxy or connect to anything to display it.
November 30th, 2011 at 9:48 am
Try the ‘Temporarily Disable Predict Network’ link on this page.
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=113910
It seems to have solved the page loads slowly issue for me.
January 5th, 2012 at 9:07 am
I got this issue in Ubuntu too …
January 8th, 2012 at 6:34 pm
I’ve had this problem on several different Macs since Chrome was released for the Apple OS; this is why I don’t use it. It’s OK once it’s running, but launching can take up to 30 seconds, even on a eight-core MacPro with 16GB of RAM and a 1GB GPU. Loading a large video project into Premiere takes less time than launching Chrome. Safari and Firefox launch as quickly as you’d expect.
January 11th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
I fixed my problem…… Use Internet Explorer !!!
January 18th, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Since a couple of weeks the problem has now arrived here too. Never had problems before, but now when I start Chrome…
it’s just fine – until the first page is loaded; then it hangs for plenty of seconds. Sometimes a “page not responsive” dialogue pops up. After a couple more seconds the page continues just fine and Chrome is back to normal again.
Must have been some sort of “update” that’s not really an improvement :-s
January 21st, 2012 at 2:08 pm
I have the same problem on starting up chrome on win7 and ubantu. Very frustrating. Once it’s open it’s fine. But if you open a new window, same problem every time.
February 5th, 2012 at 12:36 am
Looks like at least for me, Bookmark was causing the same problem. It contained imported bookmarks plus accumulated bookmarks that had lots of folders with multi-levels… once I removed whole bunch, things are quick again.
I am assuming that Chrome loads the bookmark into the memory, but takes forever ..
February 12th, 2012 at 5:07 am
I can confirm that I’ve been having this problem for *months* (maybe even bordering on a year) and it’s actually even more sluggish than the 10-15 seconds at start up mentioned on the blog. It’s probably closer to 30 to 60 seconds!
I can also confirm that it’s not just a Windows XP problem, as I have Windows 7.
It only happens to me the first time I open chrome after booting up my computer. If I hibernate, I’m A-OK, it has to be a complete restart or start up.
Then, after that, we’re back to lightning fast Chrome…. but the long start up is a killer. And it doesn’t seem to be happening with my other browsers. I’ve even thought of switching, but keep using Chrome in the hope that Google will fix this.
They have to be aware of the problem? Right? It’s been going on too long and flies in the face of everything they’re trying to do with the browser.
February 16th, 2012 at 8:14 pm
I’m having the same problem! It just happened recently though. When I try to start chrome up, it basically freezes everything and takes like 15 seconds to actually start. I’ve also uninstalled and re-installed but still doesn’t work.
It doesn’t take long to start up again once i close the browser and re open.
I’m on Windows7 btw.
March 2nd, 2012 at 3:37 pm
The FIX (Export bookmarks, delete them, re-import) I reported last Sept. 16 (above) still works — but I had to do it again. I have thousands of bookmarks, now 4.5MB worth. The import puts them into an Import folder neatly in the bookmarks bar, where they don’t cause any delay when Chrome loads, and they are still searchable as before. And Chrome now opens almost instantly.
Before doing the above, you might want to check your bookmarks bar. Does it have hundreds of bookmarks in it, by accident? If so, move the extra ones to another bookmarks folder. There’s seldom much reason for having more than 20 or so in the bar, since the point of the bookmarks bar is to see your important bookmarks on the screen.
Here’s a specific symptom to help diagnose if this bookmark issue is your problem. If the site is quick-loading (such as http://www.google.com), that page can load quickly when you first start Chrome, but the CPU activity (shown with System Monitor (Ubuntu) or a similar program) continues (for another 15 seconds for me, using a netbook). This slows down whatever you want to do in that 15 seconds. Including the initial load of a complex, ad-filled site, if that’s what you want to visit.
John
March 6th, 2012 at 2:59 am
I know this is the “no surprise” solution, but after more than a year of waiting at least 2 minutes for Chrome to start up enough to allow me to start typing something (quad core mac), I finally exported my bookmarks (Bookmarks > Bookmark Manager > Organize > Export to HTML), went into my Applications, deleted the Chrome app, and went into User/Library/Application Support/ and deleted the entire Chrome folder.
Then, I opened Safari, went to http://www.google.com/mac, and downloaded and installed Chrome fresh, and re-imported my bookmarks.
It’s literally 100 times faster to start (that’s no joke – it went from something like 120 seconds to open to less than a second). No sooner did I click the icon than it opened and was ready to go. Yes, I lost all my history and probably some plugins, but the difference is totally worth it to me. Of course, there is probably a more elegant way to solve this problem, but this actually worked for me, and I wanted to share for those of you too impatient to go through all the stupid DNS changes other places recommend.
Cheers
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:44 pm
right-click on your chrome shortcut, after …/chrome.exe add the following line:
–proxy-server=
you’re welcome!
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:45 pm
right-click on your chrome shortcut, click properties, in the “target” line, after …/chrome.exe add the following line:
–proxy-server=
you’re welcome!
April 13th, 2012 at 3:01 pm
mrfixit your welcome! returns invalid short- cut
April 15th, 2012 at 9:31 pm
I am running google chrome with windows 7 ultimate and just started having the same problem.
April 19th, 2012 at 9:10 am
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=106010
Worked for me, also.
April 21st, 2012 at 11:15 am
right-click on your chrome shortcut, click properties, in the “target” line, after …/chrome.exe add the following line:
–proxy-server=
note: there should be a space after …/chrome.exe
example: …/chrome.exe -proxy-server=
April 21st, 2012 at 2:13 pm
okinamana, I tried it both with and without the space–I can’t even get the “properties” page to accept the string. It rejects both changes as invalid.
April 23rd, 2012 at 4:54 pm
Just finally switch to Maxthon 3 for gods sake!
May 2nd, 2012 at 12:46 am
If your browsing history is rather extensive, & not cleared every few months, chrome will lag at start up to load it all. Clear it, & see the difference. Instant start-up again.
May 2nd, 2012 at 12:54 am
If your browsing history is rather extensive, & not cleared every few months, chrome will lag at start up to load it all. Clear it, & see the difference. Instant start-up again.
Go to:
chrome://settings/advanced (in the url bar)
click [Clear Browsing Data]
Choose [From the begining of time] from the drop down box
Check everything except:
Clear Saved Passwords
Clear Auto Form-Fill Data
Then click Clear Browsing Data, & notice how long it takes to clear it all.