Google doesn’t do much advertising for itself, but when it does it goes for something a bit off the beaten track. And it doesn’t hold back on the ‘wow’ factor. This was the case with its latest ad for the Google Chrome browser, which pitted its speed against a Tesla Coil, a huge speaker, a potato gun, and so on. The idea was to demonstrate Chrome’s swiftness, but Norwegian browser-maker Opera thought it could do better.
The JavaScript engine in Opera 10.5x is somewhat fasterthan Chrome’s, so maybe the browser maker felt a bit left out. Not to be outdone, Opera sent its crack team of web-browser testers, Odd and Even, to do a bit of grassroots speed testing of their own. Using an apparatus similar to Google’s, though perhaps adapted a bit to the local conditions and Opera’s likely slightly smaller budget, the duo pitted the Opera web browser against a potato, just like Google. The ingenuity of the design amazes and the results may astonish you.
This may be a bit of a spoiler, but Opera wins out in the end. Of course, that was to be expected, Opera wouldn’t publish the test itself if it made the browser look bad. But what’s really amazing is that Opera manages to be several times faster than the potato. 112,620 times faster to be exact, according to Opera’s precise calculations. We’ll leave it up to you to discover the intricacies and the technical details of the test, as well as who wins the fish fight at the end of the video.
On a slightly more serious note, Opera’s video is one of the funniest ‘ads’ for a web browser in (the short) web history. And the clear jab at Google makes it even more delicious. For some reason, the view counter on YouTube is stuck at 303 views, but this video is going viral and fast, at least with the more tech-savvy crowd that might have actually heard of Opera in the first place.
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