Verdict on Google Chrome? – Memory Hog September 3, 2008
Posted by Andrew Wee in : browsers , trackbackYou’ve probably read about Google’s new release of it’s Chrome browser and possibly read blog posts about the new challenge to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox.
The question is: Should you install it?
As Status_Girl AKA Melanie Nathan notes: Chrome has an accompanying 38-page cartoon explaining how it works. I’m not sure how many would spend the time to read the pretty techy cartoon, but it reads more like a graphic novel, than a mere cartoon.
Still, there’re reports that it’s a fast browser.
I’ve noticed that on sites like my buddy Amit Mehta’s SuperAffiliateMindset, the inclusion of widget and/or tracking code from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BlogSkinny, Blog Rush and others might trip Chrome up. Making me think that the browser is optimized for HTML content.
Chrome doesn’t have the RSS auto-discovery features of Firefox (meaning you can’t click on the RSS icon if the browser skims through the site to locate a RSS feed). So you either have to look for a RSS icon or link and click on it. Or you can try permutations of domain-name.com/RSS to try to locate it.
To read RSS feeds, you’ll need a web-based RSS Reader like Google Reader or Bloglines.
Affiliate Marketers take note:
I was initially concerned that Chrome might have the cookie-crunching “feature” of Apple’s Safari browser. Safe to say, the default setting is to “Accept all cookies”, which we should be rejoicing. No affiliate tracking cookie, no affiliate commission, so this is a good thing.
I tested it via an affiliate link and the tracking cookie lodged.
I’m just a little concerned that cookies (located via the “Options” and “Under the Hood” pulldown menu) have 3 settings -
- Accept all cookies
- Restrict how third party cookies are used
- Block all cookies
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that users don’t opt for option #3.
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Chrome’s Achilles Heel
Here’s where Chrome’s advantages and shortfalls are apparent.
Yes, you have tabbed browsing, you can even pull out the tabs into their own separate windows (kinda “Apple-like” in a way).
But it’s not without a price.
I did an informal benchmark with Mozilla Firefox, opening 3 tabbed browser sessions in each browser:
While Firefox (shown as firefox.com above) is a single session of 69 megabytes of RAM, Chrome’s 3 sessions (labelled as chrome.exe above) take up a total of a whopping 104 megabytes of memory. Nearly double of what Firefox uses!
Google Chrome: 4 separate processes
But when you look at Firefox:
Mozilla Firefox: a single process
The opening of separate processes means that you’ll be able to pull out and put back each browsing session, collapsing it into a single browser or breaking it up.
No wonder users are saying that the collapse of a single “tab” leaves the other tabs intact…that’s because each tab is a discrete browser session!
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Google Chrome sports a couple of cool touches like a graphical history of recently visited sites:
If you’re an internet surfer who uses 1-3 tabs in your surfing, Chrome might be faster than your regular browser.
BUT, if you’re a power user who regularly has 10-20 tabs open AND you need the SEO/analytics plugins that Firefox offers, I strongly discourage you from moving to Chrome. (at least till more plugins are developed for the open source browser).
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A couple of unknowns: How do you manage Chrome’s browser cache?
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Bottomline: Install Chrome as a preview tool to see how your websites look through the new browser.
But using Chrome as your workhorse browser? I’d hold off for a couple of months.
Popularity: 10%
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I agree with some of this especially the fact that there needs to be more plugins developed for Chrome but I do not see it as a memory hog. I just ran my own test. Five tabs open in FireFox takes up 123,900 K and 5 tabs open in Chrome is only taking up 16,400 K. Sorry but all I’ve seen so far is that Chrome sucks up SIGNIFICANTLY less memory than any other browser. It may be a light weight now since it has no plugins and RSS support is week but it is definitely NOT a memory hog.
Chrome IS a memory hog!
from the Chromium Blog: http://blog.chromium.org/
Measuring memory
If you’re measuring memory in a multi-process application like Google Chrome, don’t forget to take into account shared memory. If you add the size of each process via the Windows XP task manager, you’ll be double counting the shared memory for each process. If there are a large number of processes, double-counting can account for 30-40% extra memory size.
To make it easy to summarize multi-process memory usage, Google Chrome provides the “about:memory” page which includes a detailed breakdown of Google Chrome’s memory usage and also provides basic comparisons to other browsers that are running.
Never mind shared memory! I had ~10 tabs open a couple of days ago, and suddenly everything on my PC slowed to a crawl! So I did ctrl-alt-del and when Task Manager appeared (60-90 seconds later!), my swap file was a whopping 1.5 GIG!!
However, when I terminated Chrome, it went back to just a few hundred meg.
I’m going back to Firefox!
Big brother can’t keep tabs on you then!
I have the same problem with firefox, though.
Firefox 3 will routinely hog up to 2 gigs of memory on me with only a few (3-5) tabs if left open for more than a couple of hours.
I’m not saying you should switch to Chrome, I just think that we should stop considering Firefox as the height of perfection when in reality it’s as bad a memory hog as any other browser, maybe worse.
“Firefox definitely hogs a lot of memory. Yes. I’m sure. I can swear for that.” — Yeah Right. That was 1 and a half years ago. That beast I bet you’re using is Firefox 1.5.
Firefox 3 definitely uses much less memory. And update your addons and remove all of your plugins when you upgrade!
Old plugins, like Google toolbar and yahoo toolbar make firefox leak and crash. Addons are known to leak and leak and leak. Firefox 1.5 was known for huge caching in memory.
Chrome. I don’t care if I’m counting shared memory or not, Windows (not just task manager) definitely does not take that into account and enlarges my pagefile (even though Google Chrome’s memory claimed to have used 48M and Firefox 128 M). Killing Chrome saved up 180MB in Task manager and the page file shrunk right away. So shared memory doesn’t actually work. (at least in windows it doesn’t) A good program which isolated plugins through process and tab through threads would be much better.
I ended up here after a google search to see if others were finding Chrome to be a memory hog. I’m DEFINITELY a power user, usually having 2 windows, and 12-20 tabs, between the two. When I ran activity monitor (I’m on Mac), it was obvious that chrome was killing my memory. I think I’ll revert to FF for my heavy browsing and keep chrome for when I need an alternate browser open as well
I tested it too against Firefox and Safari and I’ll be sticking with Firefox. I’d like to try Chrome again in the future because it did seem very fast. I’ll need a faster computer though before I use it on a regular basis.