Chrome
 

I've downloaded Google's new toy, Chrome. It's their entry into the web browser world. Their big claim to fame on it is that they're launching a new process for every tab with the theory that a single unstable page, such as a flash animation with a memory leak gone amok, won't bring down the entire browser.

It's a good theory, as long as they keep the per-process overhead in check. A very informal test on my part shows that Chrome, with 8 tabs open, is using about 60% more memory than Firefox with the same 8 tabs. Not a good start.

Try the beta of IE8. Early reports are that it uses ridiculous amounts of memory.

I'm not really looking at Chrome as a competitor to IE. I've already long ditched IE. I'm more interested in how it compares to Firefox.

And I know this is a first beta release, so it's not going to be anywhere near ideal yet. But the per-page process launching is their main differentiater, so they'd better get it rock solid eventually.

Oh hey, turns out the way I was opening tabs wasn't even actually spawning new processes. If I do it such that it actually takes advantage of the new process feature, the memory factor grows from ~160% to ~200%+. Yikes.

Other than lacking elegance, are you generally running sufficiently tight on resources that this would be a problem?

Generally no, but if they're trying to tout memory management as a selling point, using more than double the memory isn't the best place to start.

Oh, didn't know they were touting that.

I'm going to hope they fail regardless. I don't need the added headache of another major browser to consider for testing and design.

I read one opinion that thinks it'll drive web developers to better practices. Not only is it going to spawn individual processes per page, but it will supposedly have its own process manager (I don't think that's implemented yet, but I could just be missing it). So you'll be able to immediately, from within the browser, spot and kill memory-hog/leaking pages. The writer of that opinion is hopeful that it will lead to people being more careful about their java and other in-page apps since the browser will now be calling them out to the user.

I don't think the average user is going to be savvy enough for that to be much of a factor.

I agree, and so long as we have to develop and test for IE and Mozilla/Firefox, nothing is going to be optimized to Chrome.

We only develop our internal and external software for IE, which completely sucks for Mac users.

We even had a couple brainiacs send us code to make our end user facing page work with FF.

I am looking forward to playing with Chrome, but my primary computer is on its last legs and I don't want to risk epic failure until school is done.