snydeq writes "Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 herald a new, resource-intensive era in Web browsing, one sure to shift our conception of acceptable minimum system requirements, InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy concludes in his head-to-head comparison of the recently announced multi-process, tabbed browsers. Whereas single-process browsers such as Firefox aim for lean, efficient browsing experiences, Chrome and IE 8 are all about delivering a robust platform for reliably running multiple Web apps in a tabbed format in answer to the Web's evolving needs. To do this, Chrome takes a 'purist' approach, launching multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. IE 8, on the other hand, goes hybrid, creating multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process without specifically assigning each tab to its own instance. 'Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust,' Kennedy argues, 'but at a cost in terms of resource consumption.' At what cost? Kennedy's comparison found Chrome 'out-bloated' IE 8, consuming an average of 267MB vs. IE 8's 211MB. This, and recent indications that IE 8 itself consumes more resources than XP, surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing."
should be easy for google to do coz all they have to do to get that going is adapt their OS X version to the version that the iPhone uses... oh wait....
Thank goodness somebody pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.
Quite apart from the resource consumption, the main feature was supposed to be speed. FF3 is faster to load the same set of tabs than Chrome is, and I haven't noticed massive speed increases even on single Javascript-heavy pages. As for runaway Javascript lunching the whole browser - never happened to me, TYVM. The only thing that did that to FF3 was an extension.
I installed Chrome because it was New! Shiny!, but I am sticking with FF3 for now.
Does there really have to be one browser to rule them all? I mean, if I have to run a lot of web 2.x apps at work, but at home just like to look at a few blogs, will I be able to use Chrome on one computer and Firefox on the other or are you stupid motherfuckers going to start a war over whether or not Firefox is the One True Browser or not?
Huh?
I mean, "hairyfeet" up above seems to believe that there are "trolls" who want to make him buy a "12Gb of RAM,needing its own dang AC unit just to keep from turning my place into a sauna" just because some AC writes a comment suggesting that Chrome might be better than Firefox for some tasks.
Or maybe the real criminal here is Google who has had the temerity and bad taste to actually release a product that it appears they have thought about, and then insulted us all by charging no fucking money for it. Damn them all to hell for giving us another choice of free browser.
Mozilla has no one to blame but themselves for getting humiliated by Google and Chrome.
Humiliated? Where did you pull that from?
So Google have come up with a sort of functional (for some) browser. Great, that's nice, atrength in diversity, different strokes for different folks yada yada. But Firefox is a feature-rich, mature browser, lean in itself, but with lots of add-ons tailored to individuals with individual requirements.
Chrome has only just been released, lacks features other than stability and apparently has a huge memory footprint.
If I were a Firefox developer, I really don't think I would be humiliated.
Link for the google-handicapped: http://windows.kde.org/ [kde.org] actually lists KDE 4.1 as a release for Windows. I'm surprised there wasn't more news about it though. It seems to still be alpha/true beta quality software though but interesting nevertheless. Nice for people like me who like KDE apps but also like Windows (gasp).
Correction: Konqueror can be compiled to use QtWebKit, but out of the box it still uses KJS/KHTML from the KDE Devs. If you don't believe me then check yourself on Debian or other distributions.
Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.
Firefox allows me to specify fonts and minimum font size for all websites.
And Firefox extensions actually make life comfortable:
1. PDF Download 2. Downthemall (increases download speeds up to 4 times, may not matter to most people but does significantly to many of us) 3. Web Developer Bar (nothing like this on ANY other browser) 4. FireBug (nothing like this on ANY other browser, not even Safari's inbuilt "Develop" menu options comes close for debugging) 5. Better Gmail 6. Better GReader (yes, not useful for common joes) 7. Tabmix Plus 8. Speed Dial 9. Foxmarks which makes sure all my bookmarks (and their keyboard shortcuts) are exactly the same in my office, on my three home machines (XP, Leopard, Ubuntu)
So, sure, you may find all this functionality "uninspiring" if your needs are simply to browse. You'll do just fine with ANY browser in that case, and you probably represent 80% of the browsing community -- but you're a small tip of that iceberg as you know what a browser option means. Most of that 80% doesn't know or care, they simply want to check their hotmail and read BBC. They're hardly going to be swayed away from IE for that precise reason. So for this group, Chrome is immaterial anyway.
To recap:
FOR GEEKS AND PEOPLE WHO KNOW: Firefox or Opera, depending on whom you ask
FOR THOSE WHO REALLY WANT TO USE WEBKIT: Safari will do, thank you
FOR THOSE WHO JUST WANT TO BROWSE: Their platform's default browser will be it.
See, Chrome doesn't really make a dent in any of those camps.
And that makes it unlikely I will ever use it. I tried Chrome and mostly liked what I saw, but I stopped using it and went back to Firefox, because it has Adblock Plus. Each time I am forced to use a browser that doesn't have this, I am horrified at how sites look and why people still use Internet.
Honestly, why would anyone care about your opinion if the only reason you use a browser is because a website you pay for refuses to make their site work right?
It's not a flaw in the browser, it's a problem with Netflix.
However it is slow and crashes or freezes (or rather individual pages freeze).
Actually, you CAN crash the whole browser, not just individual pages. Try typing "about:%" in the address bar. The entire browser crashes before you even see the %.
IE8 with 6 processes was using 958524 KB and Chrome with 11 processes was using 783840 KB.
Uhm, how are you counting that? There are 11 Chome.exe processes, and when you add their "Mem Usage" columns up you get 783840KB? Because, er, OS's which use paged memory VM's don't work like that; about the only way you can really work out how much memory they're all using is by comparing their VM mappings and seeing what bits are shared between them (and not also with other processes; e.g. standard Win32 dll's everyone uses) and which aren't.
This is why Chrome has about:memory, with an *estimate* of how much memory Chrome is using; if I spawn 11 tabs and add up Mem Use, I get 263MB. about:memory, however, estimates it's using 166MB, and a good chunk of that may well be in memory mapped files and as easily disposable as filesystem cache.
>"surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing"
Yep, an era that won't sit well for users of thin-clients, multiuser servers, older machines, and smaller mobile stuff. I think some of the ideas in Chrome are good, but I am not so sure I like the idea of ultra-fat browsers. I recently was complaining that Firefox was starting to get bloated (defeating the goal of FireFox, to be lean and mean). I don't mind different concepts, except the design of web sites will, no doubt, start demanding more and more "fatness" to work (kinda like trying to use the web without Flash).
I see a future where the hot new thing is lean, fast "local" applications that are compiled so they run right on your own computer, no browser needed. They will have several advantages besides speed and working better on older computers. Foremost among these, if the network goes down you can keep working, and you keep control of your private data at all times.
...surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing.
How is this a bad thing? Modern browsers are far more demanding than Mosaic, because they do more. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a more demanding browser if you need the increased requirements to add functionality... that's the point of advancing our hardware capabilities!
Next thing you know, people will be complaining that it takes more muscle to run a 360 game than it took to run an Atari game. Jeez.
I agree. I find it suspect that people are suggesting that an application is using more resources than the operating system in which said application runs. Especially when that very application provides a framework for other applications to run.
An "operating system" should, by its very nature, not "utilize" resources in and of itself, but simply partition and apportion them. Of course, I haven't R'd any FA's for a while. Perhaps they are talking about the myriad of services and built-in applications that are bundles with Windows.
That said, I find it very disappointing (although understandable) that both of these new browsers have been released for the only operating system I do not use professionally. I look forward to one day trying both of these new browsers outside of a VM.
An OS contains more than just a kernel. Usually it contains many daemons working. For example, on my Xubuntu OS, I have 96 programs without counting any major ones (terminal windows, browsers, apache, etc.) All of these daemons are needed to provide a modern operating system experience.
A kernel by nature should be tiny, but an OS should contain tons of functionality.
Advancement in technology means miniaturization, simplification. More advanced technologies require less power, not more. The modern desktop computer is thousands of times smaller than our first computers, millions of times faster, but you can run them on a battery, where as our first computers required their own power grid.
The fact that new software requires more CPU cycles, more raw power, is a mark of the immaturity of software technology. As we advance, our applications should require less memory and less power as we trim out redundant features. The resources a technology consumes is not a sign of how powerful it is.
Modern browsers do not demand more resources than Mosaic because of how powerful they are, they demand more resources because memory is inexpensive, and it's cheaper to eat up resources than it is to refine our methods.
Hardware advances mostly for games, media and business needs.
Actually, AC, while I don't think you are absolutely correct, you may be on to something there. It's widely believed that many of the advances in home electronics, home theater, computing and networking were due to porn more than any other factor. So if we use that as a starting base, perhaps Chrome was created for a different reason. Maybe it is really destined to be the Ultimate Porn Surfing Engine.
Just think: It'll start small. Google will use Chrome compatibility to partner with porn web operators to offer to protect their site content, and securely ensure payments. It'll work great, and soon all porn sites jump ship and start relying on the Chrome browser. Porn will no longer be viewable on IE or FF, so the world switches completely to Chrome. At that point, Google knows they have the entire internet by its collective short and curlies (almost literally), and that's when they SQUEEZE.
God help us all, we've uncovered it: Chrome's really a plot to take over the world!
Microsoft was unfazed [today.com]. "Browsers donâ(TM)t need to be integrated with online apps," said marketing developer Ian Moulster. "Certainly not like the operating system... Iâ(TM)ll just get back to you."
It's hype. By the time you ad in all of the mind-numbing widgetry, the browser becomes the ultimate in madness. It proves the old adage that when you get a really nice hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Mod me whatever, but browsers need to go on a diet so that there can be cross-platform coherency and cohesiveness for apps, whether it's on a phone, a kiosk, a notebook, an HD TV DVR display, or whatever. I want the same page to display the same way on Konqueror, Safari, IEWhatever, Chrome (please, a marketing guy needs a spanking), Opera, or whatever. Stop for a while and get it right guys.
A good question that I think needs to be asked is this: "What information are we trying to convey?" and "What is the best way to convey that message?"
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information. It seems to me this concept got perverted and got us into the pickle that we currently see. I remember the days when it was HARD to find information on the net, well thanks to web 2.x data is getting hard to find again.
Can somebody explain to me why resource limits are still an issue in Windows? I usually keep 25-40 tabs open in FF, and after it gets over the 350MB range, the whole browser starts to act flaky. Why is 211MB, 267MB, 350MB or even 500MB a problem on today's platforms with 2 to 6GB RAM standard?
The overlapping memory pages is kinda cool, but your computer actually is using all of that RAM you installed
This is not entirely true. Normally the BIOS will remap IO address space above system RAM, but on 32 bit hardware (with or without PAE), the BIOS will generally reserve a hole somewhere between 3GB and 4GB. Depending on your specific hardware, this hole might be pretty big. For instance, if you have a 512MB video card, that memory gets mapped into the system address space, and you lose the same amount of system RAM for the privilege. There are some BIOS that will allow you to map this memory above 4GB but drivers sometimes flake out when you do that; plus you have to run a 64bit OS at that point too.
which is why you can see computers in Circuit City running 32-bit Vista and reporting 4 GB (or more) of memory.
You will never see a 32 bit vista machine report more than 4GB of ram as it's simply not supported. (Makes you wonder why they turn on PAE by default since it slows down memory access?? A vendor turning PAE off is probably just smart.) You will, however, see vista report 4gb in the computer properties -- but it's more of a marketing trick. 32 bit windows will only allocate 2GB of address space to user processes anyway and 3GB only with a special boot switch (that you have to be careful with.)
As far as your claim that some cheap motherboards do not connect the PAE pins, that's also somewhat misleading too -- the pins are all there anyway -- its just the feature was left out of cheap junk northbridge chipsets... but this was back in the Pentium III days. It's very doubtful you can even find a board anymore that does not support PAE; especially since pretty much all current model CPU's have 64 bit support.
Mostly Wrong. The reason you don't see all 4 GB on Windows machines is a combination of 2 factors.
#1. Memory mapped devices. This includes device which has onboard RAM (video card is biggest factor with the 1GB of RAM that's usual now). This must be mapped somewhere in the physical address space (virtual address space is irrelevant for this issue). And for compatibility with 32-bit DMA purposes has to be below the 4GB mark. So modern motherboards will remap the "displaced" RAM above the 4GB mark so it is still accessible.
Now onto issue #2. Windows *could* use PAE to access this relocated RAM, but it doesn't on desktop editions (even if PAE is enabled). Technically from a hardware point, it should be accessible, but once again for compatibility purposes, the Microsoft folk have opted to simply not use any RAM seen above the 4GB mark. The reason why is because of poorly programmed 3rd party drivers which assume all RAM is below 4GB, and try to do 32-bit DMA (and thus trash random memory and crash the system). For Microsoft, it's easier to simply avoid the issue then explain why it's not there fault to customers. (BTW server editions are a different story and DO support using RAM above 4GB).
You can verify this by opening up Microsoft's "System Information" utility and going to the "Memory" section. Simply put, it does not show ANY memory above 0xffffffff despite the fact that I know for a fact that there is RAM mapped above that address (installing Linux with "64GB memory support", aka PAE support, shows this to also be true and DOES report and using all 4GB of my RAM).
This issue has NOTHING to do with "shared memory space between processes.
As I understand it, multiple processes don't necessarily mean more bloat. If a set of processes are all running the same executables and libraries, then the code is all mapped into physical memory only once and shared between the processes.
At least under Linux, using fork() and copy-on-write paging makes multiple processes highly efficient. Maybe it's a bit tougher to do under Windows (which lacks a fork call), but it seems to me that careful coding could get close to the same results.
They measured the working set [blogspot.com], not the private working set. One of the big reasons why Chrome's "spawn a bunch of different processes, all running the same code" strategy isn't a big deal is because Windows shares memory between copies of code when it can.
Simply inserting an a href linking to "evil:%" crashes chrome. ALL of chrome. While this is acceptable in a beta product, I don't buy the graceful, tab-only crashes they're promising.
Does anyone else think that benchmarking early builds is useless? Of course they're not particularly efficient yet - premature optimization and all that. Wake me when the final builds roll around.
(Of course, that brings up another issue: What the rest of the world calls "Version 3.0", Google calls "Beta". And what the rest of the world calls "Beta", Microsoft calls "Version 3.0".)
Enough with the stupid "memory consumption" pseudo-benchmarks. It doesn't "consume" your memory, it uses it. If I have 2 or 4 or 8 GB sitting there, why would I want my software to not use it? What do I possibly gain by having a program that uses only 100 MB when it could be using 1 GB to keep more rendered pages in memory (and speed up the display when I hit "back" a couple of times), for example?
If the browser refuses to run with less than, X MB available (ex., less than 30 MB), that can be a problem. But if it simply uses memory that would otherwise just be sitting there, how is that a relevant (or negative) thing?
I keep remembering that article where someone from the Mozilla foundation said very proudly that Firefox used less memory than Opera (on Windows), making it "superior". But when you look at situations where memory really matters, you find that you can run Opera on pretty much any cellphone but you can't run Firefox. There's a difference between using less memory and needing less memory.
On a PC, I'll trade 100 MB for a 10% speed increase (in page drawing, tab switching, etc.) any day. One of the reasons I like Opera is that (since years ago) it keeps rendered copies of the previous pages in memory, plus a ful index of your e-mail, so you have instant page flips, instant mail searches, etc..
Multiple intercommunicating processes are generally a good thing. And almost all modern operating systems can share read-only code regions between processes, which is safe.
However, once you put "just in time" compilers in, the sharing goes away. This is classically a Java problem; each Java instance has yet another copy of all the Java libraries in use. If Google Gears ends up importing as much cruft as Java does, it will have the same bloat problems.
Still, browsers have become memory hogs, even when rendering pages that aren't doing anything exciting. Firefox can balloon to 300MB after viewing a modest number of relatively vanilla pages. Even with "browser.cache.memory.enable" set to False.
I'm old enough to remember this kind of argument about assembler vs. compiled languages. Hand coded assembler will always be smaller, and for any given algorithm it will very likely be faster. When viewed as assembler it will always be more elegant.
From time to time one comes across an assembly language application (although it's a lot rarer these days) that is a tour de force, doing the essential tasks of its compiled competitors in a fraction of the space and often noticeably more snappily. But they aren't notable for the breadth of features they offer.
And that's what bloat is about. Bloat isn't about using resources; it's about devoting resources to ideas that seemed like a good idea at the time but which you don't have the time or ability to undo. Sometimes the feature doesn't exist yet, or abandoned, but still leaves its mark. The reason that large assembler programs tend to be lean isn't so much that humans produce tighter code than compilers, although they can. It's because people who code in assembler think very, very had about any feature before adding it. You'd get much the same results if people coded in a language like Brainfuck.
Any application benefits from skepticism about features, whatever it is coded in.
Now, if you think about what Google is trying to do with Chrome, launching a separate process for each tab makes sense; it is a legitimate use of resources. Each tab is, presumably, hosting a different application. You don't want them running in the same address space, anymore than you want traditional applications running in unprotected memory by cooperative multitasking. Yes, it takes more resources to do this, but I've heard much the same complaint about virtual memory and process preemption.
You don't want some random site's malware to get to close to the online banking application running in a different tab, so you've got to take steps. If you're coding was perfect, those steps probably would work pretty well, but running the online apps in different processes is a legitimate use of resources. You can try to protect pages from each other, manage resources such as processor time between them, but eventually you're coming very close to making the browser an operating system in itself.
In fact, for the purposes of Chrome, the browser is an operating system, or at least a layer in the whole operating system that hosts applications. By taking advantage of the underlying operating system's facilities, the browser doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it comes at a cost.
There isn't a universally right or wrong answer to how to architect something like this. When considered as a hypertext viewer, this kind of architecture is wasteful and bloated. When considered as facility to participate in multiple distributed processing applications, this kind of architecture isn't bloated. It consumes more resources, but to achieve an important goal.
In the old style multi-tabbed environments(Firefox, Opera), if one tab crashes, all tabs crash. That's fine if all you're looking at is web pages, because both of those browsers can pull you back up to where you were page wise. But in the era of AJAX and responsive web applications, just reloading the page with your previous session settings isn't enough, because it won't be the way you left it.
IE has been able to create separate process for each instance of the browser for quite some time(mostly because internet explorer and explorer used to share code and crashing one would crash the other which wasn't good), but until IE 8/Chrome it hasn't been done for tabs before.
The upshot of this is that if one of your tabs misbehaves, theoretically your other tabs ought to be fine, the downside is that it means that each tab uses significantly more resources than it would otherwise because state which would otherwise be shared amongst all tabs has to exist for each and every tab.
So basically yes, page complexity is what is causing this to be necessary, but no it's not what is creating the actual increase in resource consumption. I also agree that ditching complexity wherever possible is a good thing(flash,javascript,etc where you don't need it is just plain silly), but rich web applications are a good thing and they're here to stay.
How about this? Put flash in a separate process, and problem solved. 99.99% of all my crashes in Firefox are due to the Flash plugin for Firefox (most of them in youtube)
e.g. Just open youtube and play any video. Now, Chrome Task manager shows three 'processes' - each with memory footprint and CPU usage - One for Browser, one for Tab, and one for Flash Plug-in. You can not kill the Browser process, but you can kill any other.
For more details, you can type "about:memory" in the URL and see what's going on in more details.
You can not kill the Browser process, but you can kill any other.
I found that out as well! I installed Chrome, ran it for the first time and after a bit of surfing I wanted to close the window. When I clicked the red X in the upper right of the window, out of my speakers came this strange voice, booming "YOU CAN NOT KILL TEH BROWSER PROCESSSSSSS".
I only use 64-bit Linux these days. Since Flash isn't 64-bit yet, it runs in a separate process from my 64-bit browser, thanks to nspluginwrapper.
The only problem is, when it does crash, it doesn't restart until I restart my browser. So, my browser is fine, but I won't be watching any more YouTube. Better than a crash, but not as good as it could be. If anyone knows enough about nspluginwrapper to fix this, it would be awesome -- maybe even for 32-bit users.
I believe Chrome does this, too -- but I would hope that, since they've done it deliberately, as a way to minimize the damage a plugin can do, they would also be able to handle plugin crashes more gracefully than requiring a full browser restart.
Just because something takes up more resources doesn't mean it has to be slower. Granted, something that takes less resources usually runs faster, but a good application that makes good use of RAM and CPU power can seem fast.
I don't mind that it uses a lot of RAM so much...I have plenty of that. I wish it didn't use so much CPU, though. I've been using Chrome for the past day or so, and had to stop leaving it open while I was working on other things because every so often it would bog down my CPU for no apparent reason.
And by running tabs in separate processes, Google sidesteps the need for a native 64-bit browser and *plugins*.
After all, 2GB per tab should be enough for everyone.
WebKit itself is doing 100/100 on Acid3 [webkit.org]. One would assume that Chrome would be performing similarly as it is based on WebKit, especially when this 100/100 result was achieved in March of 2008. Is Chrome based on an older fork of WebKit? Or is something else going on here?
You don't see anything useful huh? Process separation improving security and responsiveness, UI improvements like Fitts'-law-obeying tabs, Incognito mode; those aren't useful to you?
Oh, and you do know that Chrome doesn't index your hard drive or send your browsing history to Google, right? It really doesn't have any more "integration" with Google Search (or GMail, or G-anything-else) than Firefox does. And you don't have to take Google's word for it because it's open source.
Chrome iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Chrome iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
should be easy for google to do coz all they have to do to get that going is adapt their OS X version to the version that the iPhone uses... oh wait....
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Funny)
Forget the IPhone. The AMount of dAmage conTROL and FUD coming out of the Firefox camp is enough to fiLl every news and discussion board on the Net.
There. You said it all there.
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank goodness somebody pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.
Quite apart from the resource consumption, the main feature was supposed to be speed. FF3 is faster to load the same set of tabs than Chrome is, and I haven't noticed massive speed increases even on single Javascript-heavy pages. As for runaway Javascript lunching the whole browser - never happened to me, TYVM. The only thing that did that to FF3 was an extension.
I installed Chrome because it was New! Shiny!, but I am sticking with FF3 for now.
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
tomato, tomato
Does there really have to be one browser to rule them all? I mean, if I have to run a lot of web 2.x apps at work, but at home just like to look at a few blogs, will I be able to use Chrome on one computer and Firefox on the other or are you stupid motherfuckers going to start a war over whether or not Firefox is the One True Browser or not?
Huh?
I mean, "hairyfeet" up above seems to believe that there are "trolls" who want to make him buy a "12Gb of RAM,needing its own dang AC unit just to keep from turning my place into a sauna" just because some AC writes a comment suggesting that Chrome might be better than Firefox for some tasks.
Or maybe the real criminal here is Google who has had the temerity and bad taste to actually release a product that it appears they have thought about, and then insulted us all by charging no fucking money for it. Damn them all to hell for giving us another choice of free browser.
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Humiliated? Where did you pull that from?
So Google have come up with a sort of functional (for some) browser. Great, that's nice, atrength in diversity, different strokes for different folks yada yada. But Firefox is a feature-rich, mature browser, lean in itself, but with lots of add-ons tailored to individuals with individual requirements.
Chrome has only just been released, lacks features other than stability and apparently has a huge memory footprint.
If I were a Firefox developer, I really don't think I would be humiliated.
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome has out of the box some basic features that are really useful and ought to be default in others . . . such as spell check enabled by default
You know what the cute part is? Chrome uses Firefox's spellchecker code.
I haven't figured out yet whether it uses FF's or IE's plug ins for this
Almost certainly Firefox's; Chrome directly uses the Mozilla NSAPI code, and it doesn't do ActiveX.
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Informative)
Konqueror uses Webkit, as of several months ago.
Correction: Konqueror can be compiled to use QtWebKit, but out of the box it still uses KJS/KHTML from the KDE Devs. If you don't believe me then check yourself on Debian or other distributions.
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.
Firefox allows me to specify fonts and minimum font size for all websites.
And Firefox extensions actually make life comfortable:
1. PDF Download
2. Downthemall (increases download speeds up to 4 times, may not matter to most people but does significantly to many of us)
3. Web Developer Bar (nothing like this on ANY other browser)
4. FireBug (nothing like this on ANY other browser, not even Safari's inbuilt "Develop" menu options comes close for debugging)
5. Better Gmail
6. Better GReader (yes, not useful for common joes)
7. Tabmix Plus
8. Speed Dial
9. Foxmarks which makes sure all my bookmarks (and their keyboard shortcuts) are exactly the same in my office, on my three home machines (XP, Leopard, Ubuntu)
So, sure, you may find all this functionality "uninspiring" if your needs are simply to browse. You'll do just fine with ANY browser in that case, and you probably represent 80% of the browsing community -- but you're a small tip of that iceberg as you know what a browser option means. Most of that 80% doesn't know or care, they simply want to check their hotmail and read BBC. They're hardly going to be swayed away from IE for that precise reason. So for this group, Chrome is immaterial anyway.
To recap:
FOR GEEKS AND PEOPLE WHO KNOW:
Firefox or Opera, depending on whom you ask
FOR THOSE WHO REALLY WANT TO USE WEBKIT:
Safari will do, thank you
FOR THOSE WHO JUST WANT TO BROWSE:
Their platform's default browser will be it.
See, Chrome doesn't really make a dent in any of those camps.
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Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP. (Score:5, Interesting)
And that makes it unlikely I will ever use it.
I tried Chrome and mostly liked what I saw, but I stopped using it and went back to Firefox, because it has Adblock Plus. Each time I am forced to use a browser that doesn't have this, I am horrified at how sites look and why people still use Internet.
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, you CAN crash the whole browser, not just individual pages. Try typing "about:%" in the address bar. The entire browser crashes before you even see the %.
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Re:Chrome iPhone (Score:5, Informative)
IE8 with 6 processes was using 958524 KB and Chrome with 11 processes was using 783840 KB.
Uhm, how are you counting that? There are 11 Chome.exe processes, and when you add their "Mem Usage" columns up you get 783840KB? Because, er, OS's which use paged memory VM's don't work like that; about the only way you can really work out how much memory they're all using is by comparing their VM mappings and seeing what bits are shared between them (and not also with other processes; e.g. standard Win32 dll's everyone uses) and which aren't.
This is why Chrome has about:memory, with an *estimate* of how much memory Chrome is using; if I spawn 11 tabs and add up Mem Use, I get 263MB. about:memory, however, estimates it's using 166MB, and a good chunk of that may well be in memory mapped files and as easily disposable as filesystem cache.
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"Thin" won't be "in" (Score:5, Interesting)
>"surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing"
Yep, an era that won't sit well for users of thin-clients, multiuser servers, older machines, and smaller mobile stuff. I think some of the ideas in Chrome are good, but I am not so sure I like the idea of ultra-fat browsers. I recently was complaining that Firefox was starting to get bloated (defeating the goal of FireFox, to be lean and mean). I don't mind different concepts, except the design of web sites will, no doubt, start demanding more and more "fatness" to work (kinda like trying to use the web without Flash).
Now I will go crawl back under my 90's rock...
Re:"Thin" won't be "in" (Score:5, Funny)
I see a future where the hot new thing is lean, fast "local" applications that are compiled so they run right on your own computer, no browser needed. They will have several advantages besides speed and working better on older computers. Foremost among these, if the network goes down you can keep working, and you keep control of your private data at all times.
I think I'll call it Web 3.0.
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Not a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
...surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing.
How is this a bad thing? Modern browsers are far more demanding than Mosaic, because they do more. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a more demanding browser if you need the increased requirements to add functionality... that's the point of advancing our hardware capabilities!
Next thing you know, people will be complaining that it takes more muscle to run a 360 game than it took to run an Atari game. Jeez.
Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. I find it suspect that people are suggesting that an application is using more resources than the operating system in which said application runs. Especially when that very application provides a framework for other applications to run.
An "operating system" should, by its very nature, not "utilize" resources in and of itself, but simply partition and apportion them. Of course, I haven't R'd any FA's for a while. Perhaps they are talking about the myriad of services and built-in applications that are bundles with Windows.
That said, I find it very disappointing (although understandable) that both of these new browsers have been released for the only operating system I do not use professionally. I look forward to one day trying both of these new browsers outside of a VM.
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Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
A kernel by nature should be tiny, but an OS should contain tons of functionality.
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Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Advancement in technology means miniaturization, simplification. More advanced technologies require less power, not more. The modern desktop computer is thousands of times smaller than our first computers, millions of times faster, but you can run them on a battery, where as our first computers required their own power grid.
The fact that new software requires more CPU cycles, more raw power, is a mark of the immaturity of software technology. As we advance, our applications should require less memory and less power as we trim out redundant features. The resources a technology consumes is not a sign of how powerful it is.
Modern browsers do not demand more resources than Mosaic because of how powerful they are, they demand more resources because memory is inexpensive, and it's cheaper to eat up resources than it is to refine our methods.
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Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:5, Funny)
Hardware advances mostly for games, media and business needs.
Actually, AC, while I don't think you are absolutely correct, you may be on to something there. It's widely believed that many of the advances in home electronics, home theater, computing and networking were due to porn more than any other factor. So if we use that as a starting base, perhaps Chrome was created for a different reason. Maybe it is really destined to be the Ultimate Porn Surfing Engine.
Just think: It'll start small. Google will use Chrome compatibility to partner with porn web operators to offer to protect their site content, and securely ensure payments. It'll work great, and soon all porn sites jump ship and start relying on the Chrome browser. Porn will no longer be viewable on IE or FF, so the world switches completely to Chrome. At that point, Google knows they have the entire internet by its collective short and curlies (almost literally), and that's when they SQUEEZE.
God help us all, we've uncovered it: Chrome's really a plot to take over the world!
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The browser is irrelevant to applications! (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft was unfazed [today.com]. "Browsers donâ(TM)t need to be integrated with online apps," said marketing developer Ian Moulster. "Certainly not like the operating system ... Iâ(TM)ll just get back to you."
BloatWare Continues.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hype. By the time you ad in all of the mind-numbing widgetry, the browser becomes the ultimate in madness. It proves the old adage that when you get a really nice hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Mod me whatever, but browsers need to go on a diet so that there can be cross-platform coherency and cohesiveness for apps, whether it's on a phone, a kiosk, a notebook, an HD TV DVR display, or whatever. I want the same page to display the same way on Konqueror, Safari, IEWhatever, Chrome (please, a marketing guy needs a spanking), Opera, or whatever. Stop for a while and get it right guys.
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:5, Insightful)
THIS!
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
A good question that I think needs to be asked is this: "What information are we trying to convey?"
and "What is the best way to convey that message?"
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information. It seems to me this concept got perverted and got us into the pickle that we currently see. I remember the days when it was HARD to find information on the net, well thanks to web 2.x data is getting hard to find again.
I propose 2 new protocols for internet usage:
Advertisement.Free.Transport.Protocol
Rich.Commercial.Experience.Protocol
Lets fix the signal to noise ratio we currently endure.
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I don't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Can somebody explain to me why resource limits are still an issue in Windows? I usually keep 25-40 tabs open in FF, and after it gets over the 350MB range, the whole browser starts to act flaky. Why is 211MB, 267MB, 350MB or even 500MB a problem on today's platforms with 2 to 6GB RAM standard?
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us are on older computers, thank you very much. We like slim, streamlined operations.
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Re:Not hard to get... (Score:5, Informative)
This is not entirely true. Normally the BIOS will remap IO address space above system RAM, but on 32 bit hardware (with or without PAE), the BIOS will generally reserve a hole somewhere between 3GB and 4GB. Depending on your specific hardware, this hole might be pretty big. For instance, if you have a 512MB video card, that memory gets mapped into the system address space, and you lose the same amount of system RAM for the privilege. There are some BIOS that will allow you to map this memory above 4GB but drivers sometimes flake out when you do that; plus you have to run a 64bit OS at that point too.
You will never see a 32 bit vista machine report more than 4GB of ram as it's simply not supported. (Makes you wonder why they turn on PAE by default since it slows down memory access?? A vendor turning PAE off is probably just smart.) You will, however, see vista report 4gb in the computer properties -- but it's more of a marketing trick. 32 bit windows will only allocate 2GB of address space to user processes anyway and 3GB only with a special boot switch (that you have to be careful with.)
As far as your claim that some cheap motherboards do not connect the PAE pins, that's also somewhat misleading too -- the pins are all there anyway -- its just the feature was left out of cheap junk northbridge chipsets... but this was back in the Pentium III days. It's very doubtful you can even find a board anymore that does not support PAE; especially since pretty much all current model CPU's have 64 bit support.
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Re:Not hard to get... (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly Wrong. The reason you don't see all 4 GB on Windows machines is a combination of 2 factors.
#1. Memory mapped devices. This includes device which has onboard RAM (video card is biggest factor with the 1GB of RAM that's usual now). This must be mapped somewhere in the physical address space (virtual address space is irrelevant for this issue). And for compatibility with 32-bit DMA purposes has to be below the 4GB mark. So modern motherboards will remap the "displaced" RAM above the 4GB mark so it is still accessible.
Now onto issue #2. Windows *could* use PAE to access this relocated RAM, but it doesn't on desktop editions (even if PAE is enabled). Technically from a hardware point, it should be accessible, but once again for compatibility purposes, the Microsoft folk have opted to simply not use any RAM seen above the 4GB mark. The reason why is because of poorly programmed 3rd party drivers which assume all RAM is below 4GB, and try to do 32-bit DMA (and thus trash random memory and crash the system). For Microsoft, it's easier to simply avoid the issue then explain why it's not there fault to customers. (BTW server editions are a different story and DO support using RAM above 4GB).
You can verify this by opening up Microsoft's "System Information" utility and going to the "Memory" section. Simply put, it does not show ANY memory above 0xffffffff despite the fact that I know for a fact that there is RAM mapped above that address (installing Linux with "64GB memory support", aka PAE support, shows this to also be true and DOES report and using all 4GB of my RAM).
This issue has NOTHING to do with "shared memory space between processes.
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Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
As I understand it, multiple processes don't necessarily mean more bloat. If a set of processes are all running the same executables and libraries, then the code is all mapped into physical memory only once and shared between the processes.
At least under Linux, using fork() and copy-on-write paging makes multiple processes highly efficient. Maybe it's a bit tougher to do under Windows (which lacks a fork call), but it seems to me that careful coding could get close to the same results.
Didn't measure memory correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
But we can already crash EVERY tab at once (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply inserting an a href linking to "evil:%" crashes chrome. ALL of chrome. While this is acceptable in a beta product, I don't buy the graceful, tab-only crashes they're promising.
Re:But we can already crash EVERY tab at once (Score:5, Funny)
See? Google does NOT do evil!
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The matchup: Beta vs. Beta! (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone else think that benchmarking early builds is useless? Of course they're not particularly efficient yet - premature optimization and all that. Wake me when the final builds roll around.
(Of course, that brings up another issue: What the rest of the world calls "Version 3.0", Google calls "Beta". And what the rest of the world calls "Beta", Microsoft calls "Version 3.0".)
Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough with the stupid "memory consumption" pseudo-benchmarks. It doesn't "consume" your memory, it uses it. If I have 2 or 4 or 8 GB sitting there, why would I want my software to not use it? What do I possibly gain by having a program that uses only 100 MB when it could be using 1 GB to keep more rendered pages in memory (and speed up the display when I hit "back" a couple of times), for example?
If the browser refuses to run with less than, X MB available (ex., less than 30 MB), that can be a problem. But if it simply uses memory that would otherwise just be sitting there, how is that a relevant (or negative) thing?
I keep remembering that article where someone from the Mozilla foundation said very proudly that Firefox used less memory than Opera (on Windows), making it "superior". But when you look at situations where memory really matters, you find that you can run Opera on pretty much any cellphone but you can't run Firefox. There's a difference between using less memory and needing less memory.
On a PC, I'll trade 100 MB for a 10% speed increase (in page drawing, tab switching, etc.) any day. One of the reasons I like Opera is that (since years ago) it keeps rendered copies of the previous pages in memory, plus a ful index of your e-mail, so you have instant page flips, instant mail searches, etc..
Multiple processes and bloat (Score:5, Interesting)
Multiple intercommunicating processes are generally a good thing. And almost all modern operating systems can share read-only code regions between processes, which is safe.
However, once you put "just in time" compilers in, the sharing goes away. This is classically a Java problem; each Java instance has yet another copy of all the Java libraries in use. If Google Gears ends up importing as much cruft as Java does, it will have the same bloat problems.
Still, browsers have become memory hogs, even when rendering pages that aren't doing anything exciting. Firefox can balloon to 300MB after viewing a modest number of relatively vanilla pages. Even with "browser.cache.memory.enable" set to False.
Resources (Score:5, Informative)
are there to be used.
I'm old enough to remember this kind of argument about assembler vs. compiled languages. Hand coded assembler will always be smaller, and for any given algorithm it will very likely be faster. When viewed as assembler it will always be more elegant.
From time to time one comes across an assembly language application (although it's a lot rarer these days) that is a tour de force, doing the essential tasks of its compiled competitors in a fraction of the space and often noticeably more snappily. But they aren't notable for the breadth of features they offer.
And that's what bloat is about. Bloat isn't about using resources; it's about devoting resources to ideas that seemed like a good idea at the time but which you don't have the time or ability to undo. Sometimes the feature doesn't exist yet, or abandoned, but still leaves its mark. The reason that large assembler programs tend to be lean isn't so much that humans produce tighter code than compilers, although they can. It's because people who code in assembler think very, very had about any feature before adding it. You'd get much the same results if people coded in a language like Brainfuck.
Any application benefits from skepticism about features, whatever it is coded in.
Now, if you think about what Google is trying to do with Chrome, launching a separate process for each tab makes sense; it is a legitimate use of resources. Each tab is, presumably, hosting a different application. You don't want them running in the same address space, anymore than you want traditional applications running in unprotected memory by cooperative multitasking. Yes, it takes more resources to do this, but I've heard much the same complaint about virtual memory and process preemption.
You don't want some random site's malware to get to close to the online banking application running in a different tab, so you've got to take steps. If you're coding was perfect, those steps probably would work pretty well, but running the online apps in different processes is a legitimate use of resources. You can try to protect pages from each other, manage resources such as processor time between them, but eventually you're coming very close to making the browser an operating system in itself.
In fact, for the purposes of Chrome, the browser is an operating system, or at least a layer in the whole operating system that hosts applications. By taking advantage of the underlying operating system's facilities, the browser doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it comes at a cost.
There isn't a universally right or wrong answer to how to architect something like this. When considered as a hypertext viewer, this kind of architecture is wasteful and bloated. When considered as facility to participate in multiple distributed processing applications, this kind of architecture isn't bloated. It consumes more resources, but to achieve an important goal.
Re:Resources? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old style multi-tabbed environments(Firefox, Opera), if one tab crashes, all tabs crash. That's fine if all you're looking at is web pages, because both of those browsers can pull you back up to where you were page wise. But in the era of AJAX and responsive web applications, just reloading the page with your previous session settings isn't enough, because it won't be the way you left it.
IE has been able to create separate process for each instance of the browser for quite some time(mostly because internet explorer and explorer used to share code and crashing one would crash the other which wasn't good), but until IE 8/Chrome it hasn't been done for tabs before.
The upshot of this is that if one of your tabs misbehaves, theoretically your other tabs ought to be fine, the downside is that it means that each tab uses significantly more resources than it would otherwise because state which would otherwise be shared amongst all tabs has to exist for each and every tab.
So basically yes, page complexity is what is causing this to be necessary, but no it's not what is creating the actual increase in resource consumption. I also agree that ditching complexity wherever possible is a good thing(flash,javascript,etc where you don't need it is just plain silly), but rich web applications are a good thing and they're here to stay.
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Re:Resources? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this? Put flash in a separate process, and problem solved. 99.99% of all my crashes in Firefox are due to the Flash plugin for Firefox (most of them in youtube)
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Re:Resources? (Score:5, Informative)
e.g. Just open youtube and play any video. Now, Chrome Task manager shows three 'processes' - each with memory footprint and CPU usage - One for Browser, one for Tab, and one for Flash Plug-in. You can not kill the Browser process, but you can kill any other.
For more details, you can type "about:memory" in the URL and see what's going on in more details.
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Re:Resources? (Score:5, Funny)
You can not kill the Browser process, but you can kill any other.
I found that out as well! I installed Chrome, ran it for the first time and after a bit of surfing I wanted to close the window. When I clicked the red X in the upper right of the window, out of my speakers came this strange voice, booming "YOU CAN NOT KILL TEH BROWSER PROCESSSSSSS".
I was like OMG!!!
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An advantage of 64-bit Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
I only use 64-bit Linux these days. Since Flash isn't 64-bit yet, it runs in a separate process from my 64-bit browser, thanks to nspluginwrapper.
The only problem is, when it does crash, it doesn't restart until I restart my browser. So, my browser is fine, but I won't be watching any more YouTube. Better than a crash, but not as good as it could be. If anyone knows enough about nspluginwrapper to fix this, it would be awesome -- maybe even for 32-bit users.
I believe Chrome does this, too -- but I would hope that, since they've done it deliberately, as a way to minimize the damage a plugin can do, they would also be able to handle plugin crashes more gracefully than requiring a full browser restart.
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Re:Resources? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having an application that responds to user input is a totally different thing than having a lot of sizzle and no steak.
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Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
So, in other words, his comment actually conveyed the precise opposite of "irony."
How ironic.
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Re:Welcome to 64bit (Score:5, Funny)
After all, 2GB per tab should be enough for everyone.
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Re:Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't see anything useful huh? Process separation improving security and responsiveness, UI improvements like Fitts'-law-obeying tabs, Incognito mode; those aren't useful to you?
Oh, and you do know that Chrome doesn't index your hard drive or send your browsing history to Google, right? It really doesn't have any more "integration" with Google Search (or GMail, or G-anything-else) than Firefox does. And you don't have to take Google's word for it because it's open source.
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