Chrome Vs. IE 8 771
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't measure memory correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tab-per-process not so good for memory? (Score:1, Insightful)
The author of this article doesn't understand copy-on-write paging. Chrome isn't actually using that much memory.
Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for evolution. Interoperability has been sacrificed for the sake of tying users to platforms. Same old story, new application. Join our free dev network and we'll grow together! Instead, we grow apart. Is that progress? Are the new features worth it when we make browsers that take a semi to run? Whatever happened to stealthy tight code? Whatever happened to API sets that worked across platforms? It's all about grabbing users and corralling them to increasingly incompatible and proprietary platforms. To both Google and Microsoft: shame on you. We love the neat new stuff. But the ball-and-chain effect gets old.
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.
Re:chrome runs great on old machines (Score:3, Insightful)
How many tabs were you using on those machines? It's probably more that it uses less RAM than firefox with a smaller number of tabs. I would expect that it would be worse than firefox on a low RAM system with larger numbers of tabs.
Perhaps the best way to compare the two browsers would be to make a graph of memory consumption by number of tabs (assuming each tab contains comparable web pages).
I noticed that Opera was much better memory-wise than firefox with low numbers of tabs, but with higher numbers it ceased to have much advantage.
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.
Re:Resources? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:4, Insightful)
I definitely plan to stick to Firefox. First of all, if it ain't broke, why break it?
A single plugin in a single tab can take down the entire browser; I think that qualifies as broken :-/
Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Didn't measure memory correctly (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why can plugins crash the browser anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most browser's codebases, at least for historical reasons, come from times when it wasn't common practice to isolate parts of things... Part of it was performance, part of it was simply that it wasn't the culture of the time (like using the safer string handling functions in C/++), etc.
Now, as to why a newer browser wouldn't do it...beats me.
Re:Didn't measure memory correctly (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple refutation (Score:2, Insightful)
Open Firefox. Check memory usage. Open a lot of tabs. Close them. Check memory usage.
Open Chrome. Check memory usage. Open a lot of tabs. Close them. Check memory usage.
The memory usage at first may be larger, but at the end will be a lot smaller!
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Not if you use Linux
Windows does not fork (Score:4, Insightful)
As I understand it, windows tends to use threads in lieu of forked processes. You can use multiple processes with any kind of IPC you want, but windows won't have anything to do with them sharing memory.
I am not an expert win32 programmer however, I do know for a fact fork() is not supported, and so far as I know this means there's no way to do copy on write either.
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..
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't install that plugin?
Seriously, I run noscript and a couple of dev plugins, and that's it with only rare lockups. This would be on OSX, Linux 64bit, and XP.
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:3, Insightful)
One could almost say that Chrome is less integrated with Google Search. One of the only things I'm missing in Chrome is FF's Awesomebar's "I'm Feeling Lucky" behavior.
I can type "wiki somethingrandom" and it will take me straight to the wiki page in FF, but in Chrome it simply takes me to the search results.
That one click really makes a difference ;)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:1, Insightful)
If you really must stick with older hardware, do you really need to be running the latest software?
I'm running on a Turion 64 ML-32 1.8Ghz, 1gig of ram, if you want to know.
And why do you need 25-40 tabs open, is it that important to watch every site you like 24/7?
It's not the "Web's evolving needs" ... (Score:4, Insightful)
At least that's the bleak future for people who don't mind putting layer upon layer of bloated APIs, reimplemented OS tasks (scheduler inside the browser...) and interpreted code on their system in order to run stuff noticeably slower than 15 years ago. Sooner or later, an emulated (in software!) Windows 95 machine with WordPerfect will outperform the mainstream JS/browser based abominations that also keep your data "safe" with corporations keen on turning them into profit...
Call me old, old-fashioned, whatever. The "Web"'s purpose is still to feed *me* information and not to cheat me into feeding megacorps with my private information and whose "evolving needs" you are talking about.
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Then why are you using Firefox? After all, the Mozilla Suite wasn't broken. Is it because there's still room for improvement even though the predecessors aren't broken?
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:1, Insightful)
You seem to be more on the defensive, and do sound more heart broken and mad than the other people, perhaps you just noticed wishful thinking is not a good replacement for reality?
You are blaming these on firefox, while after reading the articles and checking out the authors I am starting to think the source is redmond.
Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear you, and do not disagree, but I think it is a bit up to interpretation.
I consider the OS to be the kernel and base set of libraries. For example, the Linux kernel and most or all of the LSB make up the "OS" for me. By themselves, they aren't particularly useful, they just idly sit by and await instructions.
I consider terminals, browsers, servers, and even essentials like GNU coreutils to simply be part of the distribution. In an open system, they are all optional and easily replaceable components. Likewise, in Windows, I consider IE, Media Player, and even Notepad and the base set of system services to part of the "Windows distribution," although in this situation they usually aren't as interchangeable as one might like.
It's almost odd that the line becomes very blurred when you exist day to day in a Microsoft monoculture, yet in a heterogeneous environment such as Linux, the layers are really very distinct.
Where it becomes really blurred (and interesting) is where applications such as the web browser itself serves no useful purpose without a network connection and content (or application code) to make it do something.
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.
Read the EULA (Score:2, Insightful)
the main reson not to use Chrome is quite clear realy have you read EULA [slashdot.org]
i for one will not hand all my data to google for a good browser
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:4, Insightful)
Chrome is quite useless for me right now, as there is no Linux windows, and the things you mentioned don't really sound as if they are worth booting windows.
The only useful thing of those you mentioned would be the incognito mode but I can do that with firefox using some command line stuff, the rest is... Well, If I wanted responsiveness, I am just ok with ff3 in this computer, the alleged security bonus from process separation seems a little irrelevant when considering I won't have a whitelist for javascript, so indeed it won't be possible to block doubleclick and google-analytics in Chrome, unlike the firefox+noscript combination I am already using...
Whatever Fitt's law is, I take it that's irrelevant as heck?
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever happened to stealthy tight code?
We stopped caring about how tightly we can tune our applications when we got more leeway with hardware, and rightly so. If we spent the same care tuning our applications now as we did in the 640K days, that's a lot less time to spend on making our applications do nifty things. Why spend the time if you don't need to?
Re:Not hard to get... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you for providing an explanation of this. I got modded down troll and berated a few years ago for mentioning the 3GB thing.
Of course, one reason you might want to swap out those libraries is if you are running one very optimized special-purpose software package and actually want the full 4 gigabytes you paid for, to load and manipulate some very dense data. Linux let me do it, Windows didn't.
I spoke to a lot of clueful (and clueless) people and not one of them mentioned this PAE thing. In the end, I suggested my company go with the linux version of the software and they listened to me. (Don't anyone bother telling me I'm a moron, and to look at MS knowledge base article #whateverthefuck, it's water under the bridge now.)
Once again, thank you; at least there's an explanation, even if it reinforces my belief that Windows shouldn't be used for serious scientific or technical computing.
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:1, Insightful)
I have had enough of firefox. It's slow, has random freezes and is a pain. I tried Chrome and on JavaScript heavy pages it was fast. Try it on a tiddly wiki.
Soon as chrome is out for Linux, it will be goodby firefox.
Though I expect the JavaScript VM will find it into Firefox ...
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.
False claim of bloat caused by double counting (Score:4, Insightful)
The article claims that Chrome used more memory than IE8, but says nothing about how the testing is done. That probably means the author opened the a bunch of tabs, totaled up the memory used by each of Chrome's processes, and compared it to the memory used by IE8. The problem is, this double counts a lot of memory. Executable code and some data structures are shared, so if there are ten tabs open, then these get counted ten times, but only stored once.
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:3, Insightful)
You're thinking "extension" -- we're talking plugins.
Flash is particularly bad -- and, far too often, necessary.
Re:The matchup: Beta vs. Beta! (Score:1, Insightful)
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".
-
Dude that is classic... deserves to be in the mix at the bottom of /.
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:3, Insightful)
It's fast because they have a nice javascript engine. That engine is open source. If I remember correctly, both Firefox and Apple/KDE are building similar engines (also open source, I think). Google got the first one out to the general web, but it's not going to be anything special four months from now.
Has technology gone mainstream? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't believe we are talking about process per TAB vs. something revolutionary. REALLY! 2 full days of this stuff!
I mean what is the difference between having a process per tab vs. a bunch of separate windows (considering basic window frames are low-overhead in most OSes today)? So I can open several windows and get pretty much the same process per page capability, maybe a little more desktop cluster on my 24" LCD and likely faster performance... Chrome advancements aren't even exploiting tabs, but making them more robust for google-apps.
We are splitting hairs if we're calling Chrome revolutionary. Get a hold of reality, we're talking about 1 implementation (not feature nor usability) and over analyzing it against FF, opera and IE8. I think Google using webkit is more important to note and that it's not revolutionary--just expected since Google wants 100% compatibility with their webapps and the ability to go mobile. I'm glad google went with webkit and that the source is available, but that's pretty much it.
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.
'Web's evolving needs' my patootie! (Score:3, Insightful)
The "Web's evolving needs" to which he refers isn't consumer-driven evolution at all: it's driven by advertisers and commercial interests, notably the continued push to re-brand software as "content" that can be pushed as a subscription service... what we now know as "Web apps". Both Google and Microsoft are in the thick of it, though for now Microsoft also plays the other side of the fence with its traditional software. Sadly, this has actually been the case with most of the evolution of the Web and browsers; it was driven mostly by commercial interests and not those of consumers. The specifics of JavaScript, DHTML, XHTML, Flash, and the like are rife with examples of features that fulfill corporate rather than consumer needs.
If actual consumers had a forward-looking brain, they'd reject these "evolving needs" and demand things that benefit them rather than a corporate minority.
These "evolving needs" are anything but open source and consumer-centric, that's for sure. I'm sticking with Firefox... how about you?
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.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Awww, did the liddle Firefox fanboy get his feelings hurt?
Poor baby!
Quick! Someone post another Firefox damage control article stop stop him from crying...
Wow , you'r defensive. It was clearly a joke , a wordplay , and a relatively good one. No reason to be defensive about it , unless you really are a troll , and thought you got caught red handed ? Or maybe you just need a good night sleep .
Btw , i'm a heavy firefox user , and the first thing i did was install Chrome to check it out. It has some interesting features , but it's not worth switching browsers for me . It's just personal taste , i guess.
A word to the wise : ignore trolls . They are not a correct representation of a user group . The worse you can do is judge the firefox user group on a few trolls.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I read a comparison made by Bill Gates back in about 1995 or so, in response to a question about bloat. He compared the cost of the software based on the cost to store the software on a new HDD, and the price to run the software on the price of memory.
Like all simplifications, it's an imperfect and incomplete answer, but it does make it pretty clear: the cost of software bloat is paled by the power and size of new computing platforms.
I remember spending over a thousand dollars for a measley 10 MB HDD. It was worth every penny, but you can bet that I zipped up everything I possibly could! A 1 MB program cost $100 to store!
Today,a copy of MS Office might consume a full 5 GB, when you install every possible option, clip art library, and language translation. (I'm wild-ass guessing here) But a 1 TB drive costs just $200, so even with everything, it's actually costing you about $1 to save that copy of MS Office with every option, clip art package, and bloatware feature enabled.
A 1.2 MB floppy disk from the early 80s cost 100x as much to store as today's horrifically bloated copy of MS Office. And, whatever program you could run on that 1.2 MB floppy disk isn't something you would care about.
Now, let's turn the argument around: You are a software developer. It's your job to write software and get people to buy it. Are you going to:
A) optimize your software, auditing every single file to the last degree, so that it consumes as little space as possible, removing every non-essential feature, at an average savings to each of your customers of $0.10 or so in saved disk space, or
B) Make sure that your product does more, is more capable, and has more features on the box than your competitor?
As CTO of a small, rapidly-growing software company, I really do try to write and develop elegant code. Code that's easy to read, with consistent variable names, code layout strategies, lots of comments, that avoids kick-yourself-in-the-head lame-brained algorithms, etc. I can sit down and read the code written by any of the developers working for me and read it instantly - the names are consistently agreed upon, the application architecture is clear and consistent, etc.
But none of this is geared towards saving the customer disk space, or reducing bloat - only adding new features at the lowest possible long-term cost!
Customers don't buy absence - they buy STUFF. They want the nicest one, and that means the one that has the most whirlygigs, that does the most, that is the shiniest or coolest, or sometimes, runs the fastest, or has the best security.
Don't think you'll get anywhere with "but mine's the most elegantly written!", unless you are able to translate that fact into "mine does the most/best/coolest stuff!".
Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Bollocks.
Re:On tabs crashing (Score:4, Insightful)
So, regarding the whole "a tab crashing will no longer crash all other tabs" deal, how about we instead made it so no tab actually crashed?
Because isolating the tabs is somewhat difficult.
Writing a bug-free program is incredibly difficult. When that program depends on third-party plugins like Flash, it's also impossible, short of buying Adobe and making them get their shit together.
I'm with you, but realistically, there's not much of a downside to isolating tabs, and it gives us a more robust browser right now, without having to rewrite Webkit. And as a bonus, it gives us concurrent tabs, which means it's faster faster (on dual core) and more responsive (everywhere).
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In a consumer market that's headed toward mobil (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, so In a consumer market that's headed toward mobile devices that can deliver a decent web experience and are getting smaller and smaller each quarter.
These two Leaders of industry come out with new browsers that would only be suitable for a multi core desktop?
The kind of web based applications that Chrome aims at making possible don't make a lot sense on a mobile platform. I'm talking about things like Google Docs etc. These are applications which require large screens, a keyboard and are generally used for extended periods of time (usually while sitting down too).
--
Simon
Re:Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I suspect V8 is the reason for the difference, there may also be changes in webkit since then. Firefox wavered back and forth on passing Acid2 for a while because practical considerations made it hard to implement. The same thing has been happening on FF/Acid3 as well (although I don't think it has ever passed Acid3).
Passing an Acid test competes with practicality at times, and quite often changes that make a browser pass later have to be clobbered to make way for reality. Standards are a journey, not a destination :-).
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a lot of bile you seem to have built up against firefox. I'm not sure most people are ready to write mozilla off just yet though.
Some of the ideas behind Chrome sound pretty cool, but I'm not sure a browser that consumes that much in the way of system resources is such a good thing.
Personally, I like to use my web browser constantly - as a quick reference while running many other programs. I might have 5 files up in a text editor, 20 tabs open for quick reference in firefox, and a video or music playing at the same time. I don't have a state of the art computer, and a web browser that uses up that much ram would make my whole system slow down.
At least I run linux, i can't imagine what the slowdown would be like an already bloated operating system like XP or, god forbid, Vista.
Firefox' success over IE is due almost entirely to its being faster and less resource intensive, this is what people want in a browser - and it sounds like chrome fails pretty badly on this front.
Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, useless extensions. I can't imagine any possible use for them.
Oh, right.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.
Wouldnt it be better to make it look halfway decent from the start? Then users wouldnt need to waste their time hunting down themes.
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)
Every major browser has an equivalent, usually nearly identical.
IE Web Developer Toolbar [microsoft.com]
Opera Web Developer Toolbar (old version, not super great) [opera.com]
Opera Dragonfly (new developer tools) [opera.com]
Plus there's always FireBug Lite [getfirebug.com].
7. Tabmix Plus
This irritates me. The default tab behavior on FireFox is terrible. I dont think anyone I know actually uses it as is.
Heck, by default Firefox wont even remember your last session (ie, what tabs you had open, etc) if it crashes. How lame is that.
You shouldnt need TabMixPlus (mind you, thats what I use too on firefox, out of need) if the tabs behaved reasonably out of the box.
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)
Does anyone actually use bookmarks anymore? I just dont close the tab, and leave it running there for months or years or whatever. Or just use the auto-complete history.
I'm half joking here ... half not. I havent used bookmarks since like the early Netscape days.
Dont get me wrong, extensions in Firefox are better than NOT having them. But why cant the Mozilla folks just make Firefox better out of the box. Every time I have to build a new machine for me, or move to another, I spend 5 times as much time remembering, downloading, and configuring extensions as I do just downloading and installing firefox itself. I'd rather the product was just better in the first place, and then it wouldnt need as many extensions (and wouldnt waste so much of my time).
But with Firefox, you need plugins/extensions to do ANYTHING. The product is just not that good out of the box. But you shouldnt have to spend so much time doing that, when they could just make the product more reasonable from the start.
Until recently, the reasons to use FireFox was web app development, because of FireBug, LiveHTTP Headers, and Web Developer Toolbar. Plus it had the most consistently reliable javascript performance for non-IE targeted web apps.
But nowadays all the browsers have Firebug, webdev, and livehttp headers equivalents. And it looks like Chrome will be the new standard for testing javascript heavy web apps. And of course you use IE for the apps that need IE (Exchange OWA, tons of corporate intranet apps, sharepoint, etc).
And I use opera for my non-dev browsing (ie, slashdot, digg, theregister, serverside .com/.net, newspapers, blogs, naked ladies, etc). It doesnt crash as often, it doesnt suck memory so badly, page zooming actually works and has for years (firefox just barely got reasonable page zoome with 3), it works reasonably without a million plugins, etc.
I dont mean this to sound as anti-firefox ranty as it probably does. Firefox has its place, and I'm glad its there. But its just not a very good tool, outside of being a very extensible general tool. And its a shame, because you have something like Opera that 'just works' and is nearly flawless, not to mention lean, fast, and beautiful.
So for 'personal browsing' type of use, Opera is better, at least IMO. And for app-dev/app-use, what FireFox used to be the king of, Chrom
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.
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Primarily, bloat is a byproduct of misunderstanding and misuse. Many applications and so-called "nifty things" seem unnecessarily difficult or altogether unfeasible until an organization or individual with complete understanding, comes along and demonstrates that most people (and by extension most programmers) are simply bad.
Good for you and your ilk. If you keep a lookout for opportunities to learn and put in some time, you'll find there's more money in doing things right than often.
Re:Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP. (Score:3, Insightful)
You must not be aware that Google's advertisement program has supported image-based ads for several years at least. Many sites choose to have text-only, but what you said is quite a... wrong statement.
And yes, ABP can and does block Google's ads. The only thing it tends not to get are the small custom affiliate program links (those 125px blocks), not that anyone in their right mind could expect an extension to know what directory holds the ad images on any website out there.
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple thoughts in response.
1. You're expecting wildly different mediums to display content the same. I dont think this is reasonable. Phones, kiosks, notebooks/desktops, and tv's all have wildly different typical use cases, resource restrictions and human interaction limitations. Therefore they're all going to work differently.
2. It's not physically possible to have all browser render the same, as there isnt a reference standard to compare to. No reference implementation, no conformance tests. So you're asking them all to render the same as something that doesnt exist.
3. I dont think your'e distinguishing between web 'apps' and web 'sites'. Chrome appears to me to be designed purely for web 'apps'. It may well turn out that people end up using IE, Safari, or Opera for 'surfing' and Chrome for online apps.
But in any case, web apps have different needs than web sites. What is best for one may not be best for the other.
Re:These articles still don't answer my question (Score:3, Insightful)
How does FF extensions do the following:
- multi-processed architecture, rather than the ancient one-process-for-everything philosophy of FF?
- plugins running in separate processes
- stop leaking memory like a sieve, even on FF3
- run in low-priv sandbox on Vista
I hate to join the hype here, especially over a product so beta.
But the google folks have, IMO, the right idea of where browsers need to be in 3-5 years. MS is doing the same.
Firefox's old architecture is starting to show.
I dont know where Opera will fit into wrt mult-threadede vs. multi-process. But Opera is a better product right now than FF3 is, so they've got a head start.
program names (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Chrome iPhone (Score:3, Insightful)
"Now I upped the ante to 9 tabs, which for brevity, I won't list. IE8 with 6 processes was using 958524 KB and Chrome with 11 processes was using 783840 KB."
What's wrong with your computer? Why is it using so much memory for just a few tabs? What does Chrome report in about:memory?
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Chrome does not have built in RSS support. For some users, this is a must. Until then, I will stick with Firefox.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.
You just answered ALL of your questions right there. CHROME HAS BEEN OUT LESS THAN A WEEK! Does anyone here realize that Netscape was open-sourced and became Mozilla OVER A DECADE AGO?!?!? [wikipedia.org] And their browser has only been really usable in the last few years. Netscape 4 mostly sucked, and then Mozilla spent many [joelonsoftware.com] years [joelonsoftware.com] making a huge, bloated, SLOW suite before finally realizing FIVE YEARS LATER [wikipedia.org] that "hey! maybe people just want a good, fast browser!" Then they took two more years [wikipedia.org] to reach 1.0. And yet here's Google, receiving metric tons of shit on Slashdot because Chrome isn't perfect on day 1.
Despite all the Google haters that are coming out of the woodwork on Slashdot these days, I think that Chrome will have more market share than Firefox by the end of the year. Even with this first release, I can see that it has MOUNDS of potential. It is already MUCH faster than Firefox on many JavaScript-heavy sites--which is to say, almost every single popular site on the Web today. (Last time I checked, the front page of eBay had a third of a megabyte of JS code.) And not just faster on page loads, it's faster and more responsive when closing and switching among tabs. I can see this in just a few hours of usage. I can't wait to spend more time with it and see how it holds up after a several-day-long browsing session, which makes Firefox and Safari crawl. That said, I've already seen several pages that it renders incorrectly, and there are some UI changes I'd like to see, but there comes a point where what it lacks in usability in one area (UI) can be made up for in another area (lack of delays.)
Re:On tabs crashing (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps we should send a bug report to someone, or something. Let's just clean up, and start all over again though!
Yeah -- that's called "crashing". Or, in Chrome, that would be the "Sad Tab" -- it catches some exception, cleans up, and lets you hit "refresh" to start all over again.
Sadly, "starting all over again" generally means clobbering some state the user cared about. If my browser throws an exception as I type this, my comment is pretty much gone, and there's not much that can be done about that.
Re:It's not the "Web's evolving needs" ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The corporate world is begging for more web applications. They're tired of the intricacies of client-installed software. Installation, maintenance and configuration of native apps is a nightmare when you're talking about rolling stuff out on thousands of desktops. Turning it into a web app solves the problem.
Besides, how silly is it that documents and applications are tied to physical locations? Applications and documents should follow the user wherever they go, not the other way around.
Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Advancement in technology means miniaturization, simplification.
So if we take this analogy to life forms then a bacteria is superior to a human? Does that mean the processors of today utilizing millions of transistors are less advanced than the old processors? A single cycle processor is a superior design compared to a pipelined processor? Just because something is smaller doesn't mean it is simpler. And just because something is simpler doesn't mean that it is more advanced. If that were true, bubble sort would rule the world.
The fact that new software requires more CPU cycles, more raw power, is a mark of the immaturity of software technology.
Clearly you're not a computer scientist or a mislead one. It has been proven that with a simplistic set of instructions in a turing machine, that it would be possible to write all software in existence today. The problem of course is all of the complexity moves to software rather than the hardware. For example if I need to do both addition and multiplication, and my hardware only supports addition, then I can implement multiplication in software by using the hardware addition function. However, if I have hardware that does both addition and multiplication, then I don't need to implement multiplication in software. So if I continue to use your logic, then now my software is simpler and more mature but my hardware is now immature because it is more complex?
Your simplistic definition of "miniaturization, simplification" for the advancement of technology, especially information technology, is incorrect. The complexity of doing something in software will always exist somewhere whether it be built in hardware, built as a feature of a software subsystem like the kernel, stuffed into some library, or abstracted away in a programming language and compiler/interpreter. And that will always make sense as long as you want to have the capability of doing the next N+1 function in software whether it be a concept abstraction, scientific simulation, encryption problem, or application like browsing the web. That means software "bloat" is here to stay as long as hardware resources increase and the complexity of today's technology will only increase.
Finally there is no way to "miniaturize" software within software. At some point you will be forced to implement the software function directly in hardware, but for obvious economical reasons we don't go that far because the lower the level the more expensive it gets. That's the whole reason why we have compilers, high level languages, and abstract concepts in software. But no matter what you do, you're always going to increase the complexity somewhere in the system.