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."
"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...
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:While comparing browsers... (Score:4, Interesting)
That is actually something I have used in the past- intentionally slowing things down to really see how they perform. One of the best ways under Unix/Linux is to use an Xterminal to which you restrict the bandwidth. Of course, you can get the same effect by just running the Xclient remotely through ssh from another Linux machine, across a slow connection. Then you can "see" and "feel" what might not be evident on fast LAN connections.
When working with thin clients, it is a good way to see how things might behave if you were to scale up the number of users on a centralized system.
chrome runs great on old machines (Score:3, Interesting)
i'm trying it in the only windows machines i have at home: a 700Mhz P3 laptop with 256MB RAM and XP SP2. it's slightly faster than FF3, and a lot better than FF2 on this machine.
maybe on bigger machines it will use lots of RAM, but on limited machines its really good
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.
Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Mozilla has no one to blame but themselves for getting humiliated by Google and Chrome.
How many people here on Slashdot have talked about exactly what Google did with their V8 JavaScript engine and the protected memory and threading for tabs?
Only to be flamed by a Mozilla developer or fanboy?
There are too many people who seem to emotionally attached to Firefox. It's just a fucking browser. Dumping Firefox and wwitching to Chrome yesterday had that same feeling of dumping IE years ago.
The same pathetic arguments and FUD that came out of the hardcore Microsoft/IE crowd are now being mimicked by the hardcore Mozilla/Firefox fanbase and developers.
The stinking pile of crap that is the Firefox codebase isn't going to magically fix itself and bring itself up to Chrome standards. Mozilla developers had the past two years to get their shit together and they chose to play the same stupid denial and flame games they did with their atrocious memory leak problems.
Mozilla is lucky the extension API isn't finialized in Chrome with and working ad block and flashblock extension.
Chrome right now is the browser everyone has been dreaming of. Been running since the moment I downloaded it yesterday. No crashes and it feels like the first time I upgraded from a cooperatively multitasking OS to a full preemtively multitasking and memory protected OS.
Bye bye Firefox. You won't be missed. Hacking on the high quality Chrome codebase is a joy. And the Google developers are incredibly friendly and helpful.
Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
A kernel by nature should be tiny, but an OS should contain tons of functionality.
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish some people would just download Chrome and give it a shot instead of theorizing about why it's broken based on "bite-size videos", and then comment. There's nothing useful to *see*, really, it's a browser with a simpler UI. There's no integration with Google Search, nothing that Firefox doesn't have as well, anyway. But, it's so damn fast, very noticeably faster than Firefox, and you'd see that if you just took the time to try it.
It's also more stable by design, but that will take some time to really appreciate (or realize that it's a bogus claim).
But, speed... you see that right away.
OpinionWare Continues.... (Score:1, Interesting)
"Are the new features worth it when we make browsers that take a semi to run? "
Are these the same semis that run the latest games?
"Whatever happened to stealthy tight code?"
General programmers stopped doing assembly when people realized they weren't as productive as with higher level code.
"Whatever happened to API sets that worked across platforms?"
Like when I could run Mac code on an Intel platform?
"It's all about grabbing users and corralling them to increasingly incompatible and proprietary platforms. "
Did anyone tell you're cute when you're flustered? Anyway the Google code is open sourced. If that's corralling then I hate to see what your idea of free is?
Re:Resources? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Recall that the old versions of Mozilla even had the mail client running in the same process. And for the longest time Firefox and Thunderbird shared no DLLs. It was a bad design decision from the very beginning.
Re:Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I use nspluginwrapper. I run x86_64, so it is required if I want to use any i386 plugins, but it helps with the native plugins as well.
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.
ComplaintWare Continues.... (Score:1, Interesting)
"The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information. "
You're not really saying anything. The running of apps either server side and thin clients or the apps running mostly on the desktop is nothing new. We've had Application Service Providers running over the Internet for over a decade using VPN. What does that do to your "purity" argument?
"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 also remember when there were a lot less people on the Internet, and you either accessed it from work, school, or government. Now that the economics have come down. Getting on, and creating on is a lot easier. Hence your S/N ratio.
"Lets fix the signal to noise ratio we currently endure."
Who's "we"?
A middle ground? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a bit surprised that Google, a company full of smart people who can do a lot with a little, would out-bloat even IE. Perhaps because this is the original version, resource usage hasn't been brought into check yet. I remember it being somewhat this way with the original Mozilla (before Firefox existed) and, as some might recall, Firefox, too, has reduced its resource usage.
There is a middle ground where the web can be a very rich platform without requiring a supercomputer the size of Deep Thought to run it.
Re:Tab-per-process not so good for memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
I tested it, and with only iGoogle, a digg article, and this page open as tabs in both Firefox and Chrome, they had about the same memory usage. Firefox had 70MB, Chrome had 80MB. (I use Firefox 3.0.1.)
I opened up my user profile on Slashdot and ten articles I had recently commented on in both Chrome and Firefox. Firefox became unusable as it started processing the JS and it finished much more slowly. When the dust had settled, Chrome was using 180MB and Firefox 220MB.
I went to Digg.com and loaded all of the top hits then. Chrome's memory usage spiked much more quickly, dual core machine and all. Chrome started using a lot more than Firefox. 388MB for Chrome, 284MB for Firefox.
Then I killed all the Digg tabs on both. Chrome went to 186MB, Firefox went to 260MB.
Then I killed all the Slashdot pages I added after those first three tabs (iGoogle, Digg, Slashdot pages.) Chrome is down to 80MB, Firefox is down to 180MB. After about ten seconds though, the Firefox number went to 130MB.
Seems to be staying there for the time being. If I kill all the tabs in both browsers except for about:config in Firefox and about:memory in Chrome, I get 30MB usage in Chrome and 110MB usage in Firefox.
Re:Chrome iPhone (Score:4, Interesting)
Process Explorer tells me IE8 is using 389652 KB of memory. Chrome is using 260668 KB of memory. Both have three processing running.
What the heck, I'll try again. I fully restart both browsers and open up Slashdot [slashdot.org] and Newgrounds [newgrounds.com]. IE8 with three processes, 465348 KB; Chrome with four processes, 358128 KB.
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.
Admittedly, this is a small test to find an average, but what do I need to do to see the difference TFS[ummary] speaks of?
Re:Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Chrome is what you call the User Interface of an application, or the area around the primary browser window of a web browser.
The normal 'chrome' of Firefox is it's normal theme, Strata.
The name Chrome was chosen because it was ironic, their intent was to reduce the chrome that surrounds what you really want to look at in a browser, the actual webpages.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox's set of extensions and features are very, very important to a "Web 2.0" user for whom the Chrome is meant.
Less universal statements, please. Not everyone gives a damn about FF extensions. Bully for you that you do, but I find them to be rather uninspiring and useless. See? That's why universal statements are bad, they open you up to counterexamples that way.
As it stands today, Chrome is a bloody useless browser...
I dunno, it browses Web pages. That's what I want a browser for, should I be expecting something else? The only thing that disappoints me right now is the lack of native RSS support.
...and it looks butt-ugly to boot.
Uglier than Firefox? Shit, that's saying something!
To be fair, Firefox isn't actually ugly, it's just plain. That's fine, that's their choice. But don't hate on Chrome because the developers wanted to make it look halfway decent. Its aesthetic sense isn't bad (it's a bit minimalist for my taste, but their choice of colors and icons are good in my opinion), and at least they're trying to look good, which is more than you can say for Firefox.
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.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love to ditch Firefox. I hate the memory usage (and having to kill it 3 times a day). I hate the developer's attitude. (We're removing feature X or changing feature Y because it's the way of the future and to those who complain tough). I wouldn't be using 3.0 if it weren't for the hideunivisted and oldbar extensions. (Coolbar is an abomination and an annoyance all in one change).
But I tried Chrome yesterday and it's got a long way to go. I was pleasantly surprised that it handled rendering complex web pages and worked with Microsoft proxies at work. However it is slow and crashes or freezes (or rather individual pages freeze). I'd also lose my extensions and ad blocking if I switched. No thanks. At least not yet. It's got a long way to go to be a viable replacement for me.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
There are still some things I'd like to see from Chrome before I'd throw out Firefox. Namely same day support for all OSes (which shouldn't be too hard if Google lets the community get involved), I want to see how well Google handles it when security flaws are found, and I want an awesome bar for it.
Re:As far as speed goes (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you read that press release all by yourself? Let's wait for some solid testing before we judge eh?
Newer doesn't necessarily = better
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ [ejohn.org]
You mean like this solid testing?
Re: Lean Browsers (Score:3, Interesting)
I also am with the Old School philosophy that says that *some* care to software compactness is important even if we have lots of juicy hardware these days.
What are the options out there that really do use a small footprint for basic web activity (like webmail and forums)? Flash is not required, nor RSS.
If I want to actually watch a Youtube page... *I can open an entirely new copy of the app!* It would be nice if the other 7 tabs were under 100 megs.
If you think the code is bloated... (Score:4, Interesting)
It sure looks like Google Chrome is designed first and foremost to be an advertising delivery system. There is so much legal CYA in that thing, you know they're up to something they figure they're going to have to defend in court at some point.
If you think the fact that Google Search stores your search strings is a potential invasion of your privacy (I do), then you will be amazed at what it looks like they plan to get from their "browser." This is the first install in over a year I actually aborted after analyzing the EULA.
Re:Standards (Score:3, Interesting)
Chrome has it's own JavaScript engine. Acid3 tests JavaScript. V8 may be fast, but it's also wrong. I'll stick with the fastest implementation that is close to correct out there, which at the moment is WebKit's Squirelfish.
Memory management? Let's the OS do it! (Score:3, Interesting)
Application is not a good place for handling tho memory, even if you manage to re-invent the wheel and write a very good memory allocation algorithm, application layer just does not have enough visibility to get a whole picture of everything.
In short? Let's OS do it! Hey, OS is the expert and MM is exactly the job of the OS. It handles the fragmentation, the caching, the sharing of executable memory image. Chrome do exactly that, it just rely on the OS, sit and enjoy.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
System Stats: 1.46 Celeron M 512MB Ram 7 tabs in chrome
Free Ram: 151MB
Still snappy
Now i love Firefox just as much as anyone but the mutli-threading was a good idea. I cant tell you how many times I've had the browser crash because some idiot decided to load their page up with javascript doing everything just because they could. Also, most CPUs are getting multiple cores the browser might as well use them.
Security improvements? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/6353 [milw0rm.com]
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/6355 [milw0rm.com]
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.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
As it stands today, Chrome is a bloody useless browser, and it looks butt-ugly to boot.
Thats quite an amazing thing to say as a comparison to FireFox.
Firefox has always looked like it was done by a bunch of high school art students. Mediocre ones.
It's better with 3.x than ever before, but still not very good. Looks like it was done by a bunch of amateurs who have never heard of high-dpi icons and graphics. Blocky, dumbed-down, etc.
As a comparison, Opera is a gorgeous browser. Elegant metallic chrome, beautiful high-dpi icons, gorgeous glossy black tab bar, and so nicely compact.
Even IE7 does a better job with graphics and color and icons, even if their button layout is atrocious.
Chrome has gone the minimalist direction, and it works well for it. I still like Opera better, but Chrome has a decent, bare-bones, get-out-of-your-way look to it.
Re:We need to go in the other direction (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it's completely open source. Mozilla takes the exact same approach of a "blessed" official binary compiled from the freely-available sources.
Chrome may not be worth booting Windows for, but there will be a Linux version as soon as some Linux people finish porting it, and if you are paranoid about Google's official version I'm sure the Debian folks will be happy to oblige with "Matte" or whatever they end up calling their rebranded Chrome builds (c.f. IceWeasel).
Fitts' law is hardly irrelevant; it's a very important UI design principle. Wikipedia is your friend. That isn't the only non-obvious improvement Google's made to tabbed browsing either. The subtle animations are cool but perhaps the nicest thing is the way tabs don't resize as you close them, until you mouse away. It's hard to describe but it fixes a major annoyance every other tabbed browser has when closing several tabs at once in a crowded window. The implementation of tab dragging is also quite nice, the popup blocker UI is unobtrusive, the status bar only appears when you need it. Overall, the minimalistic UI uses up the least space of any browser's UI (by far), leaving more screen real estate for pages.
Your only valid complaint is that there's no add-ons, so no noscript, flashblock, adblock, GreaseMonkey, etc. I feel confident that open-source hackers will fix this soon, though Google may decide not to include support in the official Google builds.
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 %.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate the memory usage (and having to kill it 3 times a day).
I have no problem, and I do not need to.
I hate the developer's attitude. (We're removing feature X or changing feature Y because it's the way of the future and to those who complain tough).
What do you want them to do? Never change anything?
Coolbar is an abomination and an annoyance all in one change
I think it is the most useful addition to browsers since Opera added tabs a decade ago. Chrome has something similar, but with the addition of Google Suggest.
Chrome actually seems to have lot of features that people complained as causing bloat about when Firefox added them: spell checking for example.
I do not particularly want a browser that is primarily designed to run web apps. I want something that allows me to find, read, sort and store information on the web as easily as possible. The best so far is Firefox. What I really want is a cross between Forefox and Konqueror.
I do like some Chrome features (process per tab, for example), but I want my FF extensions too.
Re:Well, it is beta ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Google chrome hasn't even been released yet, and you're trying to compare resource usage to Microsoft IE?
Chrome has been released. Google has ruined the concept of beta. Gmail has been in beta for three years now. It's a wonder that the search page is apparently considered an actual product.
People don't understand beta any more. They will just be pissed every time "this new google thing crashed." Google ruined the idea of a beta, now they'll have to live with the repercussions.
Re:Resources? (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually really think this approach (many processes) is the right way to go into the future.
Yeah, its resource intensive.
But memory is cheap, desktops/laptops are shipping with 4GB default right now, and I dont mind spending my memory on the apps that I use the most (ie, those that run in web browsers).
Plus it will likely lead to a much more robust and reliable (and simpler) browser platform. Multi-threading is hard, complex, and incredibly error prone. Multi-process programming is much simpler, at the cost of increased resource usage, especially on windows.
But given the trend towards the web browser being the primary platform for running our apps on, I think this is a good path into the future.
Firefox's one-process-only-for-everything is going to paint them into an architectural corner over the next 5 years, I believe.
Multiple processes need not be expensive. (Score:3, Interesting)
If multiple processes are particularly expensive in Chrome and IE8, that's a problem with Chrome and IE8... or a problem with Windows. At the very least, multiple processes doesn't mean duplicating *everything*... there's no reason to have all the possible plugins and all the web controls and access methods loaded and initialized in all tabs... in fact NOT having that overhead in the context of every tab should be a significant advantage of the design.
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information.
The 1970s called, they want their definition of the Internet back.
Ever since the first CGI was written, the Internet (or specifically the Web) has been about more than just conveying information. Your definition would seem to exclude ecommerce, online banking, etc; that would reduce the Internet to what many believe the big content producers are pushing it towards becoming - an almost-exclusively pull medium designed to get content from a producer to a consumer. No thanks.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:4, Interesting)
It all comes down to personal preference, really.
* Chrome's UI is growing on me a little bit the second time playing around (though I think there's a lot of wasted space with how the tabs are angled). The downloads tab is fairly slick, but the progressbars at the bottom go away if you open the downloads tab and don't come back if you close it. There's certainly work to be done, but not bad for the first beta.
* Firefox is much better in 3.x; at least in OS X, it's a fairly solid theme (not without its quirks, but there you go). Camino still looks a little more OS-native on the Mac than Firefox, but that's what happens when you wrap the Gecko rendering engine in Cocoa rather than XUL.
* I think Safari has the best UI, whereas Opera's makes me slightly nauseous - I honestly like that browser less every time I end up trying it.
* IE, in usual MS fashion, looks a lot better if you've switched XP to classic mode, rather than the gaudy baby-blue you'll otherwise get; I hate most of its design elements and true to the IE name, it's behavioral inconsistencies compared to every other browser on the market are second only to its rendering inconsistencies (it's no IE6, but even still...).
Obviously though, design and aesthetic are very personal things, YMMV, etc.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:1, Interesting)
Chrome right now is the browser everyone has been dreaming of.
Well, I haven't been dreaming of a webkit browser since I already had two installed, but moreover, I haven't been dreaming of:
Me, I like the little interface conventions like those that minimize screen estate such as the lack of browser bar while still giving the info, and the webkit speed. For the rest - who gives a shit about some browser by DoubleClick. Now who is exactly the fan boy again? Are you emotionally attached in some way to DoubleClick?
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
* Firefox is much better in 3.x; at least in OS X, it's a fairly solid theme (not without its quirks, but there you go).
I agree with you there. I'm still not a big fan, but FF3 is much better than FF2 was.
I wish I could find better words for it, but FF has just always looked so ... unsophisticated, I guess is the word. Or close to it.
Safari, IE and Opera all have quite a bit of 'polish' to them, and the graphics/icons done very well. And that aspect seems (to me) to transcend personal taste. But thats just my POV.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Hi Troll, hope you're well.
regarding V8 and Firefox, TraceMonkey (FF next JS engine, due for FF 3.1 iirc) perform actually slightly better:
http://andreasgal.com/2008/09/03/tracemonkey-vs-v8/ [andreasgal.com]
You can try it out now in the nightlies.
Then, we (hopefully) got Tamarin coming for FF 4, bit vapour ware-ish at the moment though.
Having said that, Chrome is certanly a very interesting piece of kit. looking forward to check it out in more depth when things settled a bit. Still it's gonna have to be something very nice to make me swap browser though, but who knows?
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:1, Interesting)
Firefox 3, a month ago, 271 tabs open, never got above ~380 Mbytes. The only problem was when I turned it off and switched it back on, as opening all of them at once was kind of slow.
And what kind of a comparison uses different conditions for test subjects? ._.;
I have tried Opera (not Chrome - no Linux version), but I found its behaviour fundamentally broken in so many ways that I went back to FF.
That, and I like foxes. >_>;;;
cya
Raziel-chan
Re:In a consumer market that's headed toward mobil (Score:3, Interesting)
The 'consumer market' isnt headed towards mobile devices.
The 'consumer home desktop market' is growing like crazy. The 'business desktop market' is growing.
The 'consumer mobility market' is growing like gangbusters.
It's not a zero-sum situation. There's room for both.
Chrome in particular, is for a nice that is not very appropriate for mobile devices, and thats for long-running web-applications. Not web sites, but web apps like banking, webmail, slashdot, flex apps, etc.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone else feel like themes on browsers are sort of like cozies on toasters?
Do the people who put themes on their browsers also put stickers and stuff on their notebooks, or write band names on their backpacks in middle school?
I'm just asking.
Disinformation (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox *3* is the least RAM hungry of all major browsers. Specifically it has very smart heuristics about freeing temporary object when it can (such as decompressed JPEGs), which other browsers don't seem to do.
There were plenty of benchmarks posted when FF3 was released, go look for it yourself.
Re:Not a bad thing. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Bullshit.
Modern browsers have to support and render vastly more-complex pages than Mosaic did, and that's why they're so much bigger. CSS, Javascript, multiple flavors of HTML, XHTML, arbitrary XML+CSS, etc., plus more transport protocols, encryption, vastly more sophisticated history mechanisms, lots of security technology to attempt to protect the browser from malicious code, and the user from phishing sites, etc. The UIs are also much more complex, with customizable layouts, themes, etc.
Even more than that, because browsers have to do so much, and because every year brings new demands, they are also constructed with very flexible designs. FF, for example, is basically a browser-ish application development framework with its own app-development language (XUL), plus a browser implementation on top of that. That's largely what makes FF plugins possible, but all of that flexibility has its own cost in terms of code size and complexity. It's worth it because it makes development much more efficient than if programmers were rewriting tight, hand-optimized assembler for each modification.
While it's absolutely true that modern browsers (like almost any modern app) could be tightened up and de-bloated somewhat, even a perfect browser of 2008 would be orders of magnitude larger and more complex than Mosaic.
Crome browser string (Score:3, Interesting)
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13".
It doesn't seem to be too sure what it is
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Very good question. And I think that was the point of open-sourcing with an open license was so that all the other browser developers, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Netscape, Opera, and even Microsoft Internet Explorer can take the ideas and/or code and use it in their own products.
Now, I have some "must-have" plugins in my Firefox that I can't do without (ad-block, no-script, tab mix plus and weatherfox) that prevent me from using Google Chrome other than to test with occasionally. I'm also a fan of Firefox. So, I'm hoping that Firefox will incorporate the ideas given by Chrome, including multi-process the tabs and functions and better memory management.
Re:BloatWare Continues.... (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, from a UI perspective Chrome is most visually streamlined browser I've seen in years. It lacks mail, RSS feeds, those annoying widgets, 30 types of help pages, the ability to edit a site's CSS on the fly, and a lot of the other bloat that has krufted around modern browsers.
I can't speak to the RAM footprint, since with all the memory management in modern browsers that number is fake anyway. But anything learned on this highly simplified interface should translate well to other devices.
Re:Windows does not fork (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool, but according to this discussion: http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.kernel/2008-04/msg00272.html [tech-archive.net]
It looks like it would be a huge PITA to get it to work like fork on unix. It sounds like even if you can get windows to fork, microsoft seems hell bent on you not doing it, otherwise why would it be so hard?
Evolution of software... (Score:3, Interesting)
Netscape took until version 3 to get better than IE (although it didn't last long).
I started using Firefox when it was Phoenix 0.4 or 0.5, by which time it was better than IE.
Now here comes Chrome, which is better than IE with version 0.2.
If I were Microsoft, I think I'd be ready to give up on life right about now. At this rate, people will be writing better browsers than Microsoft in the time it takes Vista to boot. I bet Ballmer is in full Tourette's mode right about now.
Once there are plugins like AdBlock, FlashBlock and NoScript, I think I'd be ready to switch to Chrome today.