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."
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....
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. I
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.
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: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: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.
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: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: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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not if you use Linux
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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: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:5, Insightful)
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: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.
"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:4, Informative)
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.
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Not a bad thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
A kernel by nature should be tiny, but an OS should contain tons of functionality.
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: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: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.
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!
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.
Re: (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.
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: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!".
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.
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.
Bookmarks (Score:3, Funny)
"I usually keep 25-40 tabs open in FF"
You need an introduction to my little friend, Mr. Bookmark.
Re:Bookmarks (Score:4, Funny)
Ick.
Bookmarks?
Does anyone still use those? I havent since the Netscape days.
I just leave the tab open forever. I had tabs on previous laptop in Opera that had been there for almost 2 years.
Just seems simpler that way.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you have a 64-bit OS, you're limited in how much of that 6 GB of RAM you can actually use. I forget the exact limit, but I think you'll only be using ~3 GB of that due to various legacy hardware issues
There is some lie in your truth, and some truth in your lie. Or something like that.
The upper limit on 32-bit addressing is 2^32 = 4294967296 bytes. Which is, coincidentally, exactly 4 gigabytes. Any 32-bit copy of Windows can support up to that much.
Why, then, do some computers only report 3 GB of
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Memory is owned by the process, so killing off a thread for a tab won't help you. Worker processes is a traditional form of resiliance for app servers like IIS (presumably Apache too).
Operating systems have already solved the problem of isolation of tasks (processes) so it seems appropriate to use this functionality. Memory is cheap - I put 4gig in a laptop for under a hundred bucks. IE8 seems to be putting more effort into saving memory than Chrome, but TBH I don't think its worth the effort.
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
Re: (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 c
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:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
You are correct. Linux, Windows, and pretty much all modern operating systems implement copy-on-write.
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.
Didn't measure memory correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, 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!
Standards (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
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".)
IE8 consumes more resources than Vista? (Score:4, Informative)
Not Accurate (Score:4, Informative)
The description of the process model isn't that accurate. In both IE8 and Chrome the renderer process is shared across multiple tab groups. If you manually create a new tab that tab will have a new rendering process associated with it. If you click on a link and it opens in a new tab it will share the rendering process of the parent page. Chrome will show you this in the Task Manager as a single process which show a list of tabs.
The implementation of the rendering processes between IE8 and Chrome are strikingly similar, so much so that I am suspicious that Google borrowed some ideas from the public betas of IE8 which had this functionality since March. Both use the same behavior for sharing rendering processes as mentioned above. Both spawn the same image as the rendering process as the hosting browser process (iexplore.exe and chrome.exe), using command line arguments to pass channel information. Both use the Job API in Win32 to assign the rendering processes to security restricted jobs. Both use an IPC mechanism built on UDP messaging to localhost for the rendering processes to communicate back to the parent process, where plenty of other IPC options exist, and considering a lot of the Chrome code is Win32-specific they could have used platform-specific IPC for performance purposes without sullying the project.
Where Chrome differs is that unlike IE8 plugins are also loaded in isolated processes. It's a neat idea in theory but I think it will be problematic in practice. The browser shares one plugin process for all uses of that plugin, which I've already seen cause bottlenecks in resources on my machine trying to view several sites with Flash content. The plugin processes also have a lot of hard coded logic to deal with the nuances of the different plugins and how they behave. For example, there is hard coded logic to deal with the UI expectations of Flash where the content is rendered in the renderer process instead of in the plugin process, whereas with QuickTime the content is rendered in the plugin process and overlaid in the rendering process. In IE8 if a plugin crashes hard the tabs that contain the failing plugin would crash, but other pages would remain open potentially displaying other content using the same plugin. In Chrome if the plugin crashes hard it does so for every page displaying content with that plugin, although all of the tabs would remain loaded showing a placeholder where the content would be.
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..
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.
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: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.
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.
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.
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.
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: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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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: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.
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!!!
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.
Re: (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:How Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
So, in other words, his comment actually conveyed the precise opposite of "irony."
How ironic.
Re:How Ironic (Score:4, Funny)
The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention... Now that is irony!
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: (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: (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: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.
Re: (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: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.
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: (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:Welcome to 64bit (Score:5, Funny)
After all, 2GB per tab should be enough for everyone.
Re: (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:Google Chrome HDD and CPU Usage (Score:4, Informative)
Somebody I know had this happening to them, turning off the malware/phishing site definition files being downloaded fixed this (it downloads a new file about every 3 seconds if you look at about:network)
Re: (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 th
Re: (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: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).
Re:Security improvements? (Score:4, Informative)
it's not an exploit. you cannot call it that because its a beta product. Beta products have bugs. its the same as a test driver saying a car is crap because feature is not correct. By downloading and using chrome, you submit to being a beta tester. if you're going to go around spreading negative publicity about a beta product that you are technically a tester of, in order to improve it, then you're a moron. call me a flametroll. just don't come post "0day sploits" about a beta product, because thats retarded.
Re:Security improvements? (Score:4, Informative)
Could you not be bothered to read the links you posted?
The first one is not a security exploit. It's at most a DoS since it causes the app to crash.
The second one is an old/known vulnerability in webkit. Of course they inherited it. It's exactly the same problem called the 'carpet bombing vulnerability' in Safari, which also uses webkit.