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Chrome Vs. IE 8
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."
Stick Chrome with iPhone and you can run them stories to fill up a whole week.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Where's it all going? Is it to with page complexity? In that case, I recommend ditching it wherever possible.
IE 8 beta 2. Go to a W3C XHTML strict compliant site and watch CPU usage. Now after that, go to a regular and even more complex site like www.yahoo.com or www.aol.com . Does it use LESS CPU on non standard site?
I got MS VPC 7 on my Quad G5, it is (as you guess) horribly slow. I installed IE 8 beta 2 to it to test my sites which are all standards compliant. First of all, it claims sites have errors and second, which you may or may not notice on "Real" PC, it renders them so slow that you can actually view site line graphics being drawn!
As VPC 7 and its horrible slowness even helped a friend to pick best performing anti virus on Windows (It is Avast), I wonder if I found a evil thing which would be unnoticed on real x86.
>"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...
...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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Microsoft was unfazed. "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."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Because your gonna need an OS that supports more than 4GB of RAM. And Vista 64 fits that bill.
Who would have thought? 8GB of RAM just to browse the web. Heh
Life is not for the lazy.
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?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
irony (plural ironies)
As far as speed goes, it's not even close. Chrome has JavaScript VM that leaves IE in the dust.
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
-Kz-
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.
Hmm, so the process-per-tab model of Chrome results in more rather than less memory consumption. Google's cartoon claimed that memory consumption would be less overall. So is google wrong? Or did this test fail to show the advantage of this model over long browsing sessions, as google claimed there was? Or perhaps the beta is more bloated, as others suggested for IE8?
My own guess is that google was wrong.
They measured the working set, not the private working set. One of the big reasons why Chrome's "spawn a bunch of different processes, all running the same code" strategy isn't a big deal is because Windows shares memory between copies of code when it can.
So, in other words, his comment actually conveyed the precise opposite of "irony."
How ironic.
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.
IE6 and even Firefox are already huge. I definitely plan to stick to Firefox. First of all, if it ain't broke, why break it?
...and I like Google -- and I really wanted to like Chrome, as well (after all, competition is good). But viewing the bite-size videos (how about a single overview, rather than having to keep clicking for a snippet on each feature?), I didn't see anything useful -- only a lot of integration with Google Search. Guys, I already have Google as my start page. I don't need a toolbar, custom browser, or especially any spyware^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsearch application to snoop through^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hindex my hard drive. Do no evil? Well, maybe. But their brand of "good" has rather long tentacles these days.
...and you kids stay the heck off my lawn, too.
I guess it's this newfangled "cloud computing" thing. I'm condemning myself to the old-curmudgeon category by saying this, but they can have my local apps when they pry them from my cold dead hard drive. I'd rather build a computer from scratch and write my own apps in machine code than trust "the cloud" to keep my information safe and secure.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Acid 3 Test, IE8: 14/100 Chrome: 78/100 Enough said. IE8 is another pathetic attempt at a good browser. As a web designer and developer I can tell you I look forward to mass acceptance of the final version of Chrome. Under no circumstances do I EVER expect to look forward to IE, any version.
Ironic indeed.
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 Vista, surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing."
Whatever happened to the web being called thin clients. That sounds morbidly obese
Just because something takes up more resources doesn't mean it has to be slower. Granted, something that takes less resources usually runs faster, but a good application that makes good use of RAM and CPU power can seem fast.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Is there a good reason to switch from IE or firefox (currently using firefox 3.0.1). to Chrome. I use some google apps; but, for office apps I generally use openoffice. I will say that I haven't looked too close; however, I have seen nothing that makes me feel that I have to switch.
Are there any real benefits to switching today?
The word you are looking for is apropos.
Of course it still would not apply because Chrome has been part of every other story on /.
Calling Firefox lean is like referring to Chris Farely as an athlete. My new new "lean" memory optimized firefox 3 consumes just about three hundred megs of memory with a handful of tabs open. It's crazy. The only reason I use it is because it's a great development platform with some kick-ass extensions, but don't think for a moment I like the fact that my freakin web browser dominates my hardware. Is there a way of decreasing this footprint? Seriously ... was the Mozilla Suite ever this bad?
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.
I don't mind that it uses a lot of RAM so much...I have plenty of that. I wish it didn't use so much CPU, though. I've been using Chrome for the past day or so, and had to stop leaving it open while I was working on other things because every so often it would bog down my CPU for no apparent reason.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
A) 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. Most people are not running 64-bit versions of Windows because most drivers aren't available or stable yet, though that may have improved since I last checked.
B) People run more than one program at a time and they can't all afford expensive new computers, nor are they geeky enough to install RAM on their own.
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".)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Has anyone else noticed Chrome thrashing their hard drive? I find Chrome is doing a lot of reading and wrinting to my hard drive (specifically the main thread, and chrome.dll), so much so that it increases my CPU usage to 20%.
I loved Chrome, but when it started freaking out like this, I can't afford to run a browser with that.
I was planning on running Chrome for Gmail/Gcal/Gdocs, and FireFox for everything else, so I can restart FireFox with no problems at all, and because FireFox has the plugins (AdBlock and NoScript) that I need.
However, I can't do that until this issue is resolved.
Additionally, what the hell is it doing? It does several hundred MBytes or reading and writing, and I have no idea what it's doing. I'm often not even using the browser.
I'll have to get FileMon to check it and force it to happen again. See what it's actually doing.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won't necessarily take down the entire browser - the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.
Could someone explain to me why the flash plugin (as well as any other plugin) can crash the entire browser? Don't they run as separate processes? If not, why not? Wouldn't fixing this (however you would do that) solve the problem without creating the inefficiencies of having a process for each tab? (Granted, the process-per-tab thing does solve other problems).
I'm guessing less than 4 hours
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
Chrome roundly beats IE in terms of memory resource usage. All previous versions of IE had a fairly limited Javascript engine, in terms of the allowed memory usage and limits on the size of statically declared arrays. There is another example here of how IE fails completely under high resource use. While Chrome and Firefox were able to handle much larger data sets. Also IE is much slower in the benchmarks above. Up to 4 times slower than Chrome.
Does that take into account the Shared Segment size? Each Chrome instance on vista lists the SS as around 8MB,
Type two characters :%
in Chrome's address bar and you can guarantee a bad crash...
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
The article mentioned in the summary states that IE8 (beta) consumes more resources than XP, not Vista. That's quite a difference I think..
I guess then that it's too bad they aren't resourceful and non-threaded enough with their site... It's been down for over an hour now:
http://slashdot.org/~davidsyes/journal/210827
I tried to firehose the story, but i guess my post is swamped by tons of other firehose sumbmissions.
ms' site has been down since at LEAST 1815 PST. Is this normal for them?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Try tying about:% into the more robust better tested chrome.
all your base are belong to the web.
"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?
from the summary: "IE 8 itself consumes more resources than Vista"... and that link goes to an article comparing IE8's footprint vs windows XP footprint...
Vista != XP. If IE8 did consume more resources than Vista that'd pretty much kill one or the other, maybe even both... because most people can't afford a computer with 8 cores and 32gb RAM
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
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.
This is what U always wanted. Software based on Java standards. You don't think all that Java TV, MHP, J2ME, SNMP, Davic love was just Sun's effort. Why build a platform specific browser on a library when U can build it on 5 layers of standards.
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!
Are you being sarcastic?
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.
Photos.
Hasn't anyone seen what I have? I looked at the pics, and the icons on the toolbar look *awfully* familiar.
Maybe that's because they're identical to the ones on my Firefox toolbar.
Then there's the default skin/theme/whateveryoucallit of Firefox: chrome.
mark
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..
The test is not correctly measuring the memory usage of the browser. What he's reporting is the "working set" of each process which includes memory mapped binary images, including the browser binaries themselves. For each rendering process, for both Chrome and IE8, the working set would reflect the entire loaded code base. However, that memory is shared between all processes so the numbers are very inaccurate.
My experience is that Chrome uses about 6 MB of overhead per tab. For IE8 that number is around 15MB. If you're loading different sites those resources are also private bytes to the rendering process. For example the process handling the rendering of the two Slashdot tabs I currently have open is using 8MB of RAM. The process handling rendering of Microsoft.com and the Chrome DOM inspector is using 26MB of RAM. The process handling the Flash plugin is using 32MB of RAM.
...if there is an 'article' titled 'Google Chrome, Day 3' tomorrow I am taking an uzi to the entire /. crew...
Geebuz H Christ...I'm having chrome overload. I am all for cool articles having to do with the web (I'm a web developer) but enough is enough!
/* sig */
I, Anonymous C, am never sarcastic ~
If that was what they were aiming for, I think they missed by about an astronomical unit.
so I can double the killer delete select all.
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?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"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"?
The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention... Now that is irony!
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
who cares if it uses more memory- memory is a few bucks a gig, disk space for swapping is free. just started running chrome today. blows away firefox in all respects. IE? Well, who runs that anymore. No more page hangs, way better performance. Anyone who doesn't try it before shooting off their mouth...
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.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
No, it just means that it's taken resources away from the half dozen other things I'm doing in the background, making my whole system slower.
It can seem fast, but using resources has an impact. Even if using the resources makes that application faster, it's definitely going to have an impact on how much other stuff the user can run without having trouble.
Yes, I am a bit of an extreme example in that I usually want to have multiple processor and memory intensive programs going at the same time, but I should have that sort of opportunity. Programs should take as little resources as they can to achieve the objective.
I've been using Chrome for the past day or so, and had to stop leaving it open while I was working on other things because every so often it would bog down my CPU for no apparent reason.
What did the Chrome task manager say? In Firefox, you'd have a nearly impossible time figuring out what was causing the usage other than doing Russian roulette on tabs. In Chrome, at least in theory, you should be able to find exactly what the culprit is. Did you try that, and if you did, why didn't it work? Maybe the CPU usage was too bursty?
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If I've got 18 things going in different browser windows, why should killing one of them (and there's always some silly shit that makes you need to kill one) kill the other 17? I always wondered why they did it that way. The memory used by many instances of a browser doing normal stuff should be manageable. It's only when it starts to go mental that there's a problem, and that's exactly when you want to be able to kill one and keep the others isn't it?
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
the main reson not to use Chrome is quite clear realy have you read EULA
i for one will not hand all my data to google for a good browser
null
"I usually keep 25-40 tabs open in FF"
You need an introduction to my little friend, Mr. Bookmark.
Better known as 318230.
Heh, I don't know...I didn't get that far in the comic book ;-). I'll have to leave the Task Manager open for awhile to see what it says.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Unfortunately, nobody will ever know what "rain on your wedding day" feels like, as nobody on slashdot will ever get married.
I installed it myself to see and it uses 100mb or less on my system(vista x64). I also find it faster than chrome or firefox. Though I still don't like the layout of the browser.
In her masterpiece "who gives a fuck?", renowned social critic Coward juggles complicated concepts in homosexuality and technology to construct a masterpiece post of pace and metaphor. From the bold and striking opening Coward jumps into a contrasting rhetorical piece. She follows this up with an apparant digression into mortality, which is then wrapped up cleanly in a sudden controversial conclusion.
A compelling read. Four stars.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I'm having this problem too. It's not just happening on the slower machine at work, it's also happening on the faster comp at home.
At times, it will hang both Firefox and itself. Way to go, Chrome.
1 + 1 = 3?
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 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.
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?
Speaking of those multi core machines. When was it ever written that just because the hardware gets better and cheaper that applications get fatter and more resource hungry?
Just my .02
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy - Benjamin Franklin"
IE8 was reported to use more than Windows XP, not Windows Vista. The /. article and the article it points to both even say so.
:(){
What I don't understand is the seeming implication in the writeup (I admit I have not RTFA) that you need "bloat" for performance? WTF?
If I go to a heavy Flash website, for example, and the performance is slow, it's certainly not because my browser isn't "heavy" enough. I need better hardware or a better Flash player or something, but not a beefier browser.
I applaud the usage of separate processes per tab from a stability standpoint, but don't quite get the "bloat required for performance" angle.
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.
Look at how well a proper minimal Linux distribution can scale to modern hardware! Basic Linux, for example running in a Qemu or bochs install, is more usable in its root'd single-user mode in a networked HAL for connectivity. Vista and Longhorn (and prior XP) just slow everything down when multi-tasking, yet this little thing just flies in its sandbox just fine. If it means anything to anyone, more VM sessions of any minimal OS within Vista would cluster together and be more usable.
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?
"Kennedy's comparison found Chrome 'out-bloated' IE 8, consuming an average of 267MB vs. IE 8's 211MB."
Until 4gb of RAM costs more than $50, I will continue to not care. I'm much more interested in how much better use I can use the extra RAM I have other than to buffer HD read/writes.
When Microsoft releases a memory-intensive browser, it's a "poorly written" and "inefficient". But when Google does the same, it's "a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing"??
Bollocks.
of something you should not use
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
Google chrome hasn't even been released yet, and you're trying to compare resource usage to Microsoft IE? Microsoft have their own cadre of very smart people who, while they seem to do a little with a lot, really do a large amount of work. I would scream with George Lucas approved melodramatic pain, if I were to be involved with something like IE on Windows. The IE programmers have done a sterling job, given what they needed to create. Hats off to 'em.
Give the Google engineers some time to refine their software. Right now, it's more important for them to get it working right, rather than get it working efficiently.
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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Read the EULA. It's HUGE. (I recommend using something like EULAlyzer rather than reading the whole thing.)
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.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
We're here pretending to read dry blocks of informational material and then posting nested dry blocks of presumably informational material. That's what Web 2.0 discovered! That's cheap!
Therefore it's got to be possible to produce a lean, mean, word&picture optimized browser for this. Yea, it might not be able to do dynamic online market trading, but that's when you open a second Big Engine browser.
I am not even creative enough to think of the little neat features that don't cost much but add fun little experience perks. Maybe organize stories by Slashdot Category?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Google makes money through advertising. That makes it unlikely at there will ever be an Adblock Plus for any browser that Google makes.
I've had a similar experience but with the HDD. Shortly after opening Chrome, my hard disk started to "purr" and when I checked with the Windows Task Manager, the I/O Reads and I/O Writes were going crazy for the chrome process (there was only one).
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.
I don't want or NEED "web-centric computing", and I sure as hell don't need a fucking web browser that sucks down all the memory and processor cycles like it's a 3D first-person shooter. Why the hell is software tending to get fatter and slower instead of more efficient?
What's funny is that Chrome feature list seems eerily similar to IE8 (plus the coolness factor). Process-per-tab isolation? Check. Private browsing? Check. Tab groups? Check. Only Chrome beta is much faster than IE8b2, and, so far, more stable for me as well. And of course, it's Google! I wonder whether it's just a coincidence, or whether the Google dudes just love to dodge those chairs...
Just because something takes up more resources doesn't mean it has to be slower.
Not if you're not using those resources, no.
Chugging along at 1-2% per core and 30% RAM usage, like I do while doing everyday web-browsing using Firefox 3, is basically a waste of resources, unless you count the small amount of energy saved by not using 100%.
If I want to browse while using, say, Reason and Sonar or a game, a browser that uses lot's of resources will definitely make things go slower.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I keep hearing about "security improvements"... There's two exploits in two days of life. It's an immature codebase, but if this's what we've got to look forward to, well, count me out.
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/6353
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/6355
www.isoHunt.com
it's beta for god sake..
that's like playing the WoW beta and saying "i fell through the map! what a crappy game!"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That puzzle piece had cankles....
Firefox seems to render Hebrew pages much better than Chrome (whose output is just inadequate). Maybe other foreign-language (e.g., Arabic) users can input their experience too.
what exactly it is that they like about Chrome?
Because to me it really sounds like marketing hype combined with some new technology buzz surrounding a solution looking for a problem.
I've actually been quite pleased that while everyone else seems to be trying to improve my life by throwing as much unnecessary bloat as possible someones had the sense to focus on features and performance. I like updating a product and noticing it's actually better then the previous version.
But now this and I feel suddenly like I've been missing something.
Quack, quack.
Don't say that bloatware is progress. Using more computing resources to accomplish the same task is not an achievement.
It's an insult to what has been the real progess in the computing world. And that is, an INCREASE in the useful life of hardware (which may not be exciting to hardware makers, but lowers costs and physical waste/trash to the benefit of the rest of society). Sure, games continue to target high-end hardware, but right now it is possible to install a modern browser on a system at least as old as a PentiumII and use it to eg. read slashdot. With javascript disabled there remains only a hint of sluggishness. This wasn't true in the previous decade. Web browsing sucked on 486s even back in the mid '90s, I remember.
You want to run random games/applications/gobbledygook in your browser? That's fine, but I'd rather this functionality doesn't end up being de-facto mandatory in browsers and decreasing everyone's system performance even if they just want to read message boards. Let me tell you what I love about Java. I never use it. It's been around a while, and other people use it, but I don't. I don't even have a Java VM installed on my machine. So it doesn't bother me at all if an update for Java comes along that needs Windows Hindenburg service pack 17, 4TB of RAM, and 15PB of disk space to run someone's new online Pong game. I don't need to download just to be able to post a comment on Youtube.
Let's face it - Google's plain text ads are hardly obtrusive enough to warrant an ad-blocker. Most people wouldn't even notice if they were blocked or not - they just care about the huge, multimedia-rich, bandwidth-intensive flash ads that fill half the screen.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Hundreds of megabytes to display a dozen web pages? Single process or multiple process, that's just bullshit. Chrome, IE8, and Firefox all sound ridiculously bloated.
The tabs are separate processes. That means that a lot more memory is going to be duplicated rather than shared. Ideally to ensure that one tab can't hang the whole app I think they will have to have an instance of their engine and any plugins running for each tab.
Actually, its almost always the other way around. Classic time/space tradeoff.
Usually, you bleed space for faster execution, or if your space is tight, you optimize for that often at the cost of execution time.
In one way, this is exactly the approach for Chrome. Except its a stability&security/space tradeoff.
The multi-process approach is much more robust, and easier to secure, and simpler to code. But it uses up a lot more resources.
No, it just means that it's taken resources away from the half dozen other things I'm doing in the background, making my whole system slower.
Using more resources (memory) doesnt inherently slow other apps down or take anything away from them.
It only slows other apps down in the very specific case where using more resources uses the last of your memory, and you have to start paging.
But in general, using more resources does NOT slow other apps down, only when you're already resource constrained.
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.
Okay.
If I may be so bold.
This is where it's at:
Windows has something call Dynamic Link Libraries (aka DLL's)
The aim of a DLL is to share code amongst processes. So if Chrome's multiprocess model loads the same DLL multiple times, it maps the DLL's code into the address space of the calling process. Let's pretend for the sake of argument that the rasterization DLL is 10 megabytes large. This means that the shared 10mb DLL is shared between all the processes, and that in fact you should be measuring the shared DLLs. Just because Task Manager (or similar tools) measure 6x50mb processes, this does not mean that each process is physically consuming 50mb of RAM. It means it has 50mb mapped to it. Windows (and any sufficiently advanced operating system with delay-load code systems) follows a scheme called Reference Counting, where a DLL is loaded when referenced the first time and a counter incremented that says "hey, now 1 process is using me"
After that, each successive process loads the DLL and also indirectly ups its reference count. When all processes that load the DLL end, the DLL remains loaded in memory until the OS garbage collects it.
One must always question the tools he uses to measure the efficiency of programs. What you really want is to see the difference between process-local and process-mapped heap allocation statistics, as this is a truly accurate count of memory usage.
Furthermore; IE8 is in beta. Chrome is in beta. And before all you firefox fanbois go off about "yeah but look at firefox's memory use when it was in beta!" I have one thing to say: Firefox is based on netscape. Which has been a little out of beta for more than 5 years. (probably in excess of 10 years). Chrome is new. And HIGHLY feature-packed. and it is NOT bloated. just because there's a high memory use report in a task manager, this does not mean that the use is high. I'm disappointed in you guys, I thought this was a geek forum, where people question everything?
"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."
WTF does that even mean ?!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
It's a common mistake when people see many similar processes for them to add up all their memory usage and think that's how much is really being used.
In a situation like this it's often not the case.
Much of the RAM used by those processes will be read-only _shared_ data, not copies of it.
This is the case in linux and I'm sure it's probably the same in winblows.
I got married! Yes, a slashdotter actually got a girl. A maths PhD no less (how nerdy?) and quite pretty. And it was nice and sunny on our wedding day, too. Happy news on /. - whatever next?
Smivs on the intertubes!
// IE 8 itself consumes more resources than Vista
You mean XP surely... editors, stop sleeping on the job...
My experience with Chrome:
1. Wow, this is so much faster and well thought out than FF. I'll use it as my main browser, even if that means ads are back.
2. Crash. Crash. Crash. Open FF in the background to surf sites that crashed the whole browser. Simulteneous browsing on Chrome and FF. More Chrome crashes.
3. Close Chrome, go back to FF.
Did anyone have the same problem?
Of all the pages in the web, why should it be that the Gmail login page goes blank on my machine? All I get is a blank.
I'm using a proxy of our corporate LAN. Without a proxy, Firefox can't access the internet. And Chrome uses the Windows/IE internet connection preferences. Wonder what's up with that.
I want the same page to display the same way on Konqueror, Safari, IEWhatever...
No you don't. You want the same *information* to be available. Let the browser interpret the semantic HTML and CSS to come up with a presentation that best suits the user. But for this to happen, people need to stop treating the rendering as sacred. They also need to quit messing with the DOM. Browsers *do* need to go on a diet, Javascript needs to die a horrible painful death, and people need to start recognizing the right tool for the job is not to always cram applications into a web of hyperlinked documents.
Web-apps are an oxymoron. The internet is more than port 80, and we have plenty of cross-platform runtimes, so there's no real excuse anymore: It's freakin 2008, let's have full-fledged APPS
chrome (or firefox) is never going to become the dominant browser because internet explorer has the word internet in its name. If you give most people a choice on what program they use to browse the internet - firefox, chrome or internet explorer, they will choose internet explorer because it sounds like a program to browse the internet with
I ran Chrome for 8 hours yesterday, with up to 8 tabs open, and only got memory consumption up to around 150MB at most. Not even 10% of the memory available in this computer. I imagine that Chrome would run very well on an Atom based NetBook, even if it only had 512MB RAM.
I closed them all, and Chrome went back down to 50MB.
Safari was eating 1GB of memory beforehand though!
In terms of OIL, 2gig ram costs about 1/3 a barrel.
Its still cheap, theres no excuse to not get more ram.
Any thing below 1.6ghz is in my draw, not worth running, except for a low power file server/webserver.
Whats the price of intels cheapest core2s? $40? thats going to break the bank.
But its funny how Chrome just feels INSTANT, yet FF feels fast, but not snappy. Oh and give us smarter image caching with priorities that let us choose which websites or file sizes to store longer, and flush larger, less used sites quicker.
Any FREE ram is really wasted ram. It needs to be used by cache.
Regarding blocking flash/JS, use 3rd party mini proxys that can 'regexp' the html in real time to your hearts content.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
the title says it all...!
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.
I honestly don't know what the hell they're talking about. I've been testing chrome now since its launch and it has been the best browsing experience I've ever had. It is really much faster than FireFox (let alone IE7) and has not crashed a single time. Additionally, it does not require me to restart the browser every once in a while to make it faster again and free up some memory.
Besides the ability to collapse multiple windows into tabs in a single window and visa versa is really cool.
Sure, there's some stuff missing (e.g. extensions) but since it is open source I assume that we will be seeing these things pretty soon.
In the best traditions of advertising-driven web progress, here we have yet another example of intentional bloat whose sole purpose is to push yet more foo-foo "targeted content", at the expense of your system and bandwidth, into your ever-shrinking useful workspace. Bloody wonderful.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The great, simple thing about copy-on-write and fork is that a process can't fuck up its siblings' memory space, yet will share physical memory as long as they don't write to it.
Linux is heavily optimised in this domain so that you can fork thousands of processes in no time.
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.
On Fedora Core nspluginwrapper also allowed them to implement SELinux protection on the Flash plugin.
So far it works *extremely* well for me on this fresh install of FC9 on x86_64.
Except that it's open source and some hacker will provide either a binary patch or add-on or re-release that has an adblock feature (that probably links in to the lists used in FF at the moment).
So, no there won't be a Google endorsed adblocker.
If you like Slashdot's RSS feed, keep Firefox, cuz Chrome apparently does not support RSS
I just fired up vanilla versions of both IE8, Chrome, and Process Explorer and opened the same two tabs: the Facebook login page and Wikipedia (English).
Process Explorer tells me IE8 is using 389652 KB of memory. Chrome is using 260668 KB of memory. Both have three processing running.
Ouch! That's what Opera uses with about 80 tabs open (after a fresh start, admittedly). Firefox usually gets there around 30 tabs (probably more with FF3). This kind of memory usage for only two tabs is pretty extreme.
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.
9 tabs and you risk running out of system memory? I was hoping Chrome would be a good heavy-duty browser like Opera, and possibly a fine successor, but these numbers suggest they have quite a bit of work to do.
IE8 even moreso ofcourse, but I don't think anyone is surprised by that.
I guess I'll stick to Opera and Firefox for now.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Really? In that case, I have to assume that you were running pages with Flash - my Chrome's Flash plugin seems to go screwy very easily.
Apart from that, I've found CPU usage to be very, very nice - especially coming from Firefox where keeping many tabs open, Flash or no, seems to leave a huge CPU usage even when it's idle.
The real WTF, surely, is where it installs itself (on XP): C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome.
I guess Google are too good for Program Files these days...
i don't understand why in the media people are always talking about a "browser war". chrome is not challenging M$ but supporting these monopolizing duces. i don't see any port for Linux/BSD machines yet. pretty arrogant for a company making billions with Linux, if you ask me. fuck their multithreaded piece of scrap. they can me - i'll stick with w3m and geckos e basta!
My recommendation is that you don't ignore this. I wish all documentation was written to explain something in such incredibly plain English.
I downloaded Chrome, read the whole thing and by the time I was done, was sold. Not in a marketing sense, but in a usability sense. By the time I'd done reading, I was encouraged to use many of the key features.
There's few times when something is free, and out of the box replaces the old. This one accomplishes the feat.
Now, I just want Linux versions, but looking at the technology behind it, I doubt Google will be the one making such a version. Hopefully others will.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
Interesting Analysis. However, Most users will not run this kind of diagnosis to see which browser is better. Unless the resource consumption is obvious to average user, i doubt that will be a deciding factor.
I would rather be Google be google and take care of searches and do good job and Let Microsoft be Microsoft and take care of OS & browsers.
I don't see why each is trying to undermine other's area of expertise.
That said, i can't understand the animousity towards Microsoft by lots of developers when its Microsofts that is created millions of jobs for IT. Anything from MCSE to SQL server and .Net.
Who is employed by Google's inventions other than few thousand folks in their offices.
I just installed Crome. It's cool, but for now I'm continuing with Firefox as I have it all set up with the extensions I like. Meanwhile, I checked out my own web site to see how it displays in Chrome - no problem - looks great. I thought you may be interested in seeing the browser string that Crome sent to my web site...
:-)
"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
So we round the bend and come full circle, back to client server computing. Good I say, but it's too bad we're still stuck with a tangled mess of web standards with with to build rich applications. Current web standards have got to go. The web has demonstrated one important thing: the importance of open standards; otherwise it's a complete mess, and it's success primarily a testament to human ingenuity. What we need now are some good open standards for building rich networked gui applications. Web 2.0 is a horrible kludge, but it will hopefully help nudge demand for truly inter-operable and well-designed standard solutions to building distributed applications. Just keep Microsoft off of the committee to prevent them from thwarting the process.
I can't believe they did it so wrong ...
Perhaps my original post was a bit too salty? :)
At any rate I do find it troubling to see this on the horizon.
I do not really care for my web browser to do anything other than display useful information and be efficient at doing it.
I also do not want my browser to be a flashing billboard on the information super highway. :)
Whether it's on my desktop or on my smart phone. I would prefer that be executed as quickly and quietly as possible without any crashes, hangs, or complaints.
Perhaps I am showing my age, but once upon a time browsers did that you know, before they became something like the those annoying billboards in, "Minority Report".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQbVD5hlddk
Also, but not to start a flame here, I cite the following sources as to where things appear to be going for the average consumer.
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9575
http://news.cnet.com/Mozilla-aims-for-mobile-browser-market/2100-1032_3-5483683.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/aug/21/business.newmedia
I honestly think IE should have stopped at 6.X, 7.X has been constant trouble for me.
Thank you for the discussion!
Joe
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy - Benjamin Franklin"
Google makes money through advertising. That makes it unlikely at there will ever be an Adblock Plus for any browser that Google makes.
Given that Google is making it open source, I'm sure someone will make an AdBlock'ing version, even if it can't be done in the same way as Firefox (e.g. an extension)
Ok nice chrome is out, wait one month so that it keeps all his promises. Looking at the specs the strict process isolation used to keep chrome to do bad things outside of his memory pool looks nice and promising. Now just everything else apart (I'm not a big fan of the preview of the websites you like the most...but the idea is interesting indeed) I am just only waiting for some devs puting some easy way to administrate their software through active directories policies (giving out MSI's instead of executable for example) or some mockup. When you administer a large organization (large starts when you have three floor of people and a bunch of other one abroad) you don't have really a lot of time to say "hey let's use Firefox/Opera/Whateverelse" instead of IE "because IE is buggy and prone to create a lot of problems. Yeah it's true but I can control IE bookmark from policies, it's behavior, the user agent, the authorized controls, and so on...this teamed with an enlightened ;) usage of local people rights/applications to control spywares and so (yeah still useful) AND proxying/viruschecking the trafic you have something that could be thought as a somewhat secure setup (somewhat is the magic word here).
So doing that with Firefox...well I tried for a while Firefox with a few users. The problem is that the update went wrong on a few system who didn't updated (I suspect that user right was in cause...having to log as a local admin is a drawback), that some internal system doesn't work well (think about activeX controls...shivers) well the whole package was giving me more support and interventions than otherwise with IE.
I am not telling that IE is cool and nice and Firefox not useful...just that in a corporate case even the nicest browser couldn't give a dent into Microsoft monopoly due to a severe lack of central management (or at least reporting).
*yes I know I can put the profile of firefox in a centralized location to achieve that, but it's not really what I have in mind here with "central administration"*
Sure, they can do that, but it would likely amount to forking the tree, since there is simply no way Google will accept such an extension back into its own codebase. Forks like that don't tend to do all that well.
Chrome: doesn't run on Linux either.
I don't see what everyone's getting so excited about.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
FOR GEEKS AND PEOPLE WHO KNOW: Firefox or Opera, depending on whom you ask
Whether it be the novelty of a Google browser or just the opportunity to try something new, I've read on numerous sources that Chrome is already being used by 1% of users on the Internet. Considering it JUST released 48 hours ago, thats not too bad. They already have a larger market share than Opera. That 1% is undoubtedly coming from Mozilla and Opera, and NOT from IE. I love the fact that if one of my tabs crashes it doesn't bring down everything. I love that it doesn't eat memory like mozilla. It appears to compete with Opera with speed. I like Chrome... and it's only in beta testing. Wait til it comes out for real, and then stack it up against Mozilla and Opera.
Ok nice chrome is out, wait one month so that it keeps all his promises. Looking at the specs the strict process isolation used to keep chrome to do bad things outside of his memory pool looks nice and promising.
Now just everything else apart (I'm not a big fan of the preview of the websites you like the most...but the idea is interesting indeed) I am just only waiting for some devs puting some easy way to administrate their software through active directories policies (giving out MSI's instead of executable for example) or some mockup.
When you administer a large organization (large starts when you have three floor of people and a bunch of other one abroad) you don't have really a lot of time to say "hey let's use Firefox/Opera/Whateverelse" instead of IE "because IE is buggy and prone to create a lot of problems. Yeah it's true but I can control IE bookmark from policies, his behavior, the user agent, the authorized controls, and so on...this teamed with an enlightened ;) usage of local people rights/applications to control spywares and so (yeah still useful) AND proxying/viruschecking the trafic you have something that could be thought as a somewhat secure setup (somewhat is the magic word here).
So doing that with Firefox...well I tried for a while Firefox with a few users. A few problems raised like the updater who went wrong on a few system (I suspect that user right was in cause) the only way was to log as a local admin to start the process...this is a drawback, that some internal websites weren't working well (think about activeX controls...shivers) well the whole package was giving me more support and interventions than otherwise with IE.
I am not telling that IE is cool and nice and Firefox not useful...just that in a corporate case even the nicest browser couldn't give a dent into Microsoft monopoly due to a severe lack of central management (or at least reporting).
*yes I know I can put the profile of firefox in a centralized location to achieve that, but it's not really what I have in mind here with "central administration"*
If Chrome is more "bloated" than other browsers, it's going to be due to general coding style, feature-bloat, etc. When I see people quoting stats about different browsers having memory footprints differing by hundreds of megabytes, and attributing that to Chrome's multiprocess approach, I have to laugh. In reality, the multiprocess approach aspect of Chrome is costing what: maybe a couple hundred KB at the most (and I'm being pessimistic), with most of that being the address translation table?
That aside, Chrome's approach, at least in this respect, is right. It's the cleanest and best way to do things. When you can separate things into processes, you should. When you just can't do that practically, then you sigh and fall back to threads (or just give up on parallelism altogether).
This talk about multiprocess somehow being a Chrome liability is absurd and I can't take anyone who says such things seriously. Google did the right thing here, and in a few years everyone else will be doing the same thing.
Also, everyone has been saying for many years, that internet clients are getting ridiculously complex and hard to make bug-free, so that heavy sandboxing is getting to be an essential requirement for any new project. This is a step toward that, and it's clear that maximizing separation was one of their goals.
I'm not normally a Google fanboi, but this project just reeks of thoughtfulness. Well done, Google.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
anyone else notice that the link saying that it takes up more resources then vista is actually a link to a blog post on how it takes up more resources then xp? Though the fact that it uses a ton of resources definitely stands. So far from playing around Chrome seems alot more streamlined then IE8, even its instancing habits seem to be a little better and you can tell what its new process means!. Microsoft has horrible habits for naming its process things that make you wonder if its a bad program or not.
Am I the only one who thinks that's completely unacceptable?
Am I right, slashdotters? Slashdotters routinely ripped IE7 for lack of a menu bar. So Chrome sucks for the same reason, RIGHT? Or is that not the case because it's Google rather than Microsoft?
I've even seen some saying that Chrome removing the menu bar is "brilliant", with nobody questioning such a stance. You guys seem to just dismiss the fact that, not only did Google rip Microsoft off on this, Google gets praised for their "innovation" while Microsoft got ripped for it.
Then again, nobody ever accused slashdotters of intellectual honesty.
I understand why Google wants to push web-centric computing from a business standpoint but it ain't gonna happen.
Hardware is cheap these days and processing power is abundant. And if I have enough bandwidth to run an application over the web with desktop-app-like responsiveness, then I have enough bandwidth to download the application very quickly and actually own it vs. being dependent on some remote server for the rest of eternity. And If I want to be able to access my personal desktop environment anywhere in the world, I can already do that. It's called Remote Desktop.
So exactly what are the advantages of web-centric computing again, for the average home user...? None that I can see.
No, it just means that it's taken resources away from the half dozen other things I'm doing in the background, making my whole system slower.
What resources? A few megabytes of RAM is not a big deal in this age of multi-gigabyte systems, with virtual memory management and caching at all levels. There shouldn't be a huge difference in processor time -- the same algorithms are being run, just at a different schedule. The operating system scheduler is pretty smart.
It can seem fast, but using resources has an impact. Even if using the resources makes that application faster, it's definitely going to have an impact on how much other stuff the user can run without having trouble.
Seem fast? "Using resources has an impact?" This is a troll, right? Of course using resources has an impact. Stuff gets done, potentially faster if things are working correctly, and you have fewer resources. But unless this "lack of resources" actually causes a bottleneck, it won't degrade performance for other applications.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
As far as I remember, windows doesn't have fork() (probably Vista does), and I don't know how it manages memory between forked processes. Of course this is a comparison with IE on windows, but since google is obviously headed towards running chrome on some kind of "dumb terminal" type machine, and all the apps on top of it, is the windows port really that relevant?
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
What I want to know is how was Google able to keep this quite until just before the launch? Android was rumored for months before it was announced.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
concerning "Firefox aim for lean, efficient browsing experiences":
I do not consider FF lean by any means. I use it exclusively but still find it hogging up my windows box (yeah yeah blame windows). Right now with 2 tabs open its consuming 203MB and is using 44 threads. wtf!
I won't switch to IE8. But I'm not happy with FF
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
I use the Windows taskbar as a push-down interruption stack while I'm working. I'll be in a browser window, then need to open up a Word doc, then another browser, and later I can just click down the list (or actually, up the list as I keep the taskbar vertically on the left hand side of my widescreen display where I have readily available screen real estate for it). Everything is thus kept in chronological order, browser pages nicely integrated with application pages. And a vertical taskbar, widened for tab-label readability on a widescreen display works nicely for this purpose. Pages tend to be taller than they are wide, so this maximizes the vertical space I have for individual pages.
Nice thing about using the OS tabs, is I can interleave Word doc tabs with Browser tabs with whatever apps I have. No can do with browser tabs. I can't integrate non-browser apps with in-browser tabs (and don't want to, so don't get any BIG IDEAS). Browsers that insist on putting everything in new tabs annoy the hell out of me as it screws up my workflow and eats up valuable vertical-space realestate. Unnacceptable-- software that won't adapt to *me* is subject to immediate defenestration. In addition, I'm used to looking on the left side of the screen for current pages and in-browser tabs don't show up there.
Browser tabs are less than USELESS to me. And while I can often right-click open-in-new-window instead of open-in-new tab, the problem is a lot of pages decide this for me by doing their own open-in-new-window which ends up being relegated to a tab in these new-fangled "tabbed" browsers. Firefox options in that regard help somewhat, but now and then a tab will sneak past for some reason. Not conditioned like a sheep to look at the in-browser tabs (not expecting or wanting any), I've found that often new tabs are opened and not brought to front so they start building up with who-knows-what crap that I don't notice until pages later, when I can no longer connect what page I visited that produced it in order to isolate the condition and proxyfilter it into submission.
The problem is though, is that there is a conflict-of-interest here. Many browser authors want to keep you in the browser as much as possible, and Google in particular. Just like in the early days where Yahoo search at one point would give you an *intermediate* search page with additional options before giving you the final links page-- and it was clear the reason was that it provided them another page where they could subject you to advertising. I'm not sure what happened with Yahoo after that, as I quickly moved to AltaVista at that point and never looked back (this was before Google became ubiquitous). I don't want Google in control of my web "experience" any more than I want Microsoft or Steve Jobs to be (or Mozilla, for that matter). I suspect that they actually will trend towards integrating external apps into browser tabs, as it keeps them in control of your experience-- exactly where they want you.
-- The "I hate browser tabs" curmudgeon.
I just saw an interesting post on Chrome versus IE8 - where running through 176 of W3C CSS Tests - Chrome failed on 16 and 77 (44% of the tests). There was an telling comment on Microsoft's ability to meet web standards as well. See it here:
http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=784
I have run into some applications which were using proprietary data formats. In some cases the analysis was taking a full day to run against the models.
I thought this might be an application that could run better in parrallel. So I got permission to export the data for testing purposes and was given the algorithms for some of the basic models.
After I wrote the draft version of the code running on a single processor and transferring the data into postgre. I started the comparison test. Ready to let it run all night.
It ran 30 minutes on the linux system and took 5 hours to run on the XP system.
The program using XP was written in VB and the program on linux was using C++. C++ code was using doubles which weren't being used in the VB version.
Difference in the results, the VB version had a better presentation of the results. The actual numerical results showed that doubles weren't really necessary, but the computing model was still 10 times faster.
The only other possibility was a difference in the MB on the 2 systems.
The results of the test. Customers were told to run their computer models on isolated systems without any other applications installed. The number of customers which were running into 12 hour run times dropped significantly. It was also suggested that they run with higher performance hard drives.
So I'm getting tired of applications which use up my hardware to do non-essential tasks. I also think that there should be a requirement or a standard developed telling people how much of hardware performance capabilities software is going to utilize. This especially goes for AV, spyware, office tools and such. So that consumers have a better understanding of what the cost is on using a Windows system with the required applications.
You might note that I never mentioned the customers who were trying to run this on a Vista system. Strong recommendations were given to customers to get a system with XP. In fact very little attention is given to customers who attempt to run large models on systems using Vista.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
Doubtful. That would require forking the code. See this comment just above.
On Linux, otherwise is a "No Linux version, no care".
A scaled system such as google, could mean the difference between 9000 servers or 2000 servers, and a million $ in power costs and rental space cost, support costs, hardware cost, admin cost.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
While using Chrome I found that a lot of sites sites don't work, due to missing plugins for the new platform. Sometimes just quitting the site is not an option so I created an easy way to open the page in your "old" browser. Just drag and drop the URL from the Chrome URL bar into the Mirror form and you can continue your Chrome browsing. Download: http://www.zonator.com/mirror.zip