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."

Comments

Not a bad thing.

[bigstrat2003]

...surely announce a new, very demanding era in Web-centric computing.

How is this a bad thing? Modern browsers are far more demanding than Mosaic, because they do more. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a more demanding browser if you need the increased requirements to add functionality... that's the point of advancing our hardware capabilities!

Next thing you know, people will be complaining that it takes more muscle to run a 360 game than it took to run an Atari game. Jeez.

Re:Not a bad thing.

[entrylevel]

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.

[entrylevel]

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.

[Jekler]

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.

BloatWare Continues....

[postbigbang]

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....

[postbigbang]

I'm all for evolution. Interoperability has been sacrificed for the sake of tying users to platforms. Same old story, new application. Join our free dev network and we'll grow together! Instead, we grow apart. Is that progress? Are the new features worth it when we make browsers that take a semi to run? Whatever happened to stealthy tight code? Whatever happened to API sets that worked across platforms? It's all about grabbing users and corralling them to increasingly incompatible and proprietary platforms. To both Google and Microsoft: shame on you. We love the neat new stuff. But the ball-and-chain effect gets old.

Re:BloatWare Continues....

[B5_geek]

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:BloatWare Continues....

[bigstrat2003]

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....

[mcrbids]

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....

[Jack9]

Why spend the time if you don't need to?

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.

We stopped caring about how tightly we can tune our applications when we got more leeway with hardware, and rightly so.

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.

Hmmm

[Waffle Iron]

As I understand it, multiple processes don't necessarily mean more bloat. If a set of processes are all running the same executables and libraries, then the code is all mapped into physical memory only once and shared between the processes.

At least under Linux, using fork() and copy-on-write paging makes multiple processes highly efficient. Maybe it's a bit tougher to do under Windows (which lacks a fork call), but it seems to me that careful coding could get close to the same results.

Re:I don't get it.

[Haoie]

Some of us are on older computers, thank you very much. We like slim, streamlined operations.

Re:Resources?

[Eskarel]

Well essentially most of it is going to overhead.

In the old style multi-tabbed environments(Firefox, Opera), if one tab crashes, all tabs crash. That's fine if all you're looking at is web pages, because both of those browsers can pull you back up to where you were page wise. But in the era of AJAX and responsive web applications, just reloading the page with your previous session settings isn't enough, because it won't be the way you left it.

IE has been able to create separate process for each instance of the browser for quite some time(mostly because internet explorer and explorer used to share code and crashing one would crash the other which wasn't good), but until IE 8/Chrome it hasn't been done for tabs before.

The upshot of this is that if one of your tabs misbehaves, theoretically your other tabs ought to be fine, the downside is that it means that each tab uses significantly more resources than it would otherwise because state which would otherwise be shared amongst all tabs has to exist for each and every tab.

So basically yes, page complexity is what is causing this to be necessary, but no it's not what is creating the actual increase in resource consumption. I also agree that ditching complexity wherever possible is a good thing(flash,javascript,etc where you don't need it is just plain silly), but rich web applications are a good thing and they're here to stay.

Didn't measure memory correctly

[interiot]

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.

Re:chrome runs great on old machines

[TwistedSymmetry]

How many tabs were you using on those machines? It's probably more that it uses less RAM than firefox with a smaller number of tabs. I would expect that it would be worse than firefox on a low RAM system with larger numbers of tabs.

Perhaps the best way to compare the two browsers would be to make a graph of memory consumption by number of tabs (assuming each tab contains comparable web pages).

I noticed that Opera was much better memory-wise than firefox with low numbers of tabs, but with higher numbers it ceased to have much advantage.

Re:Resources?

[Trouvist]

This might sounds like blasphemy on slashdot... but there are some things that are TOO rich.

Re:Resources?

[Spy der Mann]

How about this? Put flash in a separate process, and problem solved. 99.99% of all my crashes in Firefox are due to the Flash plugin for Firefox (most of them in youtube)

Re:We need to go in the other direction

[shish]

I definitely plan to stick to Firefox. First of all, if it ain't broke, why break it?

A single plugin in a single tab can take down the entire browser; I think that qualifies as broken :-/

Re:How Ironic

[omeomi]

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.

Windows does not fork

[metalhed77]

As I understand it, windows tends to use threads in lieu of forked processes. You can use multiple processes with any kind of IPC you want, but windows won't have anything to do with them sharing memory.

I am not an expert win32 programmer however, I do know for a fact fork() is not supported, and so far as I know this means there's no way to do copy on write either.

Enough!

[Rui del-Negro]

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" ...

[Lazy Jones]

Chrome is just an attempt to implement a solid layer between the native OS and the future "OS" Google will provide: Google Gears. In a couple of years, most of our everyday applications will run inside our browser, most likely using Gears.

At least that's the bleak future for people who don't mind putting layer upon layer of bloated APIs, reimplemented OS tasks (scheduler inside the browser...) and interpreted code on their system in order to run stuff noticeably slower than 15 years ago. Sooner or later, an emulated (in software!) Windows 95 machine with WordPerfect will outperform the mainstream JS/browser based abominations that also keep your data "safe" with corporations keen on turning them into profit...

Call me old, old-fashioned, whatever. The "Web"'s purpose is still to feed *me* information and not to cheat me into feeding megacorps with my private information and whose "evolving needs" you are talking about.

Re:Resources?

[Eskarel]

Never said there weren't. I work on portals and do AJAX work for a living and I still hate 95% of all use of flash and javascript in the web.

Having an application that responds to user input is a totally different thing than having a lot of sizzle and no steak.

Re:We need to go in the other direction

[Vexorian]

Is Chrome open source though? My impression is that google is actually taking the approach of having a proprietary , official, version + the development code base called 'chronium' that goog will make sure users never use and comes with so many funny extras like the unique id stuff.

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:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough

[BrokenHalo]

Mozilla has no one to blame but themselves for getting humiliated by Google and Chrome.

Humiliated? Where did you pull that from?

So Google have come up with a sort of functional (for some) browser. Great, that's nice, atrength in diversity, different strokes for different folks yada yada. But Firefox is a feature-rich, mature browser, lean in itself, but with lots of add-ons tailored to individuals with individual requirements.

Chrome has only just been released, lacks features other than stability and apparently has a huge memory footprint.

If I were a Firefox developer, I really don't think I would be humiliated.

False claim of bloat caused by double counting

[Jimmy_B]

The article claims that Chrome used more memory than IE8, but says nothing about how the testing is done. That probably means the author opened the a bunch of tabs, totaled up the memory used by each of Chrome's processes, and compared it to the memory used by IE8. The problem is, this double counts a lot of memory. Executable code and some data structures are shared, so if there are ten tabs open, then these get counted ten times, but only stored once.

Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough

[shanx24]

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.

Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough

[Korin43]

Honestly, why would anyone care about your opinion if the only reason you use a browser is because a website you pay for refuses to make their site work right? It's not a flaw in the browser, it's a problem with Netflix.

Re:On tabs crashing

[SanityInAnarchy]

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:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough

[hairyfeet]

Um....Hi,Mr. Troll! See,I am trying to be a nice and polite poster. I can't help it,we southerners are just that way. You see Mr. troll,I don't want to buy a dang quad core, 12Gb of RAM,needing its own dang AC unit just to keep from turning my place into a sauna,PC just to run Vista without it sucking the big wet titty. And hey,guess what? I don't want to do the same damn thing just to run my freakin' browser neither! Imagine that!

And how about this: Before we all go "web 2.0" crazy and supercharge JavaScript all over the place,how about we make more secure so I don't see a new JavaScript exploit every other day! How about that? Wouldn't that be a good thing? I mean,we have all accepted that ActiveX was a BAD thing,right? So what is the difference between ActiveX and JavaScript,besides the fact that it runs on every platform? Just as ActiveX was script kiddie heaven a few years back,now JavaScript exploits are practically an everyday occurrence. I know I have cut the infections of my customers by a good 80% just be installing Noscript. And despite Chrome with their little "sandboxes" the simple fact is there are enough hackers out there with enough knowledge and money at stake that the sandbox WILL be broken.

But hey,whatever melts your butter. If you want your browser to be some giant RAM sucking monster so you can render JScript at lightning speed,go for it. Just as long as Firefox and Seamonkey allow me to install Noscript so I don't have to deal with the "exploit o' the day" I'm a happy little camper. Oh,and I'm typing this on an 8 year old 1.1GHz Celeron with 512Mb of RAM with 7 tabs open in FF3 and still have 156Mb of RAM left and everything is snappy! Try THAT with your multi threaded monster! But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP.

[Futurepower(R)]

Google makes money through advertising. That makes it unlikely at there will ever be an Adblock Plus for any browser that Google makes.

Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough

[amRadioHed]

Not everyone gives a damn about FF extensions.... I find them to be rather uninspiring and useless

Yeah, useless extensions. I can't imagine any possible use for them.

The only thing that disappoints me right now [about Chrome] is the lack of native RSS support.

Oh, right.

Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough

[Allador]

Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.

Wouldnt it be better to make it look halfway decent from the start? Then users wouldnt need to waste their time hunting down themes.

3. Web Developer Bar (nothing like this on ANY other browser)
4. FireBug (nothing like this on ANY other browser, not even Safari's inbuilt "Develop" menu options comes close for debugging)

Every major browser has an equivalent, usually nearly identical.

IE Web Developer Toolbar
Opera Web Developer Toolbar (old version, not super great)
Opera Dragonfly (new developer tools)

Plus there's always FireBug Lite.

7. Tabmix Plus

This irritates me. The default tab behavior on FireFox is terrible. I dont think anyone I know actually uses it as is.

Heck, by default Firefox wont even remember your last session (ie, what tabs you had open, etc) if it crashes. How lame is that.

You shouldnt need TabMixPlus (mind you, thats what I use too on firefox, out of need) if the tabs behaved reasonably out of the box.

9. Foxmarks which makes sure all my bookmarks (and their keyboard shortcuts) are exactly the same in my office, on my three home machines (XP, Leopard, Ubuntu)

Does anyone actually use bookmarks anymore? I just dont close the tab, and leave it running there for months or years or whatever. Or just use the auto-complete history.

I'm half joking here ... half not. I havent used bookmarks since like the early Netscape days.

Dont get me wrong, extensions in Firefox are better than NOT having them. But why cant the Mozilla folks just make Firefox better out of the box. Every time I have to build a new machine for me, or move to another, I spend 5 times as much time remembering, downloading, and configuring extensions as I do just downloading and installing firefox itself. I'd rather the product was just better in the first place, and then it wouldnt need as many extensions (and wouldnt waste so much of my time).

But with Firefox, you need plugins/extensions to do ANYTHING. The product is just not that good out of the box. But you shouldnt have to spend so much time doing that, when they could just make the product more reasonable from the start.

Until recently, the reasons to use FireFox was web app development, because of FireBug, LiveHTTP Headers, and Web Developer Toolbar. Plus it had the most consistently reliable javascript performance for non-IE targeted web apps.

But nowadays all the browsers have Firebug, webdev, and livehttp headers equivalents. And it looks like Chrome will be the new standard for testing javascript heavy web apps. And of course you use IE for the apps that need IE (Exchange OWA, tons of corporate intranet apps, sharepoint, etc).

And I use opera for my non-dev browsing (ie, slashdot, digg, theregister, serverside .com/.net, newspapers, blogs, naked ladies, etc). It doesnt crash as often, it doesnt suck memory so badly, page zooming actually works and has for years (firefox just barely got reasonable page zoome with 3), it works reasonably without a million plugins, etc.

I dont mean this to sound as anti-firefox ranty as it probably does. Firefox has its place, and I'm glad its there. But its just not a very good tool, outside of being a very extensible general tool. And its a shame, because you have something like Opera that 'just works' and is nearly flawless, not to mention lean, fast, and beautiful.

So for 'personal browsing' type of use, Opera is better, at least IMO. And for app-dev/app-use, what FireFox used to be the king of, Chrom

Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough

[SEE]

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

[PopeRatzo]

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.