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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."
...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
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.
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.
Some of us are on older computers, thank you very much. We like slim, streamlined operations.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
As I said, I don't repeat myself.
Google makes money through advertising. That makes it unlikely at there will ever be an Adblock Plus for any browser that Google makes.
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.