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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"
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...
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.
That is actually something I have used in the past- intentionally slowing things down to really see how they perform. One of the best ways under Unix/Linux is to use an Xterminal to which you restrict the bandwidth. Of course, you can get the same effect by just running the Xclient remotely through ssh from another Linux machine, across a slow connection. Then you can "see" and "feel" what might not be evident on fast LAN connections.
When working with thin clients, it is a good way to see how things might behave if you were to scale up the number of users on a centralized system.
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-
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.
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.
An OS contains more than just a kernel. Usually it contains many daemons working. For example, on my Xubuntu OS, I have 96 programs without counting any major ones (terminal windows, browsers, apache, etc.) All of these daemons are needed to provide a modern operating system experience.
A kernel by nature should be tiny, but an OS should contain tons of functionality.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I wish some people would just download Chrome and give it a shot instead of theorizing about why it's broken based on "bite-size videos", and then comment. There's nothing useful to *see*, really, it's a browser with a simpler UI. There's no integration with Google Search, nothing that Firefox doesn't have as well, anyway. But, it's so damn fast, very noticeably faster than Firefox, and you'd see that if you just took the time to try it.
It's also more stable by design, but that will take some time to really appreciate (or realize that it's a bogus claim).
But, speed... you see that right away.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
"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?
IE has been able to create separate process for each instance of the browser for quite some time(mostly because internet explorer and explorer used to share code and crashing one would crash the other which wasn't good)
Recall that the old versions of Mozilla even had the mail client running in the same process. And for the longest time Firefox and Thunderbird shared no DLLs. It was a bad design decision from the very beginning.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
WebKit itself is doing 100/100 on Acid3. One would assume that Chrome would be performing similarly as it is based on WebKit, especially when this 100/100 result was achieved in March of 2008. Is Chrome based on an older fork of WebKit? Or is something else going on here?
That's why I use nspluginwrapper. I run x86_64, so it is required if I want to use any i386 plugins, but it helps with the native plugins as well.
You don't see anything useful huh? Process separation improving security and responsiveness, UI improvements like Fitts'-law-obeying tabs, Incognito mode; those aren't useful to you?
Oh, and you do know that Chrome doesn't index your hard drive or send your browsing history to Google, right? It really doesn't have any more "integration" with Google Search (or GMail, or G-anything-else) than Firefox does. And you don't have to take Google's word for it because it's open source.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
"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"?
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!
I tested it, and with only iGoogle, a digg article, and this page open as tabs in both Firefox and Chrome, they had about the same memory usage. Firefox had 70MB, Chrome had 80MB. (I use Firefox 3.0.1.)
I opened up my user profile on Slashdot and ten articles I had recently commented on in both Chrome and Firefox. Firefox became unusable as it started processing the JS and it finished much more slowly. When the dust had settled, Chrome was using 180MB and Firefox 220MB.
I went to Digg.com and loaded all of the top hits then. Chrome's memory usage spiked much more quickly, dual core machine and all. Chrome started using a lot more than Firefox. 388MB for Chrome, 284MB for Firefox.
Then I killed all the Digg tabs on both. Chrome went to 186MB, Firefox went to 260MB.
Then I killed all the Slashdot pages I added after those first three tabs (iGoogle, Digg, Slashdot pages.) Chrome is down to 80MB, Firefox is down to 180MB. After about ten seconds though, the Firefox number went to 130MB.
Seems to be staying there for the time being. If I kill all the tabs in both browsers except for about:config in Firefox and about:memory in Chrome, I get 30MB usage in Chrome and 110MB usage in Firefox.
My first question is what web pages define their average? 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.
What the heck, I'll try again. I fully restart both browsers and open up Slashdot and Newgrounds. IE8 with three processes, 465348 KB; Chrome with four processes, 358128 KB.
Now I upped the ante to 9 tabs, which for brevity, I won't list. IE8 with 6 processes was using 958524 KB and Chrome with 11 processes was using 783840 KB.
Admittedly, this is a small test to find an average, but what do I need to do to see the difference TFS[ummary] speaks of?
Chrome is what you call the User Interface of an application, or the area around the primary browser window of a web browser.
The normal 'chrome' of Firefox is it's normal theme, Strata.
The name Chrome was chosen because it was ironic, their intent was to reduce the chrome that surrounds what you really want to look at in a browser, the actual webpages.
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.
Did you read that press release all by yourself? Let's wait for some solid testing before we judge eh?
Newer doesn't necessarily = better
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/
You mean like this solid testing?
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
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!"
Chrome has it's own JavaScript engine. Acid3 tests JavaScript. V8 may be fast, but it's also wrong. I'll stick with the fastest implementation that is close to correct out there, which at the moment is WebKit's Squirelfish.
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 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
Yes, it's completely open source. Mozilla takes the exact same approach of a "blessed" official binary compiled from the freely-available sources.
Chrome may not be worth booting Windows for, but there will be a Linux version as soon as some Linux people finish porting it, and if you are paranoid about Google's official version I'm sure the Debian folks will be happy to oblige with "Matte" or whatever they end up calling their rebranded Chrome builds (c.f. IceWeasel).
Fitts' law is hardly irrelevant; it's a very important UI design principle. Wikipedia is your friend. That isn't the only non-obvious improvement Google's made to tabbed browsing either. The subtle animations are cool but perhaps the nicest thing is the way tabs don't resize as you close them, until you mouse away. It's hard to describe but it fixes a major annoyance every other tabbed browser has when closing several tabs at once in a crowded window. The implementation of tab dragging is also quite nice, the popup blocker UI is unobtrusive, the status bar only appears when you need it. Overall, the minimalistic UI uses up the least space of any browser's UI (by far), leaving more screen real estate for pages.
Your only valid complaint is that there's no add-ons, so no noscript, flashblock, adblock, GreaseMonkey, etc. I feel confident that open-source hackers will fix this soon, though Google may decide not to include support in the official Google builds.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Google chrome hasn't even been released yet, and you're trying to compare resource usage to Microsoft IE?
Chrome has been released. Google has ruined the concept of beta. Gmail has been in beta for three years now. It's a wonder that the search page is apparently considered an actual product.
People don't understand beta any more. They will just be pissed every time "this new google thing crashed." Google ruined the idea of a beta, now they'll have to live with the repercussions.
I actually really think this approach (many processes) is the right way to go into the future.
Yeah, its resource intensive.
But memory is cheap, desktops/laptops are shipping with 4GB default right now, and I dont mind spending my memory on the apps that I use the most (ie, those that run in web browsers).
Plus it will likely lead to a much more robust and reliable (and simpler) browser platform. Multi-threading is hard, complex, and incredibly error prone. Multi-process programming is much simpler, at the cost of increased resource usage, especially on windows.
But given the trend towards the web browser being the primary platform for running our apps on, I think this is a good path into the future.
Firefox's one-process-only-for-everything is going to paint them into an architectural corner over the next 5 years, I believe.
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.
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information.
The 1970s called, they want their definition of the Internet back.
Ever since the first CGI was written, the Internet (or specifically the Web) has been about more than just conveying information. Your definition would seem to exclude ecommerce, online banking, etc; that would reduce the Internet to what many believe the big content producers are pushing it towards becoming - an almost-exclusively pull medium designed to get content from a producer to a consumer. No thanks.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
And that makes it unlikely I will ever use it.
I tried Chrome and mostly liked what I saw, but I stopped using it and went back to Firefox, because it has Adblock Plus. Each time I am forced to use a browser that doesn't have this, I am horrified at how sites look and why people still use Internet.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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.
Modern browsers do not demand more resources than Mosaic because of how powerful they are, they demand more resources because memory is inexpensive, and it's cheaper to eat up resources than it is to refine our methods.
Bullshit.
Modern browsers have to support and render vastly more-complex pages than Mosaic did, and that's why they're so much bigger. CSS, Javascript, multiple flavors of HTML, XHTML, arbitrary XML+CSS, etc., plus more transport protocols, encryption, vastly more sophisticated history mechanisms, lots of security technology to attempt to protect the browser from malicious code, and the user from phishing sites, etc. The UIs are also much more complex, with customizable layouts, themes, etc.
Even more than that, because browsers have to do so much, and because every year brings new demands, they are also constructed with very flexible designs. FF, for example, is basically a browser-ish application development framework with its own app-development language (XUL), plus a browser implementation on top of that. That's largely what makes FF plugins possible, but all of that flexibility has its own cost in terms of code size and complexity. It's worth it because it makes development much more efficient than if programmers were rewriting tight, hand-optimized assembler for each modification.
While it's absolutely true that modern browsers (like almost any modern app) could be tightened up and de-bloated somewhat, even a perfect browser of 2008 would be orders of magnitude larger and more complex than Mosaic.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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
To be fair, from a UI perspective Chrome is most visually streamlined browser I've seen in years. It lacks mail, RSS feeds, those annoying widgets, 30 types of help pages, the ability to edit a site's CSS on the fly, and a lot of the other bloat that has krufted around modern browsers.
I can't speak to the RAM footprint, since with all the memory management in modern browsers that number is fake anyway. But anything learned on this highly simplified interface should translate well to other devices.
The ______ Agenda
Cool, but according to this discussion: http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.kernel/2008-04/msg00272.html
It looks like it would be a huge PITA to get it to work like fork on unix. It sounds like even if you can get windows to fork, microsoft seems hell bent on you not doing it, otherwise why would it be so hard?
Photos.
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.