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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.
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.
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?
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?" `":" #");}
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!
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?
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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