Google Chrome
Sep. 3rd, 2008 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tgiesOkay, so let's talk about Google's new browser, Google Chrome.
For the authentic Google Chrome experience, Windows users are invited to download it now and use it to read the rest of this post. The current version is 0.2.149.27, available from the website linked above.
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 is, by all accounts, a ridiculously bloated program. Right now, it is consuming 69,984 kilobytes of memory to display five pages in five tabs.
Fig. 1: Firefox is pretty terrible
Maybe Chrome is better. Let's fire it up and find out.
Fig. 2: It is made of candy
Chrome implements its tabbed interface in a very interesting way. Each tab is actually its own process. Google's reasoning for this appears to boil down to "we didn't want to fix our memory leaks". This is ostensibly supposed to save memory in the long term. Well, let's see here. I have an instance of Firefox which has been open for days and which has seen dozens of tabs come and go. Undoubtedly, it has leaked several megabytes of memory. I'll open up Chrome and create the same five tabs in it, and then measure its memory usage.
Fig. 3: Puzzling evidence
Oh.
This is one instance of Chrome — one window with the same five tabs as that lone firefox.exe process up there.
Firefox seems to have done some housekeeping while nobody was looking1, now consuming only 59,608 kilobytes of memory. Chrome, meanwhile, consumes 96,948 kilobytes across the same five tabs. Also, it seems to cost a lot of processor2 to sit there idle and display the LiveJournal update form.
So let's close a bunch of tabs and see how well each browser reclaims memory. This should be where Chrome shines, since the entire point of its design is that it theoretically is all but devoid of memory leaks and can totally reclaim the memory associated with a tab when that tab is closed. It is up against an instance of Firefox which I have been using for several days, one which is basically guaranteed to have leaked at least six megabytes somewhere along the line.
Fig. 4: Dreams crushed
Oh.
So thank you, Google, for figuring out how to write a browser even more careless with memory than Firefox, a Mozilla Foundation product, based on XPCOM, featuring a user interface which runs inside several SpiderMonkey Javascript environments. If anybody could do it, it was going to be you.
BONUS CHROME FUN CORNER
Hey, kids! Check out all these fun things you can do with NEW Google Chrome™ web browser substitute! For best results, try these activities in Google Chrome™! Remember, get a parent's permission to log on.
- Have a Java executable archive saved to your hard drive just by visiting a web page! A handy button is even provided to execute it!
- Mouse over this link to go on a fantastic voyage! Go on, just roll the cursor over it for a second!
- A fun experiment: Try killing the process associated with a tab in Google Chrome™. Spooky!
1 For the purposes of these measurements, Firefox's config.trim_on_minimize option, which causes it to swap out/release a bunch of memory on minimization, was turned off. Also, both browsers' windows were in the foreground. Changing focus did not make a detectable difference.
2 AMD Turion 64 Mobile MK-36, 2.00GHz. Running in Plain Old x86 mode.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 11:57 pm (UTC)http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/6353
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Date: 2008-09-04 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 12:06 am (UTC)Garbage collection! What a revolutionary idea!
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Date: 2008-09-04 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 02:57 am (UTC)I have seen the future, and it is not color-coordinated
no subject
Date: 2008-09-04 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-05 02:30 am (UTC)Anyway, yeah, you went about it the scientific way. I just used it a while, having only three tabs open, and started feeling like I was using Opera with twenty tabs open.
So, I think I read this on Wikipedia, but the page has been extensively edited since then so I can't find it, but it said they named it Chrome because it has less of what designers call chrome, i.e. all the menus and buttons and things. And that's great, that's great. But if that is the case, why does a big ol' animation appear every time I start downloading a file? Why does the download bar present itself? WHY CANT I TURN THIS OFF I WILL KILL EVERYONE IN THE WORLD
Seriously it freezes the damn thing for like two seconds every time that happens. I think I know I'm starting a download, why do they feel the need to tell me?
Now, I preface the following by saying Facebook is terrible, and I wish someone just made one big greasemonkey script to eliminate its interface entirely. The only thing I wanna do is look at pictures. The only thing I want to see when I click on a thumbnail of a picture is 'next' and 'previous' links and the picture. With that in mind, Opera mostly displays everything okay. Sometimes when you click 'next' on a picture it just shows that spinning ring that means it's loading, and you have to click back and then next again. In Chrome, for no reason, it sometimes stops letting you progress. You click 'next', or on the image, which should do the same thing. You get a brief glimpse of the next image in the album, and then you're back to the one you were on. If you copy the link from the 'next' button, paste it and follow it that way it works. But I want to click it once and have it work, not have to copy and paste it each time.
Познавательный блог
Date: 2011-06-04 06:25 pm (UTC)Благодарю за блог
Date: 2011-07-11 03:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 10:44 am (UTC)