20-03-2013, 11:50 AM
Chrome is fast, but very memory-hungry - that's partly how it achieves the speed. On Linux at least. I have to use it on my 3GHz P4 with 2GB RAM because Firefox is a bit sluggish. In practice, I end up having both browsers open because Chrome consumes so much memory with all the tabs open that I want (I have about 3 times as many tabs open in Firefox, and it takes about a 3rd of the memory that Chrome does). After running for about 3 days, Chrome slows down and needs to be restarted - it's fun to watch the resource meter, as the memory usage suddenly drops by about a GB when it unloads. It takes about 5 minutes all-told to restart, and locks the CPU usage at 100% for nearly all of that time.
So, that's the main reason I feel that Chrome is "a bad thing". Of course, one could additionally get paranoid about Google (the new Microsoft!).
A modern web browser taking a couple of hundred MB is not atypical. Modern web technologies are very memory-hungry. Even just rendering a simple HTML page that's been put together using CSS is surprisingly difficult. Given that the browser is the primary application for most people today, I have no problem accepting that it's going to use a large percentage of the available memory. The OS can always "page" out to virtual memory if needed - that just results in a bit of a delay when switching to another application, but that's only a second or two - less than the response time of some websites.
Incidentally, the machine mentioned above runs Windows XP like a dream - even though it's >10 years old - and Firefox is the best browser to use in the Windows environment. But choosing between them is personal preference - if you don't tend to have many tabs open at once, Chrome is fine. Firefox is better with memory management these days (it wasn't always thus, so if you suffered from that, try it again). I haven't tried Opera or Safari in recent years, but no reason to suspect that they have a "killer" reason that makes them better than Firefox (last time I compared, they were slower and more memory-hungry, but that was a few years back).
So, that's the main reason I feel that Chrome is "a bad thing". Of course, one could additionally get paranoid about Google (the new Microsoft!).
A modern web browser taking a couple of hundred MB is not atypical. Modern web technologies are very memory-hungry. Even just rendering a simple HTML page that's been put together using CSS is surprisingly difficult. Given that the browser is the primary application for most people today, I have no problem accepting that it's going to use a large percentage of the available memory. The OS can always "page" out to virtual memory if needed - that just results in a bit of a delay when switching to another application, but that's only a second or two - less than the response time of some websites.
Incidentally, the machine mentioned above runs Windows XP like a dream - even though it's >10 years old - and Firefox is the best browser to use in the Windows environment. But choosing between them is personal preference - if you don't tend to have many tabs open at once, Chrome is fine. Firefox is better with memory management these days (it wasn't always thus, so if you suffered from that, try it again). I haven't tried Opera or Safari in recent years, but no reason to suspect that they have a "killer" reason that makes them better than Firefox (last time I compared, they were slower and more memory-hungry, but that was a few years back).
