http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/internet-explorer-10-chr... In the 40 tab test, Chrome used 1619MB while FF only used 872MB.
This memory bloat is why I switched back to Firefox. After reading this article I fired up Chrome and it loaded about 20 tabs, then a message popped up: Close programs to prevent information loss. Your computer is low on memory.
Looking at the old browser comparisons on Toms, I can see that Chrome's memory has ballooned from 991MB in Chrome 13 to 1619MB in Chrome 23. This is a real problem. I wish Google would return to it's roots of making a lean responsive browser.
Ctrl + 1,2,3... let's switch between tabs. Do you know the equivalent? I'm going to try using it for a while if you say you can run that much tabs and it still runs smoothly. I usually have 40+ tabs open at all times.
CTRL+# are reserved for websites stored in SpeedDial. But maybe [2] helps you. I doubt that any experienced Opera user would require such a feature, because the more fluent you become with the UI the more often you swap tabs around. Instead I stored sites into the SpeedDial that I visit regularly, e.g. CTRL+7 is HN :)
[1] http://i.imgur.com/Z55rPDh.png [2] http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/go-to-a-specific-tab-using-ke...
2. While a couple of hundred megabytes is usually a small portion of the total RAM, it could be a critical share of the free RAM, and this is what matters.
Firefox isn't perfect, but it seems to be more of a problem with Flash than the browser (clearing out my Rdio tab has the most effect). And measuring memory usage through top isn't perfect, but FF does seem to use significantly less RES even after long sessions.
So, anecdotal evidence, but I was using Chromium as my regular browser for years and ended up switching back to FF because I found the performance on my reasonable-but-aging machine to be far superior to Chromes under regular, long-term usage.
Firefox has it's issues. It still doesn't silently update when run under a normal user account. Also the UI freezes when running heavy HTML5 pages.
Chrome is beginning to feel like FF 3. Google needs to take a page from Mozilla and start their own MemShrink program.
Any examples? I've never seen this (other than blatantly broken JS), and would be interested in seeing what would cause it.
I don't use sites like gmail or google docs, though, so maybe it has more to do with the sites visited than the OS platform.
first, a cache should never slow you down. old obscure settings can. and these can be in your old firefox profile as well.
second, the usecase of many open tabs is better in firefox. there are studies out there that show lower ram usage in firefox for many tabs. (first google link, because i don't find the one i had in mind right now: http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-...)
btw: if you are going to criticize test methodology, why do you include two browser? you know you can run various development version of firefox as well?
Cache tangent: Of course it can and will, generally things that use caches wait for the results of those caches query before hitting whatever the slower thing is being cached. Anytime you have a cache miss and the slower thing must be queried anyway, the wasted time you spent waiting for the cache query results "slowed you down". Also applications that allocate huge caches for data sets with poor cache rates or low utilization can "slow things down" by starving other data-sets with better hit rates or higher utilization from being as large as they could be.
Your second point is a good one. I didn't know!
I'm not sure what you mean by your last point. Include two browsers? Do you mean that I mentioned Canary? I didn't consider that specific to my point. Yes, I know FF has dev versions as well.
3 Chrome Beta windows, with 17, 14, and 1 tabs open. 1 Chrome Canary window with 2 tabs
A good number of these tabs have not-very-light applications open like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, and some YouTube vids.
If you say to yourself, "oh, let me go check out Firefox compared to this," and launch it with one tab, do a quick Google search, and then determine, "hey, this is way faster," well... yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Not only do you not have multiple windows and tabs open, but if you haven't used it in years you've probably got a pretty small cache not bogging you down.
Personally I've never actually noticed Chrome's performance to have any issues. Maybe because I have 12 gigs of RAM and an otherwise decent setup. On a more constrained system perhaps problems start to show themselves more easily. But are you sure that those same problems don't also appear in other browsers, given you're using them as intensely as you've been using Chrome this whole time?
I'd really love to see some browser comparison stats that go in-depth on this. Basically the only numbers you ever see these days are javascript rendering scores, and I feel like that's a really poor way to determine a browser's overall speed and efficiency. It doesn't account for how long it takes to open a new tab (like .01 seconds vs .3 seconds, which IMO is a big difference), scroll lag, startup time, etc, and it certainly doesn't account for how and if browsers become bogged down by real-world use.
I fear that users may be making similar snap judgments by comparing on the basis of quick open-and-go tests, instead of actual in-depth testing. First impressions are everything. You may find yourself five years from now using a browser that is actually slower than you were using previously, but you maintain your use of it because one time five years ago you opened it and loaded a page and it was faster than the encumbered incumbent.