I do not consider Firefox inferior to Chrome because of this, instead I consider Firefox superior to Chrome for this very reason. With 6 tabs open, Chromium is using 1.6GB of RAM, while I can browse forever in Firefox until it reaches that kind of memory consumption.

Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?

> Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?

I'm not sure process-per-tab is "severely" better. However, how are you measuring that 1.6 GB? If you're not careful, you're N-counting the copy-on-write pages that the processes are sharing. Even chrome://memory-redirect has a note that Chrome itself has a bug with N-counting its RAM usage across tabs. (Issue 25454) The RAM overhead of process-per-tab is more than the fanbois will tell you, but it's much less than you see by adding up the sizes you seen in top/taskmgr, and is less than seen in chrome://memory-redirect.

Sandboxing for security and fault tolerance is a big deal; it's certainly worth the difficulty in figuring out how much RAM is actually being used by N tabs, if that's your main complaint.

Edit: I'm notorious for browsing with 30+ tabs open. I currently have 48 tabs open, and I'm not noticing any ill effects from high RAM usage. I really wish there were a keyboard shortcut for pushing the address of a link onto a temporary bookmarks stack, and another shortcut for popping a bookmark and opening a tab.

> Sandboxing for security and fault tolerance is a big deal; it's certainly worth the difficulty in figuring out how much RAM is actually being used by N tabs, if that's your main complaint.

I use Firefox with tab groups and lazy tab loading and have probably over a thousand tabs in all the tab groups I use. This is very useful for me doing research and I haven't yet found a better workflow. I don't believe I would be able to achieve this with Chrome with any reasonable RAM usage.

> I really wish there were a keyboard shortcut for pushing the address of a link onto a temporary bookmarks stack, and another shortcut for popping a bookmark and opening a tab.

I use the Firefox addon "Save-to-Read" for this purpose and works great.

One tab can freeze (because of the js, for example) without killing the rest of the browser.

I don't remember when this has last happened to me. If this is the major reason, I, most definitely, prefer the current Firefox approach: much less memory utilization and the chance that I have to restart the browser once in a blue moon (not a problem for me in real use) vs very high memory usage but I'm protected in the off chance that one tab messes up my browser (and I always have to live with the high memory usage).

So FF devs, if you're listening, this is a vote against Electrolysis (if it means higher memory usage than current FF).

I seem to run into that pretty frequently on Firefox 19 at work, but I don't think I ever notice it when I'm running 23 at home.

I've been on the Aurora channel for some time now and it's been a pretty smooth ride for me. You should give it a try to see how it works out for you.

I still can't understand how a freezing js could stop browser, can't they handle that stuff on a different thread other than browser's main ui thread?

With plugins already in a different process, these situations are far less likely.

But you only get 15 tabs.

I'll be the first to admit that Chrome does have a pretty big memory footprint, I have not compared it to Firefox recently, but I assume Firefox is better. How ever as others have said using Chrome with over 40 tabs open still works well.

My macbook has 8 GB of RAM and my stationary has 12 GB so in my case the memory footprint is far less important than having tabs separated in processes.

If Firefox implemented one process per tab tomorrow, would you switch from Chrome to Firefox? I suspect this particular implementation detail is not a "main problem" for the majority of users comparing Chrome and Firefox.

Actually I probably would consider it. I like and trust mozilla as a company more than Google. Also Firefox has some extensions I would like to use such as No Script. I would probably still use Chrome for development hough.