Can confirm that we are not required to use AOL Desktop. Don't be ridiculous. Only thing we're required to use is the corporate VPN software.
Their target market for that application might have extraordinarily low-end computers (non-tech people who haven't bothered upgrading).
It looks like they still support Windows 98 users and computers with 32 MB of ram: http://daol.aol.com/software/90vr
For comparison, Chrome requires 512 MB minimum. I only have 4 windows open and it's using about 4 GB of memory, and this is a very light day.
Good heavens. Below is top showing Iceweasel (Firefox in Debianspeak) with theverge, vox, fivethirtyeight, bbc news and theregister and an html5 video playing.
On an old i5 laptop with 3gb ram (64 bit OS).
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
10272 keith 20 0 1673m 460m 29m R 67.2 16.1 16:23.65 iceweaselChrome does a lot of caching when memory is available. I've got plenty of excess memory, especially when there are no virtual machines running, I'd rather chrome use it and be very fast than leave it unused.
Why is your CPU so high? The video? My CPU usage from chrome without a video play is 1%, and my processor is nothing special.
In Chrome, each tab is a separate process by the way, that accounts for some of the extra large usage. Top 5 Chrome tabs using between 200 MB and 350 MB of memory each, that does seem kind of excessive...
I was confused by your window count. The cpu in Firefox spikes when I scroll a long window with lots of 'widgets' in it. On the very few occasions during testing of a pre-release version of (say) Ubuntu, that scrolling is also when I get kernel panics. Runs about 10%-15% most of time.
Doesn't alter the main fact: we demand more from our computers now than we did 15 years ago (RISC OS and then Win95 in my case)
Are techcrunch employees required to use AOL Desktop? It looks the same as it did in 1998 http://daol.aol.com/software/aoldesktop97/
AOL badly needs to rebrand themselves. It seems like the company has changed and is very profitable in recent years.
They could offer, "the greatest thing in the world, by AOL", but it's not a company I would ever do business with, I don't have a logical reason for this.
Fun fact: "at one point, half of the CDs manufactured worldwide had AOL logos on them" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/