15 ms·
Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54
- chrija 10y agoMy own tests confirm these numbers.
- RaitoBezarius 10y agoTypo in the title of the article linked : It's not Chome, it's Chrome.
- smegel 10y agoAlso, if you are not yet using 64-bit Chrome, you really should. It is more stable and avoids internal "out of memory" errors individual tabs can sometimes return. Not the default Chrome for some reason!
- Exuma 10y agoIt's the default on Mac, not sure on windows.
- wyclif 10y agoI'm curious why this is the case. You'd think if Google wanted 64 bit Chrome to be the default, they'd do it on both platforms even if only for consistency's sake.
- moreira 10y agoIt might just be because of the difference in platforms. 32-bit Mac has been gone for half a decade, whereas 32-bit Windows is still out there (32-bit Windows 10 exists), and those wouldn't be able to run 64-bit Chrome, so they may be using 32-bit as the default in order to avoid user confusion.
- wtallis 10y agoMore specifically about OS X: support for 32-bit hardware was dropped in 2011, but support for 64-bit applications has been available on all 64-bit hardware since 2007, even if you were running the 32-bit OS kernel. Apple handled that transition way better than Microsoft.
- chipperyman573 10y agoIt helps that Apple controls the hardware of their devices.
- wtallis 10y agoIt does help some, but probably the biggest advantage is that they simply didn't have to support x86 machines from before 2006. By that point, ACPI, AHCI, EHCI, OHCI, HDA drivers would get you a working system, except for 3D graphics and networking. That's why Hackintosh systems are viable: basic PC hardware is extremely standardized now compared to what it was in the 1990s. Apple's hardware platform control helped them cut down on the number of network drivers they needed to implement, and their decision to do the 3D graphics drivers in-house didn't save them much effort but made things a lot more straightforward. By contrast, Windows 7 officially supports GPUs from 2001 running on systems that could be quite a bit older, from the days when there were half a dozen third-party chipset vendors that couldn't properly implement a spec even when they were trying to make standard interfaces. Windows 10 moves the cutoff forward quite a bit with its NX bit requirement, but still targets a diversity of core system components that simply didn't exist by the time Apple entered the x86 market. Microsoft and Apple both have to contend with pretty much the same driver challenges for peripherals like printers, although it tends to be easier to put those drivers in userspace where 32-bit vs 64-bit isn't a showstopper.
- mishac 10y agoTo be fair, microsoft's userbase requires backwards compatibility a lot more than apple's does, since Macs are largely consumer systems rather than enterprise ones. Microsoft got flack for dropping 16bit app support in 64bit OSes (since 64 bit windows doesn't have NTVDM). They'd be flayed alive if they dropped 32bit support.
- DiabloD3 10y agoI think their installer detects what Windows you are on and installs that, now; but I could be wrong.
- blinkingled 10y agoYes I have installed Chrome on W10 on few machines and always got the 64-bit version automatically.
- hemancuso 10y agoAnyone have any perspective as to whether these gains will flow to Electron?
- stemcc 10y agoIf they didn't, then that would mean development on Electron had stopped. Or that the Electron team needs to remove these features in their fork, and considering how much grief Electron's RAM usage gets, I don't see that happening.
- hemancuso 10y agoThe notes suggested a lot of the gains were targeting low memory environments so it wasn't immediately clear if it was a win in all dimensions.
- richdougherty 10y agoThe underlying changes are in V8, so you'll see them in Electron too. https://v8project.blogspot.co.nz/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizing-v8-memory.html https://v8project.blogspot.co.nz/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optim...
- wfunction 10y ago[edit: removing comment as people made it unreadable anyway.]
- Exuma 10y agohttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/cldokedgmomhbifmiiogjjkgffhcbaec?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MrQuincle 10y agoIt's not so relevant to the conversation about memory, but is indeed a feature that has been removed. If you want to have a single key on Linux representing going back again, I would recommend not to overload the backspace, but pick a key you don't need. On my system F7 I never use, so it's perfect for this purpose. $> xmodmap -e 'keycode 73 = XF86Back F7 F7 F7' Or persistent: $> keycode 73 = XF86Back F7 F7 F7 >> ~/.xmodmap I hope I save you all a lot of keystrokes in the future!
- jessaustin 10y agoOr get a chromebook: there's a nice "back" button at the top left next to "esc". There are also some nice "forward" and "reload" buttons.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gf263 10y agodoes this help the battery life in any way?
- Alex3917 10y agoNo, if anything the energy impact looks worse than before on OS X. I love Chrome, but the fact that it's almost completely unusable on laptops that aren't plugged in is problematic.
- stemcc 10y agoRAM is one of your least power hungry components compared to other parts of your computer, such as what generates heat (CPU/GPU) or produces physical motion (fans or spinning drives).
- Bud 10y agoThis makes no sense. RAM generates heat just as CPU does, and RAM also actually does consume a substantial percentage of laptop power. However, said usage isn't related to how much RAM is being used, really; it's a constant usage rate to keep the current RAM state alive.
- ptaipale 10y agoWell, it makes sense to me: CPU and GPU take in the order of 10 times as much power as RAM. RAM power usage just isn't depending on load, like that of CPU and graphics.
- cxseven 10y agoReducing RAM usage will reduce disk activity, though, so there's that.
- 0xffff2 10y agoWhy would that be? Unless you're frequently running out of RAM and swapping to disk, RAM usage shouldn't correlate to disk usage much, right?
- niij 10y agoThey mentioned that weather.com crashed their website. Their website is always extremely slow for me as well. It's ridiculous how poorly designed their website can be for such a simple service.
- oxide 10y agoI use weather.gov instead for precisely this reason.
- wfunction 10y agoIt doesn't even have sunrise/sunset? Or am I just missing it? (I use Weather Underground.)
- sillysaurus3 10y agoYou can run `curl wttr.in` to get your local weather and 3-day forecast. Or just go to http://wttr.in/ http://wttr.in/
- spacehacker 10y agoHow does this compare to Firefox?
- hashhar 10y agoNot that great. Chrome still crashes beyond 50 tabs and/or eats up a lot of CPU slowing the system while I easily have 150 tabs on FF.
- leeoniya 10y agofrom my testing, there's also a bit of a dip in js perf. maybe due to GC aggressiveness tweaks.
- ausjke 10y agoawesome news then, chrome really needs to improve memory usage, especially when I have lots of tabs open. under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.
- curiousgal 10y ago120 tabs?! What for?!
- setq 10y agoI do this. It's a curse. I don't know why.
- Buge 10y agoI once had 1000 tabs open in firefox. I only found out when I accidentally clicked the x and it asked "are you sure you want to close 1000 tabs".
- wiredfool 10y agoTabs are the new bookmarks.
- tdkl 10y agoSadly they aren't bookmarks and then people moan about memory usage, when they should get a reality check instead.
- to3m 10y agoI don't know if you're familiar with the ins and outs of writing computer programs, but it's actually often practical to make a program that does one thing do another instead. So in this case one obvious thing that could be done is to have a dormant-type (exact terminology TBC) tab. Such things would have an entry on the tab bar like a normal tab, but wouldn't actually have anything loaded until you clicked. Firefox already supports this sort of thing internally, it looks like, since when you reload a session that had a bunch of open tabs, it doesn't seem to load each tab's contents until you click on it. (Open such a thing with a particular shortcut, or by transforming an existing tab into a dormant one - obviously equivalent in terms of JS callbacks and so on to closing the window.) Other possibilities could include multiple types of tabs, and/or alternative UIs for lists of pages you like/pages you want to look at sometime soon.
- kfrzcode 10y agoFor the layman web developer with little knowledge of browser internals, how does this compare to Firefox's memory usage?
- jansenv 10y agopoorly
- ikeboy 10y agoWow. My normal session now leaves me with around 8gb free out of 16, compared to 1-2gb free previously. Gmail is using less than 1GB again. I might even disable The Great Suspender, and stop killing tabs that use up lots of memory. Whoever worked on this, you deserve a raise. QOL improvements for so many people.
- bogomipz 10y agoWhat is The Great Suspender?
- MetaMonk 10y agoSuspends tabs after a set period of disuse. Great for people who open a ton of tabs in Chrome.
- minot 10y ago(To add to the description, from their github readme) > "The Great Suspender" is a free and open-source Google Chrome extension for people who find that chrome is consuming too much system resource or suffer from frequent chrome crashing. Once installed and enabled, this extension will automatically suspend tabs that have not been used for a while, freeing up memory and cpu that the tab was consuming. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender
- bogomipz 10y agoAh Ok I thought it might be an OS utility. Thanks for the tip. I also highly recommend session buddy for excessive tab folks. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...
- wheelerwj 10y ago
- amelius 10y agoThis sounds too good to be true. Are there any downsides to this improvement?
- Waterluvian 10y agoA random 30% of the document and scripts don't load. ;)
- edblarney 10y agoI'm still getting full white and black screens on Chrome 54. It's 2016.
- Rumudiez 10y agoSame thing for me, but only on my 2011 MBP. My girlfriend's 2012 MBP doesn't do it, and neither does my work 2015 MBP. I think it might be related to Chromecast, because that's the only difference between each of those browsers aside from hardware. Do you have any extensions like that might be causing it?
- pitaj 10y agoWhat do you mean? Have you tried reinstalling? Updating graphics drivers? Turning off hardware acceleration?
- edblarney 10y agoTried everything except turning off hardware accel. But that should not be it - because it works fine on startup. Every once and a while, screen goes black for most pages, even on reload. Have to restart. I shouldn't have to tinker to get a web browser to just load pages.
- bogomipz 10y agoI have a question - should the same also be true on the latest Chromium?
- hyperdunc 10y agoChrome and Chromium are essentially the same. In this case the optimizations were made to the V8 JS engine, which is part of Chromium.
- piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago> heap snapshot 87 KB 85 KB 3% Are those really kilobytes? Not megabytes?
- Tempest1981 10y agoAny way to set the minimum tab width yet? Once I get 7+ tabs in a window, they're truncated to a useless width.
- drcross 10y agoPerhaps close them.
- madeofpalk 10y agoI'm assuming that was already though of.
- isuraed 10y agoFirefox does this.
- ksec 10y agonope. no tab overflow.
- amlib 10y agoIf you need that many tabs you should take a look at tree tabs for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/ it's the best thing to have all your tabs stacked on the side of the screen and still fit, alongside with a search bar!
- johnp_ 10y agoFirefox originally had a preference for that, but they moved it to CSS, so you can modify it via an addon or with userchrome.css: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
- olegkikin 10y agoIt also looks like the UI shrunk 30%, and there's no way to change it, except by changing the DPI of the whole OS.
- notyourwork 10y agoI didn't notice any UI change when I reloaded chrome after updating.
- dexwiz 10y agoPreviously Chrome did not take computer DPI settings into account. Now it scales the UI with DPI settings. I found my laptop was at 125% scaling without me knowing. http://techdows.com/2016/10/fix-chrome-54-looks-zoomed-in.html http://techdows.com/2016/10/fix-chrome-54-looks-zoomed-in.ht...
- noinsight 10y agoOn Linux on my 32" 4K screen Chromium automatically scales to 150% or so and the top chrome is the height of a Coke can. I have to start the process with "--force-device-scale-factor=1" to make it stop.
- patadune 10y agoI got the opposite problem (tabs and address bar were bigger after update), and I fixed it by changing the flag "UI Layout for the browser's top chrome" in chrome://flags from "Touch" to "Normal". Maybe this flag can also fix your problem.
- barnacs 10y agoGreat news! A simple weather website, with about 1 MB worth of actual content (text, markup, images, layout) now only uses 250 MB of memory. And it only takes a few seconds to load on a 100Mbps+ connection whenever I click a menu item (that's with all ads and tracking blocked and most of the stuff already cached). I'm sorry, I just don't see any reason to celebrate.
- kevindong 10y agoI personally just do a Google search for 'weather' if I want local weather. Otherwise, 'weather <location>'. Very fast and lightweight.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ksec 10y agoExactly this. Even though it is not quite 1MB, but more like 5-10MB including all the images. But requiring 250MB of memory, AND some doesn't even load 60fps smooth on latest machines. At times i wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with the Web Stack.
- laichzeit0 10y agoConsole yourself by remembering that the vast majority of people creating these websites don't have computer science degreees. They learned their "trade" over a few weekends. Their "profession" is the equivalent of self-taught backyard abortionists.
- agentgt 10y agoNice... but why is it faster/memory is more important to me. I suppose I could look at the changelog but it would have been nice if the post guessed why.
- scott_karana 10y agoJavaScript engine (aka V8) improvements, per the post they linked: http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizing-v8-memory.html?m=1 http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...
- tbrock 10y agoAWS Console went from 284 to < 150 but that was the only tab that broke 100mb. Not sure what all of you with 100s of 250mb+ tabs are doing. Excited for electron + node to get this improvement.
- rjain15 10y agoMore exciting news coming in Chrome 56 with complete optimization.. V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language. Can't wait for Christmas presents
- raarts 10y agoDo you have a link for that?
- DCoder 10y agohttps://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/12/v8-release-56.html https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/12/v8-release-56.html says: > V8 version 5.6, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 56 Stable in several weeks... > Starting with 5.6, V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language.
- desireco42 10y agoThat is welcome change, I already switched to Opera and happy with it, but we really need a lot of choices always and that is why I welcome this change.
- dirkg 10y agoChrome can't even begin to compare to Firefox when it comes to handling anything >10 tabs, which is I think what 99% of people max out at, so Chrome doesn't bother about the rest even though people have been begging for years. - no multiple tab rows - when you launch, it reloads every single tab vs loading only the active one (the only sane option), causing massive slowdown and network traffic - as a result in Firefox you can have 100's of tabs, open the browser, work in a few and close, without affecting anything. - Firefox had Tab groups, an awesome visual representation, before they made it optional due to everyone copying Chrome's limited feature set. - Chrome still uses much more memory - Firefox extensions are by design much more powerful. e.g. Session Manager. And things like Tree style tabs etc.
- sargun 10y agoI have recently been running FF in parallel with Chrome. If I'm using non-Google properties, that don't use bad extensions, I quite like using FF. It's not quite as stable, but it "feels" faster and lighter.
- hashhar 10y agoFirefox easily handles upwards of 50 tabs while Chrome keeps crashing most of the times for me and takes up a lot of load time. FF extensions are really great compared to Chrome (apart from some Chorome Apps). My only remaining gripe with Firefox is the tab spinning problem (it seems to improve after every new build. I'm on nightly.).
- imron 10y agoI typically have like 80 tabs open at any time with Firefox - I use them like temporary bookmarks.
- dirkg 10y agoThis is only for low memory devices. From the linked article - "All the improvements discussed above reduce the Chrome 55 overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices compared to Chrome 53. Other device segments will only benefit from the zone memory improvements."
- dwetterau 10y agoThe "zone memory improvements" however were also significant: "Figure 5 shows the peak zone memory improvements since M54 which reduced by about 40% on average over the measured websites. " From: http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizing-v8-memory.html http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...
- known 10y agohttp://www.seamonkey-project.org/ http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ uses less CPU