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Safari has been multi process for ages now (several years). I don't think that's the difference. I think Safari simply errs on the side of better resource consu

Safari has been multi process for ages now (several years). I don't think that's the difference. I think Safari simply errs on the side of better resource consumption where Chrome's highest priority is cutting edge shinies for web front end devs and being as fast as possible at the cost of everything else. One example of this is where Safari will suspend tabs (as in slow them down or freeze them while keeping them in memory) you haven't used in 15+ minutes that aren't playing music for anything. Effectively, this means that Safari's total power impact is only that of the 2-4 tabs you're currently actively using instead of how ever many you actually have open. It's a bit nicer than something like The Great Suspender though, since it doesn't just trash the loaded pages and force you to reload upon visiting said tabs. If you're using an adblocker based on WebKit Content Blockers, that can have an impact too. They're much more efficient than even uBlock and add almost no additional CPU or RAM usage to web browsing, meaning you fully reap all the savings of blocking ads and egregious JS.

LeoNatan25 10y ago
While technically true for Safari, all these advantages are true if you develop your own application using WKWebView. Each web view will consume its own process up to a point, then some processes will be reused; inactive processes will throttle down activity and suspect. The WebKit2 architecture is a lot more efficient in its memory managed as well. It's a shame so many browsers went with Blink rather than use WebKit2, mostly for political reasons.
- kitsunesoba 10y ago
  I think the bigger problem with WebKit-based browsers on platforms other than macOS is the frequency of updates. For example, I find GNOME Web on Linux/*BSD perfectly suited for my own web browsing, but depending on the distribution you're using updates can be fewer between than even Safari's once-per-year big updates and far more infrequent than Safari Technology Preview's or Chrome's update schedule. There aren't really any good WebKit-based options on Windows, though. IIRC Midori runs on Windows but is GTK based and feels out of place.

LeoNatan25 10y ago

While technically true for Safari, all these advantages are true if you develop your own application using WKWebView. Each web view will consume its own process up to a point, then some processes will be reused; inactive processes will throttle down activity and suspect. The WebKit2 architecture is a lot more efficient in its memory managed as well. It's a shame so many browsers went with Blink rather than use WebKit2, mostly for political reasons.

kitsunesoba 10y ago
I think the bigger problem with WebKit-based browsers on platforms other than macOS is the frequency of updates. For example, I find GNOME Web on Linux/*BSD perfectly suited for my own web browsing, but depending on the distribution you're using updates can be fewer between than even Safari's once-per-year big updates and far more infrequent than Safari Technology Preview's or Chrome's update schedule. There aren't really any good WebKit-based options on Windows, though. IIRC Midori runs on Windows but is GTK based and feels out of place.