8 ms·

Burning Chrome

80 points by ggordan 16y ago

pnathan 16y ago
Well, I've personally been real happy with Chrome. I've got it on OSX/Windows/Linux. It's not a weird-ux like IE, it's snappy unlike Firefox, it isn't a memory-hog like Safari, and it's well-supported (unlike the runner-ups). It also has an epically nice PDF reader, which could be its own product and I would be very, very happy.
- Confusion 16y ago
  Not a memory hog?! The smallest tab currently opened takes 18MB; the largest 83MB for a single tab. Each extension takes an additional ~13MB. It's using a grand total of 725 MB private memory, for 18 tabs.
  - borism 16y ago
    well, it doesn't feel like memory hog due to having many processes. when you close all those tabs the memory is freed. for some unknown to me reason after having few sites open in Safari and closing everything, it still takes up 500MB in memory. in short, you have to restart Safari to free-up memory. with Chrome closing tabs is sufficient.
    - Qz 16y ago
      The sites are still cached in-memory for fast history browsing.
      - eklitzke 16y ago
        Is that really where all of the memory goes? On a normal consumer-grade HDD a disk seek is ~10ms and reading a megabyte sequentially is another 10ms or so. Conservatively speaking it should be possible to load a site from the disk cache in under 50ms, and in practice that would probably be quite a bit faster (especially if the data is in the page cache). With that kind of speed it would make sense to persist these caches on disk if a page isn't actually opened in any tabs. I don't know if data like this exists in an easily understandable format (i.e. not just cryptic massif dumps that would only make sense to WebKit hackers), but it would be interesting to see a heap profile of a WebKit/Safari session to see what's using all of the memory in an "empty" browser session.
      - Joeri 16y ago
        Fast history browsing is useful only when clicking the back button. Caching the sites after tabs are closed is just a bad design, no excuses.
        Qz 16y ago
        Fast history browsing is plenty useful when undoing a closed tab. Not sure if Safari does this, but on Firefox if you undo a closed tab, the tab comes back exactly as it was before, with history intact. I use that feature quite a bit.
        borism 16y ago
        it works like this with Chrome too, but without keeping all the stuff in RAM.
    - traskjd 16y ago
      My general view is that I don't mind something being a memory hog if it's using that memory to make my experience really fast (which chrome does). Being a memory hog AND being slow really just makes me hate the software (Firefox - although I hear it's getting better in 4+ which I have not tried).
      - rtaycher 16y ago
        I think almost all tests(as difficult as it is to measure) show firefox coming in with the least amount of memory usage.
- rtaycher 16y ago
  not a weird-ux ?
nhangen 16y ago
I used to love Chrome, but as of late it's crashing on a daily basis. Perhaps it is a flash issue, but Safari seems to handle it OK.
- CWIZO 16y ago
  What channel are you using? The stable, beta or dev?
  - nhangen 16y ago
    stable - 9.0.597.102
    - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
      You might want to click around in the preferences and make sure you click to enable anonymous usage data to be sent to Google. I think that sends crash reports back, which the team then triages to prioritize the bugs that are causing the most crashes for users.
      - nhangen 16y ago
        Thanks Matt, I just made that adjustment.
- Griever 16y ago
  Dev channel user here. Can't say I experience this at all. However, I have heard from other users that some extensions can cause the browser to crash. Not sure which, unfortunately.
  - nhangen 16y ago
    That's strange. I thought about that, but the only extension I have is the Google Blacklist extension.
- peregrine 16y ago
Charuru 16y ago
I agree with most of the article. Android and Chrome OS are great products, I just don't see how Google is going to make money from them. Not sure about Chrome, but I feel like Android is a defensive measure against a possible monopoly. If one company controlled mobile then Google might be locked out of whatever greater potential mobile could reach. So Android doesn't necessarily have to be financially awesome to be strategically successful.
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  The influence of Chrome and Android on web development are very probably part of what Google is aiming for. It's the anti-Facebook/Apple, in a way, which should help Google Search keep earning enough money to support all the other peripheral projects.
  - rmrm 16y ago
    I read recently that 90% of HTTPS traffic for Google properties <> Chrome is handled using SPDY. Interesting also that Google continues to put more and more of their properties on HTTPS. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/TCOW7Lw2scQ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/TCOW7Lw2scQ I think Chrome is useful for them for just this reason, rather than solely trying to cajole others, they can just do things. I imagine this will continue to accrue benefits to them for quite some time.
    - MikeCapone 16y ago
      That's actually very cool! I wonder what kind of difference it actually makes with an application like GMail or Google Search SSL.
retlehs 16y ago
I absolutely love Chrome. I recently ditched Firefox + Firebug for Chrome [Canary build] + Developer Tools. It didn't take any time to get adjusted with the new Firebug like CSS editing and I no longer have to deal with having to regularly restart Firefox once it becomes sluggish. Check out "Google Chrome Developer Tools: 12 Tricks to Develop Quicker" by Paul Irish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI
- nkassis 16y ago
  Gotta say, that pause button(last tip) is genius!
willifred 16y ago
I love Chrome, but I hate silent updates. The majority of Chrome users have no idea that their browser is silently updating itself without their knowledge or consent, and if they did, they wouldn't have any idea how to shut it off. I can think of plenty of cases where most users would want to turn it off—tethered to a slow data network, throttled bandwidth, etc—but the precedent it sets bothers me more than any hypothetical inconvenience. It's like I'm suddenly, unknowingly leasing a little space on my machine to Google, and I'm not always sure what they're installing.
- div 16y ago
  I love the silent updates. You raise a valid point about not knowing exactly what is being installed, but the flip side of the coin is that security fixes and new feature support get adopted much faster. It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security patch.
  - rkudeshi 16y ago
    > It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security patch. Even though I still use Firefox personally, this is why I've transitioned every family member to Chrome.
    - badwetter 16y ago
      As have I. When you have to support other people it just makes sense (silent update).
  - willifred 16y ago
    Security and convenience at the expense of control and privacy. I like knowing what's installed on my computer. I realize that I'm going to have to go into the future kicking and screaming.
    - albertzeyer 16y ago
      You know what's installed on your computer. Chrome updates. The only thing which you don't really know anymore is when or to what version it is currently updating. But why would you care anyway about that.
djahng 16y ago
I think what Chrome really needs is the ability to watch HTML5 video in full screen (not just fill the browser window). At least this is Chrome's functionality on my Mac. I realize full screen video is not part of the HTML5 spec, it's left to the browser to implement. Safari will do full screen HTML5 video...
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  Just press F11 (on linux) and you'll get full screen.
  - mixmastamyk 16y ago
    He means the video full screen, the page being full screen is not so helpful unless still running at 1024x768.
hasenj 16y ago
The bit about the Cloud being like electricity is very insightful. However, if you've lived anywhere outside the US and Europe, you know that grid electricity is not as available as you're used to. In third world countries, electricity goes off periodically, specially in places where there are wars. When I was young (and living in the middle east) I heard a joke where 3 men: an American, an Arab, and an African were asked the question: what's your opinion about electricity going off? The American says: does electricity go off? The African says: what's electricity? The Arab says: what's an opinion? I visited Iraq in 2000; practically everyone had an electricity generator at home. I had to learn how to operate it and refill it with gas.
- nochiel 16y ago
  "The African says: what's electricity?" That should read "The Africa says, 'What electricity?'" We certainly know what electricity is; we've heard of it and understand its usefulness; we even use it almost daily. However, as you aptly noted, its availability is sufficiently irregular and inconsistent that we expect it to be off as much as it is on.
  - tkahn6 16y ago
    Um, that hyperbole is part of the joke. Americans know that electricity goes off and Arabs have opinions.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
- ewald 16y ago
  Why do people generalize stuff about third world countries? I live in Brazil, and electricity is as reliable as in the US and Europe.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    Sure, maybe it's not bad in Brazil, but there are many places where it's not super good. In Syria and Jordan, it goes off for about 3 hours every two weeks, or something like that (not scheduled, just randomly). I think the same is true for Egypt. I've heard the same about India. In fact, I've heard from a trusted person that computer/software offices in India have their own backup power generators. I can only assume the same applies to hotels and factories.
alanh 16y ago
> Obviously no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime soon Um… not that hard, if you aren’t so cheap as to only run Windows.
mkramlich 16y ago
As I read the article, and only a paragraph or two into it, I was reminded once again why I think Google naming both their browser and their Linux distro "Chrome" was a bad idea. Feels like an amateur mistake the kind I wouldn't expect them to make but they did. Yes, technically, one is called ChromeOS, but obviously many folks are going to drop the -OS part when talking about it, thus causing confusion.

80 points by ggordan 16y ago

Well, I've personally been real happy with Chrome. I've got it on OSX/Windows/Linux. It's not a weird-ux like IE, it's snappy unlike Firefox, it isn't a memory-hog like Safari, and it's well-supported (unlike the runner-ups). It also has an epically nice PDF reader, which could be its own product and I would be very, very happy.

Confusion 16y ago
Not a memory hog?! The smallest tab currently opened takes 18MB; the largest 83MB for a single tab. Each extension takes an additional ~13MB. It's using a grand total of 725 MB private memory, for 18 tabs.
- borism 16y ago
  well, it doesn't feel like memory hog due to having many processes. when you close all those tabs the memory is freed. for some unknown to me reason after having few sites open in Safari and closing everything, it still takes up 500MB in memory. in short, you have to restart Safari to free-up memory. with Chrome closing tabs is sufficient.
  - Qz 16y ago
    The sites are still cached in-memory for fast history browsing.
    - eklitzke 16y ago
      Is that really where all of the memory goes? On a normal consumer-grade HDD a disk seek is ~10ms and reading a megabyte sequentially is another 10ms or so. Conservatively speaking it should be possible to load a site from the disk cache in under 50ms, and in practice that would probably be quite a bit faster (especially if the data is in the page cache). With that kind of speed it would make sense to persist these caches on disk if a page isn't actually opened in any tabs. I don't know if data like this exists in an easily understandable format (i.e. not just cryptic massif dumps that would only make sense to WebKit hackers), but it would be interesting to see a heap profile of a WebKit/Safari session to see what's using all of the memory in an "empty" browser session.
    - Joeri 16y ago
      Fast history browsing is useful only when clicking the back button. Caching the sites after tabs are closed is just a bad design, no excuses.
      - Qz 16y ago
        Fast history browsing is plenty useful when undoing a closed tab. Not sure if Safari does this, but on Firefox if you undo a closed tab, the tab comes back exactly as it was before, with history intact. I use that feature quite a bit.
        borism 16y ago
        it works like this with Chrome too, but without keeping all the stuff in RAM.
  - traskjd 16y ago
    My general view is that I don't mind something being a memory hog if it's using that memory to make my experience really fast (which chrome does). Being a memory hog AND being slow really just makes me hate the software (Firefox - although I hear it's getting better in 4+ which I have not tried).
    - rtaycher 16y ago
      I think almost all tests(as difficult as it is to measure) show firefox coming in with the least amount of memory usage.
rtaycher 16y ago
not a weird-ux ?

nhangen 16y ago

I used to love Chrome, but as of late it's crashing on a daily basis. Perhaps it is a flash issue, but Safari seems to handle it OK.

CWIZO 16y ago
What channel are you using? The stable, beta or dev?
- nhangen 16y ago
  stable - 9.0.597.102
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    You might want to click around in the preferences and make sure you click to enable anonymous usage data to be sent to Google. I think that sends crash reports back, which the team then triages to prioritize the bugs that are causing the most crashes for users.
    - nhangen 16y ago
      Thanks Matt, I just made that adjustment.
Griever 16y ago
Dev channel user here. Can't say I experience this at all. However, I have heard from other users that some extensions can cause the browser to crash. Not sure which, unfortunately.
- nhangen 16y ago
  That's strange. I thought about that, but the only extension I have is the Google Blacklist extension.
peregrine 16y ago

Charuru 16y ago

I agree with most of the article. Android and Chrome OS are great products, I just don't see how Google is going to make money from them. Not sure about Chrome, but I feel like Android is a defensive measure against a possible monopoly. If one company controlled mobile then Google might be locked out of whatever greater potential mobile could reach. So Android doesn't necessarily have to be financially awesome to be strategically successful.

MikeCapone 16y ago
The influence of Chrome and Android on web development are very probably part of what Google is aiming for. It's the anti-Facebook/Apple, in a way, which should help Google Search keep earning enough money to support all the other peripheral projects.
- rmrm 16y ago
  I read recently that 90% of HTTPS traffic for Google properties <> Chrome is handled using SPDY. Interesting also that Google continues to put more and more of their properties on HTTPS. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/TCOW7Lw2scQ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/TCOW7Lw2scQ I think Chrome is useful for them for just this reason, rather than solely trying to cajole others, they can just do things. I imagine this will continue to accrue benefits to them for quite some time.
  - MikeCapone 16y ago
    That's actually very cool! I wonder what kind of difference it actually makes with an application like GMail or Google Search SSL.

retlehs 16y ago

I absolutely love Chrome. I recently ditched Firefox + Firebug for Chrome [Canary build] + Developer Tools. It didn't take any time to get adjusted with the new Firebug like CSS editing and I no longer have to deal with having to regularly restart Firefox once it becomes sluggish. Check out "Google Chrome Developer Tools: 12 Tricks to Develop Quicker" by Paul Irish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI

nkassis 16y ago
Gotta say, that pause button(last tip) is genius!

willifred 16y ago

I love Chrome, but I hate silent updates. The majority of Chrome users have no idea that their browser is silently updating itself without their knowledge or consent, and if they did, they wouldn't have any idea how to shut it off. I can think of plenty of cases where most users would want to turn it off—tethered to a slow data network, throttled bandwidth, etc—but the precedent it sets bothers me more than any hypothetical inconvenience. It's like I'm suddenly, unknowingly leasing a little space on my machine to Google, and I'm not always sure what they're installing.

div 16y ago
I love the silent updates. You raise a valid point about not knowing exactly what is being installed, but the flip side of the coin is that security fixes and new feature support get adopted much faster. It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security patch.
- rkudeshi 16y ago
  > It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security patch. Even though I still use Firefox personally, this is why I've transitioned every family member to Chrome.
  - badwetter 16y ago
    As have I. When you have to support other people it just makes sense (silent update).
- willifred 16y ago
  Security and convenience at the expense of control and privacy. I like knowing what's installed on my computer. I realize that I'm going to have to go into the future kicking and screaming.
  - albertzeyer 16y ago
    You know what's installed on your computer. Chrome updates. The only thing which you don't really know anymore is when or to what version it is currently updating. But why would you care anyway about that.

djahng 16y ago

I think what Chrome really needs is the ability to watch HTML5 video in full screen (not just fill the browser window). At least this is Chrome's functionality on my Mac. I realize full screen video is not part of the HTML5 spec, it's left to the browser to implement. Safari will do full screen HTML5 video...

patrickaljord 16y ago
Just press F11 (on linux) and you'll get full screen.
- mixmastamyk 16y ago
  He means the video full screen, the page being full screen is not so helpful unless still running at 1024x768.

hasenj 16y ago

The bit about the Cloud being like electricity is very insightful. However, if you've lived anywhere outside the US and Europe, you know that grid electricity is not as available as you're used to. In third world countries, electricity goes off periodically, specially in places where there are wars. When I was young (and living in the middle east) I heard a joke where 3 men: an American, an Arab, and an African were asked the question: what's your opinion about electricity going off? The American says: does electricity go off? The African says: what's electricity? The Arab says: what's an opinion? I visited Iraq in 2000; practically everyone had an electricity generator at home. I had to learn how to operate it and refill it with gas.

nochiel 16y ago
"The African says: what's electricity?" That should read "The Africa says, 'What electricity?'" We certainly know what electricity is; we've heard of it and understand its usefulness; we even use it almost daily. However, as you aptly noted, its availability is sufficiently irregular and inconsistent that we expect it to be off as much as it is on.
- tkahn6 16y ago
  Um, that hyperbole is part of the joke. Americans know that electricity goes off and Arabs have opinions.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
ewald 16y ago
Why do people generalize stuff about third world countries? I live in Brazil, and electricity is as reliable as in the US and Europe.
- hasenj 16y ago
  Sure, maybe it's not bad in Brazil, but there are many places where it's not super good. In Syria and Jordan, it goes off for about 3 hours every two weeks, or something like that (not scheduled, just randomly). I think the same is true for Egypt. I've heard the same about India. In fact, I've heard from a trusted person that computer/software offices in India have their own backup power generators. I can only assume the same applies to hotels and factories.

alanh 16y ago

> Obviously no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime soon Um… not that hard, if you aren’t so cheap as to only run Windows.

mkramlich 16y ago

As I read the article, and only a paragraph or two into it, I was reminded once again why I think Google naming both their browser and their Linux distro "Chrome" was a bad idea. Feels like an amateur mistake the kind I wouldn't expect them to make but they did. Yes, technically, one is called ChromeOS, but obviously many folks are going to drop the -OS part when talking about it, thus causing confusion.