As a part of Google's quest to take over the world.....

[dc]

..... they released their web browser today:

http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en-US/welcome.html

[BigDun]

Chrome actually looks pretty interesting. I'll give it a few weeks before I install it on my computer.

[Alice]

I'm curious about this... but I'd miss my firefox extensions.

[Jessie]

Yep, I'll try it when it has copied all the FF extensions that I love so much.

[Gamplayerx]

I wonder how big it is. 

[meredith]

I wonder how big it is. 

The file you download is only like 500k.  It pulls down more during the install.  After tracking down the installed files, which are buried in my home directory instead of installed in \Program Files, the application itself is 46M installed, and comes with Google Updater which is 2M installed and stays running in the background. (If you kill it, Chrome will re-start it shortly.)


chrome.exe is 16M after startup, and GoogleUpdate.exe is 1.6M resident.

Chrome seems to allocate about 1.1M for the base environment of each isolated tab.

[Gamplayerx]

I wonder how big it is. 

The file you download is only like 500k.  It pulls down more during the install.  After tracking down the installed files, which are buried in my home directory instead of installed in \Program Files, the application itself is 46M installed, and comes with Google Updater which is 2M installed and stays running in the background. (If you kill it, Chrome will re-start it shortly.)


chrome.exe is 16M after startup, and GoogleUpdate.exe is 1.6M resident.

Chrome seems to allocate about 1.1M for the base environment of each isolated tab.

Too much math -- if I'm reading correctly, it's way littler than Firefox.  Is that right?

[meredith]

Firefox (3.0.1) is about half the size on disk, and is 16-19M in memory after startup, but swells rapidly with use due to a number of issues and design choices.  I've got a whole lot of work tabs open here, or I'd provide an objective comparison.

I'm not sure about how the recent Firefox betas are for memory or speed.

[Gamplayerx]

Right now, I have one instance of firefox running, with 4 tabs and the processes tab in the task manager says it's using 107500+/-

[meredith]

I was just checking - I've got 21 tabs open, and firefox is at about 135M.   (I also have Adblock Plus and NoScript installed here)

[Gamplayerx]

Okay.  Now launch all those in chrome and check. 

[meredith]

Afraid i can't do that at the moment.  If you've read about Chrome, you may have seen mention of the crash recovery they designed into it. That's what I mentioned earlier about isolated tabs - a single tab should crash, not the whole browser.  Well, due to that design, Chrome will use a bit more memory up front, but after long usage, it should bloat less than Firefox.  There's actually a Task Manager in chrome, where you can see the memory and processor usage per-tab, and this comparison of memory usage.

The document inspection in Chrome looks pretty nice.

[Beefy]

Afraid i can't do that at the moment.  If you've read about Chrome, you may have seen mention of the crash recovery they designed into it. That's what I mentioned earlier about isolated tabs - a single tab should crash, not the whole browser.  Well, due to that design, Chrome will use a bit more memory up front, but after long usage, it should bloat less than Firefox.  There's actually a Task Manager in chrome, where you can see the memory and processor usage per-tab, and this comparison of memory usage.

The document inspection in Chrome looks pretty nice.

Stupid Texas.

[Gamplayerx]

this comparison of memory usage.

Thanks!!

[meredith]

Stupid Texas.

Thanks for making me go back and look, actually.  I just opened reddit.com and middle-clicked a bunch of links.  It actually grouped three tabs for reddit.com into the same process, which is good to know.

Thanks!!

Just so we're clear, that's still firefox with 21 tabs and about a week of runtime vs chrome with 8 tabs and <2 minutes runtime.

[Beefy]

I think there was a link off of Fark's mainpage within the last day or two about all of Chrome's apparent flaws.

[meredith]

Well, people get caught up in the googliness of it (*cough* youph) and don't give it a critical look right off.

They had this comic up about how Chrome is designed for what web users need today, but there are only three things that make it different from any other browser and further their goal:

- Isolated tabs
- Really fast javascript
- Inclusion of Google Gears in the install.

(Google Gears is a browser plugin that provides web developers with tools to make more responsive, richer applications, and browser-based apps that run offline.  Fast JS + dynamic HTML/XHTML/SVG + Gears = competitor to Flash, and then some. )

They could've added these features/changes to Firefox or Safari, and spent time on nicing-up what's already out there.  Hell if I were at Google, I wouldn't want to release yet another standalone application that will require support and maintenance.





Personally, though. I don't like it because I hate shaped and/or restyled windows.  Use the Windows borders like everyone else, you pretentious sh_ts!

[Gamplayerx]

I like it so far.  But it makes chat a bit weird looking.