Chrome celebrates second b-day with sixth release Google is celebrating Chrome's second birthday by releasing a new stable version of its rapidly evolving browser, offering a slightly simpler user interface, an automatic form filler, and the ability to synchronize extensions and form data across machines. The first public version of Chrome arrived on September 2, 2008, …
It's a desktop OS, who doesn't have 4GB of memory these days? The point of all that mem is that it's being used, not that it's just sitting there unused "just in case you want to run photoshop". The more it loads into RAM using memory mapped file, instead of doing disk I/O, the better.
It might be memory inefficient, but it is very processor efficient. As memory is effectively an unlimited resource (I have 12GB in my current PC, not because I need it, but because it was so cheap I could see no reason not to), and CPU time is rather more limited, it seems good to me. Especially as separate processes also scale better across multiple cores, which I also have a surfeit of.
GJC
Bugs? I dare say there might be some but I don't know of any. The in-place editor used to be a bit quirky but they fixed that a while back. As for memory footprint I have three tabs open and in total Chrome is using a couple of hundred megabytes of RAM. Yeah I know all that just for some text and image rendering makes me nostalgic as well having learnt my trade in the 80s. Still, here we are in the 21st century and who the hell cares? A few hundred MB is small potatoes. My XP machine is reporting that it has 3.2GB free anyway.
It used to be that you'd change the major version number to indicate significant changes or a major improvement over the old version. It seems more and more these days Google and others are doing it purely for marketing.
Google's marketing department;
"We've decided to implement some changes in how we increase our major version numbering. We will increase the version number if any of these conditions are met:
* The sun has risen this morning
* Is it a full moon tonight? If so major version change! If not... major version change!
* Are we still behind MSIE in version numbering? Increase the version number!
* Did any of the other browser makers release a nightly, beta, release candidate or a new release? Major version change!
* Is our marketing department full of morons? Major version change!"
And on and on.. Chrome still isn't attractive as a browser (to me at least) its addon system is pretty crappy and the bookmarks system is woeful. Never mind numerous little things like googleupdater etc.
Only five tabs? You should be able to run ten times that. Chrome is fast, but not ready.
I run several browsers simultaneously and the others don't need to be restarted. Alter less than a week Chrome has grabbed all the memory available and chewed far into swap as well. I think we need more than a few versions before this is out of beta.
on Windows and Ubuntu OS since they were released and on the later system Chromium nightly versions ; with almost no exceptions, I've found all these releases extremely stable - no blank screens or prone or supine postures. I also find that the extensions work well - so well, in fact, that if I could get my Delicious bookmarks to display in a permanent left-hand sidepanel on Chrome as they do on my Firefox browsers, I'd select the former as my default browser over the latter. My impression is that the developers have come a long way these last two years - kudos to them !...
Henri
..but I prefer Chrome.
I know why I don't like IE8. It has an irritating delay in opening tabs. It varies but having to wait several seconds for a new tab to come ready is pathetic.
But the rest - I really don't know why I don't like them. I mean all I ever do is browse right so what's the difference?
FF - I just find myself getting annoyed.
Opera - Seemed okay but no advantage over Chrome. I think there was one option it did differently.
So right now Chrome does what I want and it doesn't get in the way. Maybe it's just apathy, lol.
Have to agree with a number of posts here.
Gave Chrome a good crack for several weeks as my browser of choice and ultimately went back to Firefox as a result of Chrome's frankly astonishing memory usage. That might be unnoticable on a desktop with 4+ GB of RAM but it's very noticable on a netbook or low range laptop and, in all honesty, I saw no advantages at all to running each tab as a separate process.
Sure, crashes are better contained, but then Chrome crashes far more regularly than Firefox anyway. And even when Firefox does it just restarts and restores all your tabs. With Google pushing Chrome and web-based apps it makes sense to make it multiprocess. For regular browsing it's massively overwight and clearly geared towards the 'lower' end of the user intelligence scale.
Besides, each version they punch out takes up around 100MB of installation space. With their new 6 week release cycle you can expect your USER PROFILE to increase by the best part of a gigabyte over the course of a year.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
