IE8 and Chrome Betas Eat More RAM Than WinXPOK, admittedly, that is a bit of a sensationalist headline. But it -did- get my attention when I saw something similar. Did it get yours? A lot of press reported the beta of IE8 is fatter than IE 7, and also more resource-intensive. After evaluating IE8, the folks over at the exo.performance.network declared it to be seriously bloated. And wait till I tell you about Chrome, which I have been expecting for at least a few years. Actually I was wondering how come they are so late with a Google browser because Google having their own browser makes all the sense in the world. They are worried that IE could hurt its search business by, for instance, blocking it from collecting data relevant to its advertising business and/or offer a Microsoft centric search bar.
First off, keep in mind that Beta software often still has a -lot- of extra debug code activated, so both Redmond and Google still may be able to significantly optimize. Once these products go RTM, I would really like to see an independent performance shoot-out between IE7, IE8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. But like Google Apps, Chrome might be forever in beta, a great excuse why things don't work. To start off, here are the IE8 Beta stats in all their glory, and later we will compare them to Chrome. Fasten your seatbelts.
350-400MB memory footprint
150-200 concurrent execution threads
6 discrete iexplore.exe process instances
Over 2x more demanding than Firefox
The above was recorded during a 10-site browsing scenario, visiting popular sites like Fox News, CNET, New York Times, InfoWorld, and more. During testing, they compared IE 8 to IE 7 and FireFox 3.01 running on WinXP SP3 and Vista SP1, using the DMS Clarity Tracker agent to record system and process metrics from the test boxes. But wait...They did the same thing with Chrome, which also is fat by design. Chrome turns out to be a major strategic Google development project with a lot of resources dedicated to it, not one of their "20% projects". Google has set up an open source project called Chromium so developers can dig in and contribute: They position it as: "not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications." Here is a quick video with 10 features of Chrome, did you know it comes with its own task manager?
http://www.wservernews.com/3SA5YE/08090 ... e-FeaturesDevil Mountain Software Inc., ran Chrome through the same 10-site scenario used to benchmark IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox. In the test, each browser opened the 10 sites in separate tabs, with links on those sites opened in additional tabs. Chrome's peak memory consumption under WinXP was 324MB, slightly less than IE8 Beta 2's 332MB, but Chrome's average footprint of 267MB was 26% larger than IE8's 211MB.
What I like and don't like about Chrome after using it a few days: It's fast
The multi-process, sandboxed architecture is more crash-resistant
I like the minimalist approach to the GUI
The tab implementation is better
It snapshots your Top 9 most visited sites on the home page
What I don't like all that much: Not trial-by-fire tested yet for security flaws...yet
Not too many add-ons available, but that's not such a big deal
I -always- use the drop-down bar of the URL address field, and not
having that is very inconvenient.
No RSS features yet
The uninstall doesn't really uninstall - it still leaves files, particularly the
new GoogleUpdate.exe that runs continuously.
Your surfing/keystrokes are an open book. Privacy Schmivacy.
http://www.wservernews.com/3SA5YE/080908-Chrome-PrivacyChrome plays outside of Vista Security Zones, this could mean major security issues for Chrome in a corporate environment unless you lock down everything with GPO.
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