So for my first day being self-employed, I got a chance to work on my PC. So I decided to give Google Chrome a spin. Here are my very brief thoughts on the matter –
I don’t know why, but I don’t find it pretty. I’ll leave the why’s and wherefore’s to other people better qualified than me. But even though the interface is quite spare, which is good, it just looks ugly to me. Perhaps I am ignorant. Who knows.
The whole ‘every tab gets its own instance thing’ – I don’t think people understand this yet. This is not a speed play. I’m sure they’re trying to make it as fast as possible – but it’s not for speed or reduced memory use. It will probably slow things down and increase memory use, in fact. It’s for stability. Whenever you’ve crashed your browser and lost all of your tabs and windows and such – you know the pain that Google is trying to prevent. What is supposed to happen, allegedly, is that the offending tab will, indeed, crash. But nothing else will. Your other tabs should survive. If that’s useful to you, then you should give the browser a spin.
Since under Chrome it’s possible to have very very long-lived browser processes, looking at memory use right after launch of Chrome, versus right after launch of Firefox (or any other browser) doesn’t really make sense. Look at the memory use of the two after they’ve both been up and in active use for 8 or so hours. My bet (though certainly not certain!) would be that Chrome will not have used up much more memory than it started with. Whereas if my personal experience is anything to go by, Firefox will have bloated out significantly. In fact, Firefox tends to get all whacky for me and stop loading stylesheets and stuff after a certain amount of time (which could be days). I am to the point where I can recognize this, and know that it’s time to relaunch it. I’m thrilled at the prospect of not having to do so. We shall see – because I’m going to try to run Chrome into the ground today, and see what happens.