I have an old, slow, 2006 laptop. Still works, use it as a media PC. At first, i went from IE -> chrome. It picked up 5 years of life. Recently thought i would have to finally decommision the box.
Installed firefox, runs like i did -5 years ago. Same websites, same tab consumption, more performance, no intermittant hangs, less ram consumption..
TDLR; install firefox if your having memory issues with chrome. all that tracking, google services and integration has a LARGE cost, not just to your privacy!
I almost made the switch to chrome a few years ago when firefox was seeming slow... but never brought myself to it. At the office I've always used chrome because there was something weird about Firefox for some internal pages, and because I was stuck on some older version (I didn't have admin rights to my desktop when I first got hired and was stuck on the version the helpdesk would push). Today, I'm way happier with Firefox, and I'm glad I didn't make the switch at home. I'm currently in the process of trying Firefox again at work (now that I can install the latest version...), and will probably ditch chrome entirely. It hogs too many resources, and I don't really get any noticeable benefits from using it.
I also downloaded Firefox for Android recently to try it out... but I get the impression that chrome will always be king in the android space.
>all that tracking, google services and integration has a LARGE cost, not just to your privacy!
Of all browsers I've reviewed recently, Firefox is one of the most active upon installation. I think it may be the only one to immediately collect telemetry data too.
I feel like the comments here reflect a weird mindset. (“Switch to Firefox!!” and “Firefox is just as bad!!”).
I’d like to offer a different; probably controversial perspective:
Rendering is a difficult and complex problem to solve. I remember back when I was younger, rendering a PDF was quite CPU intensive and consumed a decent amount of ram (for the time), and that does just a tiny minute subset of what a modern browser can do (and, in fact, many can render pdfs too!).
Modern web browsers are the epitome of a product that has bloated to far beyond it’s initial parameters, and it’s absolutely amazing that they perform as well as they do. But I don’t think the web should be used as an application delivery platform, having the features embedded in to be able to do that turns a modern web browser into a huge monolithic runtime, renderer and templating engine all churning together constantly. I mostly lament the availability of a general purpose language too, which makes it too easy for developers to grab and use it as soon as they have a minor problem, but that’s not the real issue to be honest.
If you put your computer science hat on: imagine how you would implement a fully functional web browser from scratch. I’ll bet good money it would require a lot of cpu time or a lot of memory (or, both).
At some point there was a critical mass of people believing Web Apps are super awesome. (Although I'm not sure if this was ever the majority ;))
Speaking of myself, I was always frustrated that on Linux apps/games were missing. The situation was even worse when I tried other Operating Systems. Web Apps seemed to be the ultimate solution for that.
But yes, RAM and CPU usage is insane. (For now the only solution is to buy computers with a lot of RAM and Swap space I think ;))
> I’m lucky enough to have a PC that boasts 32GB of the stuff. Now, that amount of RAM is – to be honest – overkill for most things I use my PC for.
You should not care about how much ram chrome consume if you have 32gb, however i think you should switch to firefox if you care about your privacy and the future of the web.
You shouldn't _have_ to care but the reality is, if you use your systems and chrome eats 4GB+, then you do care. Chrome regularly consumes a major percentage of my available RAM and I have 32GB.
The Great Suspender extension [0] is a handy RAM saver for tabs you want to keep open but don't need to use right now.
Pair that with Tabs Outliner extension [1] as a kind of visual bookmarker for related groups of pages, and Chrome RAM is manageable again.
Another benefit of Tabs Outliner is desktop organizing a dump of all Chrome pages that were open on my phone's browser (via Chrome sync, then on desktop Chrome view History, other device, open all, organize in Tabs Outliner and close tree for later, then close all tabs in mobile Chrome to free up phone RAM)
I prefer The Great Discarder [1]; saves more memory, and Chrome starts very quickly even with thousands (really) of tabs open. To put another way, Chrome becomes usable almost immediately, with much less time elapsed than needed to shut down.
Tabs Outliner looks interesting. Is this a replacement for the "vertical tabs" extension I've seen others rave about for Firefox?
It is like Tree Style Tabs but with better keyboard shortcuts, handles a tree of the entire browsing session and not just for a single window and it can act as a session manager where you can close entire (sub-)trees without losing their tree hierarchy. It also can (periodically) upload the tree to GDrive and allows you to restore the hierarchy on different devices.
The drawbacks are that some features are paid only, it is closed source and afaik, it doesn't even work on other Chrome-based browsers because it relies heavily on the Google account login.
> Plus, Microsoft’s increasingly desperate pleas to stick with Edge that pop up in Windows when you search for and download Chrome simply made me even more determined to stay away.
I think the aversion to being forced/pressured to do something is pretty universal, and I'm wondering whether I'm wrong, or whether companies are going to realize it at some point. I think this also contributed to the failure of Google+: The harder Google tried to ram it down people's throats, the more repulsed people were by it.
Of course there is a benefit to advertising/pushing a product, but overdo it, and you might achieve the opposite: People not just disinterested, but actively hating your product, forever, just due to the way how they were pushed to use it.
Also: Tab wrangler is a great extension for Chrome (can be used on Firefox) to automatically close unused tabs with rules. May help some of the people that have memory issues with Chrome.
Well maybe don't open hundreds of tabs in it since it's inefficient anyway?
I have an MBP with 8Gb of RAM and I never experienced issues because of Chrome.
If you're a tab hoarder, Chrome does seem to have gotten worse in the last year.
Usually the GPU process. Even if your tabs are all inactive, killed by something like Great Discarder, the GPU process continues to use a lot of RAM (2GB in my case, at times) and CPU.
I am not sure if it's a Mac-specific issue though.
Honest question to tab hoarders, why not use bookmarks? It saves bandwidth, system resources, makes you less prone to tracking and cross-site scripting, at the cost of some elevated organizational/management work and slightly less convenience?
Because bookmarks are a pain in the ass. I have 174 bookmarks for sites that I have only visited once and will never visit again and finding whatever I want takes minutes.
I literally cannot comprehend why anyone would use bookmarks when the friction is multiple orders of magnitude higher.
99% of my tabs do not live longer than 10 minutes so why should I want to persist them in a messy non hierarchical list that is neither organized by context nor by time? If you somehow make bookmarks as frictionless as tabs by making the new tab button create a bookmark and then show that bookmark as a tree structure on the sidebar then it wouldn't be any meaningfully different from a tab other than the fact that it has to reload the entire page every time you switch bookmarks.
> makes you less prone to tracking and cross-site scripting
Huh? Those have not much to do with whether some tab is open or not. Pages that have reasons to care about seeing length (and many which don't have good reasons) will log you out anyway.
Readit News
Installed firefox, runs like i did -5 years ago. Same websites, same tab consumption, more performance, no intermittant hangs, less ram consumption..
TDLR; install firefox if your having memory issues with chrome. all that tracking, google services and integration has a LARGE cost, not just to your privacy!
I also downloaded Firefox for Android recently to try it out... but I get the impression that chrome will always be king in the android space.
I’d like to offer a different; probably controversial perspective:
Rendering is a difficult and complex problem to solve. I remember back when I was younger, rendering a PDF was quite CPU intensive and consumed a decent amount of ram (for the time), and that does just a tiny minute subset of what a modern browser can do (and, in fact, many can render pdfs too!).
Modern web browsers are the epitome of a product that has bloated to far beyond it’s initial parameters, and it’s absolutely amazing that they perform as well as they do. But I don’t think the web should be used as an application delivery platform, having the features embedded in to be able to do that turns a modern web browser into a huge monolithic runtime, renderer and templating engine all churning together constantly. I mostly lament the availability of a general purpose language too, which makes it too easy for developers to grab and use it as soon as they have a minor problem, but that’s not the real issue to be honest.
If you put your computer science hat on: imagine how you would implement a fully functional web browser from scratch. I’ll bet good money it would require a lot of cpu time or a lot of memory (or, both).
Speaking of myself, I was always frustrated that on Linux apps/games were missing. The situation was even worse when I tried other Operating Systems. Web Apps seemed to be the ultimate solution for that.
But yes, RAM and CPU usage is insane. (For now the only solution is to buy computers with a lot of RAM and Swap space I think ;))
You should not care about how much ram chrome consume if you have 32gb, however i think you should switch to firefox if you care about your privacy and the future of the web.
Pair that with Tabs Outliner extension [1] as a kind of visual bookmarker for related groups of pages, and Chrome RAM is manageable again.
Another benefit of Tabs Outliner is desktop organizing a dump of all Chrome pages that were open on my phone's browser (via Chrome sync, then on desktop Chrome view History, other device, open all, organize in Tabs Outliner and close tree for later, then close all tabs in mobile Chrome to free up phone RAM)
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
Tabs Outliner looks interesting. Is this a replacement for the "vertical tabs" extension I've seen others rave about for Firefox?
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-discarde...
The drawbacks are that some features are paid only, it is closed source and afaik, it doesn't even work on other Chrome-based browsers because it relies heavily on the Google account login.
I think the aversion to being forced/pressured to do something is pretty universal, and I'm wondering whether I'm wrong, or whether companies are going to realize it at some point. I think this also contributed to the failure of Google+: The harder Google tried to ram it down people's throats, the more repulsed people were by it.
Of course there is a benefit to advertising/pushing a product, but overdo it, and you might achieve the opposite: People not just disinterested, but actively hating your product, forever, just due to the way how they were pushed to use it.
Also: Tab wrangler is a great extension for Chrome (can be used on Firefox) to automatically close unused tabs with rules. May help some of the people that have memory issues with Chrome.
Usually the GPU process. Even if your tabs are all inactive, killed by something like Great Discarder, the GPU process continues to use a lot of RAM (2GB in my case, at times) and CPU.
I am not sure if it's a Mac-specific issue though.
I literally cannot comprehend why anyone would use bookmarks when the friction is multiple orders of magnitude higher.
99% of my tabs do not live longer than 10 minutes so why should I want to persist them in a messy non hierarchical list that is neither organized by context nor by time? If you somehow make bookmarks as frictionless as tabs by making the new tab button create a bookmark and then show that bookmark as a tree structure on the sidebar then it wouldn't be any meaningfully different from a tab other than the fact that it has to reload the entire page every time you switch bookmarks.
Huh? Those have not much to do with whether some tab is open or not. Pages that have reasons to care about seeing length (and many which don't have good reasons) will log you out anyway.