It seems impossible to go about our daily business of general web-surfing/business without ending up with a browser that’s hosting anywhere from 10-30 open tabs.
After a while this gets really annoying, but what’s even more annoying is that it can likely slow down your browser (for instance, Firefox was guzzling 1 Gig of RAM a few days ago).
So the question now becomes: which application manages those tabs most efficiently? Chrome or Firefox?
The Difference Is In the Process
The first notable difference between the two browsers, is how they handle their separate tabs.
Chrome has multiple processes, but Firefox seems a bit lonely all the way down there.
Contrary to popular belief, pinning your open tabs in Chrome does not cause them to become separate processes; it simply makes them semi-permanent. The truth is that Chrome runs its entire process construct completely different from Firefox in that every tab is its own process, whether it’s pinned or not.
Firefox, however, uses a single process to run the entire application. There may be a benefit to this, but I admittedly am unaware of it if so.
Memory Management
Now that we have established the fundamental difference between Chrome’s and Firefox’s core construction, there is the question of whether or not separate processes actually help in the memory management of the browser’s.
As a test, I opened both browsers and filled them with the same exact setup:
- 6 Pinned Tabs
- 3 Open Tabs
Not that the pinned vs. open tabs mattered, but I like variety.
Essentially, what I found out, is that both browsers handled memory relatively well, though Chrome was using between 2-8 Mb less memory than Firefox (I assumed this was the result of different extensions in the browsers).
Tip: To find out the memory usage of all open browsers, type into the Chrome search bar: "about:memory"
At first glance, it seems as though Chrome and Firefox are at par with each other.
But then why was I getting 1 Gig of memory usage from Firefox every now and then?
I should mention that during my research for this post, I stumbled upon an article that happened to answer that question, and it lies in the fact that Firefox caches each tab for later usage, and never dumps it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the link for this site, and so I can’t say this definitively. However, I should say that after having both browsers open and using 400 Mb’s of RAM each, I closed all tabs in each browser except one.
Firefox was still close to 400 Mb’s of memory usage, while Chrome had dropped to a modest 130 Mb’s.
The Winner
I have to admit, before writing this article, I was a hands-down Firefox fan. But after doing a bit of testing and working with both browsers, I got to hand it to Chrome, and here are some reasons why:
- Separate processes allows you to kill a tab that’s frozen without killing the entire browser.
- Separate processes seem to do a better job handling large amounts of memory.
- Since each process has it’s own memory, when one tab is closed, that memory is freed up.
- It looks nicer and runs smoother; presumably because of the hardware acceleration that’s built-in.
So what do you guys think? Do you use Firefox over Chrome for a reason I didn’t mention? Share your geeky thoughts!
[HT: ChurchMag]
Chrome all the way man!!!
Used to be a FF fan but switched to Chrome as a dare from a buddy. Everything I had in FF is in Chrome minus one of the bigger addons- tab mix plus. In my everyday work and surf, I cannot (on a laptop) open a link with a middle click (without installing better touch tools) which is annoying.
Tabs Mix Plus – a MUST have in my eyes, opens all bookmark sites in a new tab. So much easier than three finger clicking or right click open in a new tab
So Chrome because I have been using it for a while, but it’s Chrome plus Better Touch Tools till they fix this issue/complaint lots of us have.
Chrome won’t let you open a link in a new tab via the middle button? That’s weird man, it lets me do it.
Is Tabs Mix Plus a FF add-on or a Chrome one?
Yes, Chrome lets you middle click to open a new tab, but the comment stated that he was using a laptop. I’m assuming his laptop doesn’t have a middle mouse button.
Oh, that’s a good point Chris. I know on my laptop I can tap with two fingers and it acts like a middle mouse button, but I guess that depends on your laptop.
I’m still in the FF camp. I’ve tried Chrome and just don’t like it – no specific reason. I guess I like the way FF handles things and I do have a few add-ons that I’m very fond of.
FF does have some memory issues, but I used MemoryFox which flushes memory regularly. This seems to keep memory usage under control.
Good advice man! I haven’t actually looked into MemoryFox…maybe I should.
One of my favorite “secret” chrome features is right clicking on a pop-up window and selecting show as tab so that i can get all my tabs and pop-ups into one window.
example: http://lifehacker.com/5781873/turn-chromes-popup-windows-into-tabbed-windows
Daaaaaaaaaang! I didn’t know you could do that. Oh snap.
You missed a MASSIVE benefit to Chrome. If you view your process list using Sysinternals Process Explorer (http://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe) and turn on the “Integrity level” column (View => Select Clumns… => Process Image (tab) => Integrity Level) you will see that Chrome uses the SAME process model as IE.
Well *almost the same* – it is the same in the important part – all non-trusted sites are running in a Low Integrity process – giving Chrome the same effectiveness in blocking zero-day attacks as IE’s “Protected Mode” (IE 7 and later running on Vista and later)
IE 8 and later start one broker process at Medium Integrity and then runs all untrusted sites in one Low Integrity process and all trusted sits in one Medium Integrity process. I haven’t tested it, but there should be some memory and process management benefits to this over a site per-process. (I am 90% Chrome except for sites that require IE).
So why do you use Chrome over IE? (p.s. Great comment.)
Compared to IE 6 / 7 – Chrome was faster – especially if you look out 6 months after installation when IE has many plug-ins installed. I find the merging of the address and search bar very intuitive (IE 9 has this now). I am a Gmail user.
And I just get tired of reconsidering what browser to use
Haha, I know what you mean. I think I’ll stick with Chrome. IE 9 has some improvements, but I don’t think I will ever be able to use it.
And yes, the merging of the search bar and address bar is brilliant. In most cases though, all browsers have that functionality to some extent.
Thanks for your input man.
Also it is one thing to consider the browser from a purely personal preference perspective – however, another vote in IE’s favor is for deployment within organizations – almost every detail of IE’s configuration can be controlled via group policy.
Good point, but I still can’t stand IE
I didn’t know about the middle button creating a new tab, mine does it np. Thanks…
I love the fact that you can pull a tab out of one window and create a new window all together with it.
No problem Jason
I like that feature too, but did you know that you can do that in both Firefox as well as IE? It’s a pretty useful feature, for sure.
These must be new features to the latest versions? I see it does work and now I am very happy
. I still use IE 50% of the time at work for policy reasons and because some web apps require IE and activeX.
Ya, I think IE is the only browser that is ‘required’ for certain tasks. But that might be for Safari too.
which web apps require activeX i cannot think of one that isn’t flash. Is this perhaps a proprietary intranet that runs off of activeX?
Yes intranet functions and remote desktop require active X. We also use EventU and ACS Access and they both stated (at least at one point) that their web pages may not run properly under non IE or FF browsers.
How do I become a member to this site? Whenever I click on become member at top it brings me to WordPress login.
You can email Eric Dye at this address: eric@churchm.ag
I’m a Chrome user and generally have 10-25 tabs running Mac OS X 10.5.8. I do prefer the speed and efficiency of Chrome over FF, but w/ a caveat that can be explained here:
“Browsers (especially Chrome) – Browsers are expected to use a decent amount of memory since they’ve grown so large over the years, but one stands out as an absolute beast: Chrome. Because of the way that Chrome works, multiple sub-processes (called Workers) are run as you use it. It doesn’t take very long for there to be a dozen (or more) of these Chrome Workers, and each one usually uses about 20MB of RAM. That’s not all, though. Chrome also spawns other, more specialized worker processes called Renderers, and those can use anywhere from 90MB to 200MB or more, each. The longer you use a tab in Chrome, the more RAM it will consume, so try not to keep any one tab open too long.”
http://lifehacker.com/5808173/take-control-over-your-macs-memory-usage
It’s worth the restart of Chrome every so often in light of this, then you’re up to a better speed.
Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder why Firefox guzzles more RAM then at a faster speed.