Comments on: Now that Firefox 3.5 is out, let the benchmark battles begin

By: Chip

Chip — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:40:36 +0000

Where did I say that Chrome was the fastest? There isn’t one fastest browser here — it depends on what you’re doing. Safari certainly excels in some of the more important areas (DOM, Strings).

By: David

David — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:54:42 +0000

I’m confused. Looking at the graph of overall averages Safari is way ahead of everything else – yet you say Chrome is the fastest.

By: Chip

Chip — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:53:52 +0000

Good point, Ryan. In a quick, unscientific, ad hoc test here, I loaded all the same tabs in both, and then used Chrome’s “stats for nerds” (about:memory) page to compare — subtracting out the memory stats page itself, of course. That actually shows Firefox using more shared memory than Chrome, (20MB vs 9.5MB), but Chrome using more private memory (152MB vs 144MB).

By: Chip

Chip — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:44:47 +0000

Actually, 2k, you can group them back together. Grab the loose tab by the tab, not by the frame and drag it back to where it belongs.

By: Ryan Petrich

Ryan Petrich — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:35:51 +0000

Also, Reply here/Reply to this comment doesn’t seem to work on Safari4/Mac

By: Ryan Petrich

Ryan Petrich — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:33:32 +0000

Be careful, that page doesn’t detail the methodology they use to calculate memory usage. If they aren’t measuring correctly, they will be counting Chrome’s shared memory numerous times.

By: Chip

Chip — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:23:15 +0000

Yeah, but one of the touted positives for that model was that you wouldn’t experience the memory creep that Firefox 2 had. It looks like Firefox has solved that problem, taking away half of Chrome’s thunder. The other half is improved stability (one page can’t crash the whole browser).

By: Sean Hogan

Sean Hogan — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:42:57 +0000

I just remembered that Chrome is one process per tab, so the memory usage is as expected.

By: Chip

Chip — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:30:04 +0000

Thanks for that, Andrew! You just saved me a lot of keystrokes.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:34:31 +0000

Or to go to a specific tab, check out how far along it is and use Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+8 to go to any tab in the first 8. Ctrl+9 is reserved for the last tab. Just a little trick I found out totally by mistake.

By: Chip

Chip — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:38:29 +0000

Good point — I don’t have any data on that.

By: Sean Hogan

Sean Hogan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:27:26 +0000

The memory usage results are interesting, but you can’t interpret the results blindly. Memory is, after all, there to be used. The important thing is what happens to performance when memory is constrained. This wasn’t tested and without testing we are only guessing. Have people reported that Chrome is much slower / flakier than other browsers in constrained memory conditions?