The entire world seems to be going crazy over
Google’s open source browser
Chrome,
released yesterday – and with thousands testing the new toy, the response has been great so far.
In the video titled
The Story behind Google Chrome one of the engineers mentions that each page opened in a tab spawns a new process and is
sandboxed from other processes(pages) to provide better security.
Well, people like me who’ll never have enough RAM – that is quite an alarm. Because we can’t work without an unhealthy number of tabs opened, each gorging on a sizable amount of the core – and don’t forget the whole lot of other desktop apps like IDE, pdf readers and bitorrent clients etc minimised.
So, I dumped the process memory usages into a
csv
C:Documents and SettingsTatha>wmic /output:C:ProcessList.csv path win32_process get Caption, Processid, workingsetsize /format:csv
On opening ProcessList.csv, I could find 6 processes has been listed, the total memory consumption was 94740480 or 94 MB.
However, as the screenshot shows below, I had 18 tabs opened by then.
OK – but what if I open a few more tabs?
Before opening a new tab
C:Documents and SettingsTatha>wmic process where “name=’chrome.exe'” get Caption, ProcessId, WorkingSetSize
Caption ProcessId WorkingSetSize
chrome.exe 3904 29917184
chrome.exe 4092 15052800
chrome.exe 1944 13385728
chrome.exe 1180 42876928
chrome.exe 2364 25825280
chrome.exe 2540 3198976
After opening a new tab
C:Documents and SettingsTatha>wmic process where “name=’chrome.exe'” get Caption, ProcessId, Worki
ngSetSize
Caption ProcessId WorkingSetSize
chrome.exe 3904 32575488
chrome.exe 4092 16211968
chrome.exe 1944 13418496
chrome.exe 1180 44613632
chrome.exe 2364 25825280
chrome.exe 2540 2891776
I tried a few more times and got 6 processes named Chrome, at any point of time. Notice the change in the working set sizes.
When you switch between the tabs – you’ll find the a few tabs will come up quickly, however the ones opened a soometimes back – will take some time to get rendered, but the delay is nothing unacceptable.
But wait… see the magic when you press Shift+Esc. Seems like Google knew, we the peeping toms would be looking for more info and made life much easy for them. Hit on the link “Stats for nerds” and you’ll find what you are looking for.
A wonderful and feature is you can add shortcuts to web based applications directly to the Windows Start menu or quick launch bar. Think of it – you’ll be able to open gmail, Google docs, Google notebook directly from quick launch bar the same way you open Outlook, Microsoft Word, etc. This will be a great help for low cost desktop computing projects that are trying to replace costly desktop apps with freely available web based alternatives.
For those, who couldn’t start working without installing Fullerscreen with Firefox and the look a clean and lean look and feel is like a gift long held in waiting.
Though the lightning fast V8 Javascript engine promises you lowest latency compared to other browsers, it’ll still take sometime to get migrate from Firefox to Chrome – mostly because of the rich set of plugins. Having said that, if Firefox reclaimed the web, Google Chrome is here to redefine the web.
