Why does google chrome use so much RAM compared to firefox? Discuss.

Why does google chrome use so much RAM compared to firefox? Discuss.

Older traditional browsers put everything in one process. This tended to keep memory usage lower because threads have a smaller memory overhead than processes. But reliability was sometimes a problem because if there was a problem in one tab it was likely to take down the entire browser.

From the beginning Chrome went a different route. Usually each tab had it's own process but tabs on the same website would often share a process. This enhanced reliability because problems with a tab were usually confined to a single process and the other tabs would be unaffected. But memory usage tended to be higher.

Most popular browsers are going the multiprocess route. Internet Explorer did this quite a while ago and Firefox is on the path. Older versions still use a single process. With the amounts of memory that are now typical the higher resource usage is usually not a problem.

Thanks for that Lmiller.

Here's some reading that really made me more of an enthusiast of Firefox than I've been all year: Firefox can open over 1,500 tabs in 15 seconds | ZDNet

I'm also going toget Quantum this Nov. month. Let's see if its as good as we think it'll be!