Hopefully in time they find a way to retain safety without furthering to bloat their browser.
Sure there is. Most complex systems can trade-off between memory usage and CPU. With more memory, the garbage collector doesn't have to work as hard, caches stay warm, etc.
> You don't know what a given system has for memory,
Chrome knows how much memory is available on your system, and it adapts its own memory usage based on this.
V8 is designed to push the garbage collector harder when memory usage is tighter -- reducing usage at the cost of JavaScript running a little slower.
I believe Chrome is also capable of freezing entire background tab states and saving them to disk, to be restored later when you go back to the tab. But there's no reason for it to do that if you have plenty of RAM to spare.
Google focuses very strongly on time, so I’m unsurprised that they are willing to trade space for time.
Of course it’s possible Chrome is also outright wasting space, time, or both, but I have no idea if it is to a nontrivial extent.
But there is an upside to better security. It'd be great if it was a free lunch but apparently it's not.
>Chrome needs to be as efficient as possible.
Chrome needs to make its users as happy as possible. Efficiency only matters when it starts affecting user happiness.
>Creating an ideal situation to make Chrome fit is disingenuous.
Do you know that it's an "ideal" situation rather than typical? I don't either but I also suspect Google wouldn't turn this on if it was going to negatively affect most users because they run the risk of losing market share to Safari/Firefox/Edge. I'm open to evidence to the contrary.
>Hopefully in time they find a way to retain safety without furthering to bloat their browser.
That's most likely going to be in the Intel/AMDs court.
That's disingenuous.
Chrome is 1) more secure, but 2) less accessible.
These are separate metrics and you can't really roll them into one.