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Comment by shock | Hacker News Reader

I do not consider Firefox inferior to Chrome because of this, instead I consider Firefox superior to Chrome for this very reason. With 6 tabs open, Chromium is using 1.6GB of RAM, while I can browse forever in Firefox until it reaches that kind of memory consumption.

Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?

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> Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?

I'm not sure process-per-tab is "severely" better. However, how are you measuring that 1.6 GB? If you're not careful, you're N-counting the copy-on-write pages that the processes are sharing. Even chrome://memory-redirect has a note that Chrome itself has a bug with N-counting its RAM usage across tabs. (Issue 25454) The RAM overhead of process-per-tab is more than the fanbois will tell you, but it's much less than you see by adding up the sizes you seen in top/taskmgr, and is less than seen in chrome://memory-redirect.

Sandboxing for security and fault tolerance is a big deal; it's certainly worth the difficulty in figuring out how much RAM is actually being used by N tabs, if that's your main complaint.

Edit: I'm notorious for browsing with 30+ tabs open. I currently have 48 tabs open, and I'm not noticing any ill effects from high RAM usage. I really wish there were a keyboard shortcut for pushing the address of a link onto a temporary bookmarks stack, and another shortcut for popping a bookmark and opening a tab.

> Sandboxing for security and fault tolerance is a big deal; it's certainly worth the difficulty in figuring out how much RAM is actually being used by N tabs, if that's your main complaint.

I use Firefox with tab groups and lazy tab loading and have probably over a thousand tabs in all the tab groups I use. This is very useful for me doing research and I haven't yet found a better workflow. I don't believe I would be able to achieve this with Chrome with any reasonable RAM usage.

> I really wish there were a keyboard shortcut for pushing the address of a link onto a temporary bookmarks stack, and another shortcut for popping a bookmark and opening a tab.

I use the Firefox addon "Save-to-Read" for this purpose and works great.

One tab can freeze (because of the js, for example) without killing the rest of the browser.

I don't remember when this has last happened to me. If this is the major reason, I, most definitely, prefer the current Firefox approach: much less memory utilization and the chance that I have to restart the browser once in a blue moon (not a problem for me in real use) vs very high memory usage but I'm protected in the off chance that one tab messes up my browser (and I always have to live with the high memory usage).

So FF devs, if you're listening, this is a vote against Electrolysis (if it means higher memory usage than current FF).

I seem to run into that pretty frequently on Firefox 19 at work, but I don't think I ever notice it when I'm running 23 at home.

I've been on the Aurora channel for some time now and it's been a pretty smooth ride for me. You should give it a try to see how it works out for you.

I still can't understand how a freezing js could stop browser, can't they handle that stuff on a different thread other than browser's main ui thread?

With plugins already in a different process, these situations are far less likely.

But you only get 15 tabs.

I'll be the first to admit that Chrome does have a pretty big memory footprint, I have not compared it to Firefox recently, but I assume Firefox is better. How ever as others have said using Chrome with over 40 tabs open still works well.

My macbook has 8 GB of RAM and my stationary has 12 GB so in my case the memory footprint is far less important than having tabs separated in processes.

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