IE8, Firefox 3 and Chrome Processor Overhead
July 14, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
After speaking with a friend of mine and seeing him use Chrome, I decided to give it another try. The reason I stopped using it before is because I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t work with my Google toolbar and import all my favorites to be used.
Combine the lack of Google Toolbar support, along with missing a number of my Firefox extensions I’ve become dependent on and I just couldn’t make the full switch.
My friend said he felt the same way, but forced himself to use it for awhile and see if he could be productive without the extensions. He decided the speed increases in the browser were worth the lack of extensions. He still has Firefox installed on his machine, but it’s not his default browser. He uses Firefox when he needs to use one of his extensions.
I’m not sure I notice a huge speed increase on most sites, but as to be expected, Google sites do load significantly faster in my opinion. What I started to become more curious about was which browser had less of a processor footprint on the machine while running.
I decided to open the same page in each browser and then take a look at the memory and CPU usage for each in Windows Task Manager. Here are the results:
- Firefox 3.0: 04 CPU / 181,020 K Memory
- Internet Explorer 8: 00 CPU / 85,080 K Memory
- Google Chrome: 00 CPU / 27,300 K Memory
The results weren’t really shocking. I expected Firefox to be heavy because of all the extensions I’m using. Chrome would be light because there’s nothing running but the browser itself. IE8 sits in the middle.
I’ll keep playing with Chrome, but I still don’t see it replacing Firefox for me anytime soon.
I’m typically the anti-Google guy and this is not an exception, but Chrome makes me mad. I’ve used it once or twice and it was nothing memorable, but the thing that got me was how it installs. Into a users profile folder… where they have rights. Meaning anyone at all can install it. Thats not playing nice with how software should behave… thats more like how malware behaves or at a minimum designed to help people do things they aren’t supposed to be doing!
Very disappointing, but I wouldn’t expect anything more from Google.
Very interesting! I didn’t realize it installed into user’s folder. I’m sure this is quite the headache for network admins for numerous companies. Wonder if anyone else has experience and thoughts on this issue. I also didn’t realize you were less than a fan of Google. You don’t meet many of those these days. Lots of people drinking the Google-aid.