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Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Opera Browser? (vice.com) 303

Posted by BeauHD from the different-strokes-for-different-folks dept.
mspohr shares a report written by Jason Koebler via Motherboard who makes the case for why you should break up with Chrome and switch to the Opera browser: Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management, especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too. With Chrome, my computer crawls to complete unusability multiple times a day. After one too many times of having to go into Activity Monitor to find that one single Chrome tab is using several gigs of RAM, I decided enough was enough. I switched to Opera, a browser I had previously thought was only for contrarians. This, after previous dalliances with Safari and Firefox left me frustrated. Because Opera is also based on Blink, I almost never run into a website, plugin, script, or video that doesn't work flawlessly on it. In fact, Opera works almost exactly like Chrome, except without the resource hogging that makes me want to throw my computer against a brick wall. This is exactly the point, according to Opera spokesperson Jan Standal: "What we're doing is an optimized version of Chrome," he said. "Web developers optimize most for the browser with the biggest market share, which happens to be Chrome. We benefit from the work of that optimization."

Slashdot reader mspohr adds: "I should note that this has also been my experience. I have a 2010 MacBook, which I was ready to trash since it had become essentially useless, coming to a grinding halt daily. I tried Opera and it's like I have a new computer. I never get the spinning wheel of death. (Also, the built-in ad blocker and VPN are nice.)" What has been your experience with Google Chrome and/or Opera? Do you prefer one over the other?
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Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Opera Browser? More

Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Opera Browser?

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  • Exception to butterage (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @06:22PM (#54422769) Homepage Journal

    Why not? It could hardly be much worse ... could it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mhkohne ( 3854 )

      Why not? It could hardly be much worse ... could it?

      If you know what's good for you, you'll stop taunting Murphy NOW, while you've still got all your limbs.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )

      Assuming the addons you want are actually available. I use the following:

      - Searchonymous
      - DeGoogle
      - AdBlock Plus
      - Tab Cookies
      - ScriptSafe
      - Privacy Badger
      - LastPass
      - Search by Image
      - Remote Torrent Adder
      - Tampermonkey
      - Chrometana

      Why do I use all of this?

      Well, I get annoyed how when I searched Amazon for an 8 port switch, I get emails from them about more switches, and other websites show me ads for switches, even though I no longer want a switch. And then there was the time I was idly curious what an ounce o

      • Most Chrome addons also work on Opera. Opera also has some things Chrome doesn't such as built in mouse gestures and speed dial that work better than any plugins you can get for Chrome. Opera actually used to have a lot more features that other browsers didn't before they switched engines. Vivaldi has most of them though which is why I use that as my primary browser now.

        I agree what you say about the "resource hogging". I have 16GB Ram and I want the browser to use it if it makes browsing faster. I'v
      • Vivaldi uses Chrome Web store for extensions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ZeRu ( 1486391 )
        Would you care enough to point me to the guide on how to use tampermonkey to browse sites like forbes.com?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rnturn ( 11092 )
          That's one of my Opera annoyances. LinkedIn often has links to articles on forbes.com and you're forced to copy the link to another browser to read it.

    • I have the solution right here, it's called a tab suspender:
      https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]

      Why this is not built in is another thing entirely

      • Last I looked, it's on the todo list, but properly suspending tabs requires storing their actual state, and that's not really there yet. Though there were some experiments with just killing the renderer (tab discarding): https://developers.google.com/... [google.com] (see end for tab serialization).
    • Wasn't Opera sold to a Chinese consortium? You gona trust it with your data?

  • Is this an Apple problem? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zaelath ( 2588189 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @06:25PM (#54422783)

    Something to do with not enough RAM installed and inability to do anything about it?

    • Re:Is this an Apple problem? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @06:41PM (#54422881)

      Yeah he bought a Macbook with soldered in ram and then complains when he uses too much of said ram.

      • Jason needs anger management control.

        Opens a bunch of tabs, admittedly, then wants to throw his computer against a wall.

        Hope he never gets married.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I have a NEC ultrabook with 4GB of RAM soldered in. Performance in Chrome is fine, no issues at all. It gracefully frees up memory when other apps need it, and the machine doesn't feel slow even with many tabs open.

        Maybe the Mac OS version of Chrome is really bad or something, but for me Chrome is absolutely fine with 4GB of RAM. That's hardly surprising considering that most Chromebooks have less than 4GB and run Chrome really well.

    • I have 100s of tabs open in Safari and it doesn't have that problem.

      I know, Parkinson's Law and all that. Still, I shouldn't need a hardware upgrade because programmers are lazy.

      • I'm somewhat assuming that Opera (and Safari) are both keeping 100s of tabs "open" in the loosly defined way that Android keeps 100s of apps "open"; i.e. they're really not and as soon as they get focus they have to reload.

        Chrome on Windows seems to do the same thing, these days. It will still consume all available RAM first before it starts caching, but seems to avoid swapfile. My experience on older macs was they treated swapfile like real memory so you only got application caching once you ran out of RAM

    • Chrome is a resource hog on Windows too. I came back last weekend to find that all 16GB of RAM on my work computer were spoken for, causing things to run at a crawl. I checked Task Manager and could see various tabs each taking up over 1GB, so I closed Chrome out, killed its background processes for good measure, and immediately regained 9GB of memory, even though I had only had around 6-8 tabs open. Others at work have had similar issues, so much so that we have to be careful about having Chrome running wh

      • Can I take a guess that your 6-8 tabs were all running McAfee Enterprise Security Manager?

        I'd be rapt if that POS could run in less than 1GB in any browser over a weekend.

        Regardless, there's limits to what the browser can take the blame for; if you run flash/etc with a million memory leaks in it, anything is going to grind to a halt.

        • Nope. I remember I had these...
          - Gmail
          - Google Calendar
          - Fastmail
          - Overcast.fm
          - JIRA
          - YNAB

          Google's tabs were by far the biggest offenders, with YNAB and JIRA not far behind. Overcast and Fastmail were both decently well behaved. I think I had another tab or two open, but I don't remember what it would have been. Maybe a particular issue in JIRA?

          • Yeah, something stinks anyway. I've had Chrome open for weeks at a time with (currently) 114 tabs between 14 windows and there's a handful of Chrome processes with more than 200Mb, one with 500 (probably gmail).

            I do ad block, and a lot of ads are notorious for leaky flash scripts... so perhaps that's the issue?

            • I have Flash configured in my Chrome settings to be disabled until I enable it on a per-case basis. I also run ad blockers that block almost all third-party requests by default, so it shouldn't be anything of that sort. It just seems to be bad behavior on the part of a few browser-based apps that appear to not clean up after themselves well.

    • Maybe you shouldn't believe the one who said "640 k RAM is enough for everybody"

  • The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.

    Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

    On a side note: Opera's a great browser, however i'm skeptical of its Chinese ownership. If i'm going to have any intelligence agency know my private details in and out, I prefer it to be the NSA and CIA. /sarcasm

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lucm ( 889690 )

      Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

      The guy (and the reader who commented in the summary) uses a Macbook. That machine will die with the already obsolete specs it had when the guy bought it in 2010.

      • Re:"Open too many tabs" (Score:5, Informative)

        by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @07:31PM (#54423179)

        I'm "the guy" who owns a 2010 MacBook Air. I realize that this was never a high performace machine and is now obsolete. I would buy a new Mac but the offerings from Apple are even more pathetic than in 2010.
        I had abandoned the machine but dug it out to do my taxes and when the whole "get a VPN" thing happened, I decided to try Opera. I was amazed that the machine was useful again! Instead of endless bouts of soul sucking beach ball spinning, I could just use the machine and it rarely pegged the CPU or filled up the measely 2 Gig memory. It felt like a new computer.
        So, if you are suffering from a slow,, memory hogging web browser, I highly recommend Opera.
        P.S. If you couldn't tell, I am a cheap old geezer.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lucm ( 889690 )

          I'm skeptical of Opera because it's owned by the Chinese. And it's the same reason I don't trust most of the cheap VPN providers: they're all Chinese.

          Maybe Opera is a good "nasty stuff" browser, but one thing is for sure, I wouldn't do my taxes on a Chinese browser using a Chinese VPN. I'm not saying that the Chinese spies are involved, but that's a huge country with very little law enforcement for digital crimes; using their VPN sounds to me like using a Russian credit card pin pad.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mspohr ( 589790 )

            I think I'd rather have the Chinese eavesdropping on my browsing rather than Google. I have nothing to do with China but Google is ubiquitous in the US.
            BTW, the VPN is provided by a separate Canadian company, Surfeasy.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:"Open too many tabs" (Score:5, Informative)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @06:46PM (#54422909)

      The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.

      Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

      On a side note: Opera's a great browser, however i'm skeptical of its Chinese ownership. If i'm going to have any intelligence agency know my private details in and out, I prefer it to be the NSA and CIA. /sarcasm

      The problem is it shouldn't take over 100MB of RAM to display a webpage. Opened this very /. page in a Chrome incognito window (so no browser extensions in the tab, clean as I can get it) and it settled in at around 140,000 KB of RAM. That is ridiculous.

      • GIven the problems I have been having with Slashdot since the advertisements started popping up all over the place, I'm not surprised at all. I almost have a seizure every time I load the page and the ad at the top makes the content shift all over the place.

      • It doesn't have to take over 100MB of RAM to display a webpage, if you don't care about performance. It takes so much RAM because using that RAM makes it faster.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Xest ( 935314 )

        Are there any breakdowns about what browsers do with all that memory? I'd be intrigued to know what they're filling it with.

        I've always thought the same, it seems excessive, I understand that they can speed things up by caching, which in turn saves memory, but even here I'm struggling to understand what you could possible cache that would turn a 5mb web page into a 150mb slab of cache - even if you cache all the markup, the scripts, the images, the CSS, and have them in raw form, and displayable form (i.e.

      • The problem is it shouldn't take over 100MB of RAM to display a webpage.

        Holy crap! I mean I only have 4GB in this computer. I just realised I had 50+ tabs open and therefore my computer must be unusable now. Except it's not. Chrome resource manages just fine in a way to ensure good performance. If it uses all my RAM and makes the machine faster then let it providing it frees it for other tasks when needed.

    • ram is not cheap right now. when I built a system last year 8GB stick cost 40 bones. it's currently around 70.

    • Number of tabs shouldn't matter. They should go into an idle state and then get swapped out if they're using too much memory that's needed for something active.

      Or just drop everything in them except the address and reload the page when the user switches to the tab, since chrome seems to like to do this for half the sites anyway.

      Also, people aren't "using too many tabs." People are using tabs as a workaround for snap-back functionality being removed.

    • Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

      This works if, and only if your mobo isn't already maxed out.

    • Re:"Open too many tabs" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @11:12PM (#54424081)

      Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

      I take it you're unaware that RAM prices are nearly twice what they were at this same time last year?

      The fabs for two of the three major manufacturers are currently in the middle of transitioning to smaller manufacturing processes, resulting in the industry being unable to keep up with demand. The fact that the mobile market keeps asking for more and more of their attention doesn't help matters either. As such, prices are actually expected to keep going up until around the end of the year.

      If you'd like to see the price tends over the last few years, PCPartPicker [pcpartpicker.com] has some pretty good charts highlighting the issue. Suffice to say, picking up RAM is not so cheap as you suggest. Maybe next year.

    • The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.

      Yah, shove it. I typically have 500-600 tabs open and I like it that way. Just make it work.

  • opera's VPN (Score:3)

    by rogoshen1 ( 2922505 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @06:28PM (#54422791)

    the downside to the built in VPN is that many sites outright block it; so while it would be 'nice' -- it's usefulness is somewhat diminished.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      Not sure which sites you visit but I haven't had any block the browser because of the VPN. Some sites get confused when the VPN randomly sets itself to some random country but you can set the VPN country and this seems to make everyone happy.

  • When I was doing my Masters dissertation I switched. A LOT of tabs meant my computer was slowing down. Opera has been a dream. In addition, Australia records net activity so the built in VPN is nice. The plugins are all available too (90%).

  • If you are running into the problems you described, it's worthwhile to try switching in hopes of finding a browser that suits your needs/habits.

    I use Chrome, as a rule, though I also use Firefox, IE, and Edge depending on what I'm doing. (No, I'm not a web developer.)

    I do run into this issue if I have about 100 or so tabs open; however, I normally only run with 1-10 tabs split between 1-2 windows. Frankly, I shudder at the idea of having more than 15 or so tabs open on a regular basis.

    TL;DR

    Your mileage

  • solution (Score:5, Informative)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1@NoSpaM.hotmail.com> on Monday May 15, 2017 @06:36PM (#54422835)
    Just use The Great Suspender -- idle tab suspending service: https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]

    • You shouldn't need to use an extension. That's part of the point.

      • Re:solution (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @06:42AM (#54425243) Homepage Journal

        You don't need an extension any more. For a few versions now Chrome has been automatically unloading tabs from memory when memory pressure increases. When you switch back to them they are automatically reloaded from cache.

        Chrome is very well behaved with memory. Unused memory is wasted memory. Chrome uses as much memory as it needs to for performance reasons, until there is pressure. Then it releases that memory. There might be a few extra milliseconds delay opening another app as Chrome has to free some RAM for it, but the overall gain in terms of interactive performance more than makes up for it.

  • I suppose I'm a hopeless old fogey (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @06:36PM (#54422837)

    Because I still use Firefox.

  • Mu (Score:2, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

    I use Chrome for Chromey things, like Cleanflight Configurator or CHIP Flasher. I use Firefox for everyday browsing. Opera is not even on my radar. I have enough compatibility problems with Firefox (when people expect to be developing for Chrome.) But I prefer not to run Google's browser, in addition to all the other things I do with Google services. I tried using it for Google websites, but it turned out that I actually had a superior experience with Firefox, so I stopped doing that. I haven't tried it in

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lucm ( 889690 )

      I use Chrome for Chromey things, like Cleanflight Configurator or CHIP Flasher.

      I also use Chrome for Chromey things, like a Poser Detector which started beeping like crazy when I scrolled past your post.

      • I also use Chrome for Chromey things, like a Poser Detector which started beeping like crazy when I scrolled past your post.

        These are literally the only things I actually use Chrome for now, and I literally just installed them on a second machine today so that they would be both on my Windows machine and on my Linux machine, whose [antiquated, budget] hardware I've just been through and whose Ubuntu install I am just now upgrading. And hilariously, it's got a long RAID boot time issue — it's not even booting from the RAID, just from a SSD. But I'm updating Ubuntu some more before I even work on that.

        The CHIP device has so

  • Dear Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

    I use a program capable of utilizing large amounts of ram and then max out my system resources. Please help! I have no idea what I'm doing wrong...

    • Ask meathead to fix your computer, just hope Gloria doesn't distract him, maybe invite Lionel over to distract her and Edith while he goes to work

  • I usually end up 100 tabs open throughout the days/weeks/months. Usually this is my sign that I need to start closing tabs down and save them for later.

    One of the solution is to use a better tab manager: Tabs Outliner [google.com]

    Why?

    * It lists ALL your tabs (both open and closed) VERTICALLY in its OWN window.
    * You can name a tab group
    * You can close all tabs in a tab group
    * You can "Garbage" or "X" a tab. The former permanently removes from the tab manager, while X closes it the window but leaves the link in the tab m

  • What the fuck did these guys do to this site? Been away, you know.

    • This site even spins a little dial at the bottom center of the frame when you close a single browser tab that has 'Slashdot' running in it. They're running a script that takes a meaningful amount of time if I click the 'x' to close a browser tab.

      Weird. Has the NSA purchased Slashdot? It makes sense they would and it was probably cheap...

  • Just two weeks ago, I picked up a used dual-E5 at a good price, with sixteen available RAM slots (once I score the second CPU).

    This, mainly to run my many web tabs, and perhaps one other heavy application at the same time.

  • Unlike some less enlightened people, I understand the advanced concept known as "bookmarks" and thus have no need for opening more than a few tabs at any given time.

    What got me off Chrome is just how long it takes to load initially. It's takes about twice as long as Firefox to come up. Makes you wonder what on earth it's doing... probably phoning home to Google and checking for updates, maybe sending telemetry info, and what else?

    Or if it's not doing anything special, then it must be very bloated.

    For now I'

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      Opera is free and includes a free ad blocker and VPN.

      • I, for one, paid for the Opera Browser.

        This was back when the Opera Browser's installer fit on a single floppy diskette. That was also a time when Opera boasted about their browser fitting on a single floppy diskette.

        Times change, huh?

  • Interesting (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Wild Norseman ( 1404891 ) <tw@norseman.gmail@com> on Monday May 15, 2017 @07:22PM (#54423147)

    For years, no one mentioned Opera except to scoff in passing, but now that it's been bought out, suddenly it's the best thing since sliced bread.

    But, thankfully, Opera was forked into Vivaldi for those of us who were concerned about the direction Opera is going/went.

    At one point, years ago, I paid US$35 for Opera because it completely rocked -- it was and has been, ahead of the curve for years. Now, I dropped Opera and only run Vivaldi (except I have to use Chrome for some peculiar website shit but that's it Just one site, essentially).

    Did I mention this better browser, Vivaldi, by chance?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The bookmark-management in Vivaldi still sucks (is it so hard to implement what Opera 12.x had?), but otherwise it is a fine browser.

  • Since Mozilla cancelled Aurora (FF Developer Edition), I've been using the "Mozilla Developer Preview [mozilla.org]", which self-identifies as Nightly, but appears to be a version behind (54). With Nightly 55, almost all extensions are listed as "Legacy" and most of their icons are removed from the interface. So things aren't looking very bright now.

  • Giving away my secrets to those who do not know the secret handshake....

  • He's not using it in accordance with hardware constraints. I use the hell out of chrome all day every day but I have 64 GB of RAM and a high end Xeon.

  • Hardcore Firefox user since it was released first as Phoenix. I had to switch as I noticed in both my Windows box at work older i7/8GB Ram and at home A10/16gb of ram Firefox was making my systems slow as hell. It all started around the same time a few updates ago. Switched to Chromium and all slow downs went away.

    Yes I'd prefer to have something not controlled by Google but the Original Opera is now gone and haven't bothered to look at alternatives.

  • I started using Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org] years ago because Firefox didn't have a 64 bit browser out yet and I wanted the benefit 64 bit could bring. I keep using it because quite frankly I still need certain NPAPI plugins and as of FF 53 your SOL if you need them. Sure I can download the ES version but then I'd be stuck on an old version without access to any new updates. I like it enough that I even started using it on my Mint laptop. Waterfox strips out all of the telemetry and data collection and keeps NPAPI available s

  • If it wants or needs to use a certain amount of memory, there is little a browser can do to help. It's like saying you want to use iOS or Android or Windows or OSX to "use less memory in Photoshop". For the most part, you need to choose websites that work well for you.

  • I have used them all. (Score:3)

    by Jim Sadler ( 3430529 ) on Monday May 15, 2017 @11:25PM (#54424133)
    Opera is a great browser. Chrome is also wonderful as is Firefox. Frankly I prefer Firefox with one serious complaint. Right now my Firefox browser will not play sound on You Tube or video or sound on Netflix. That was not an issue until the latest update. Chrome has also gone through releases that would not run NetFlix. I am not aware of how Opera is doing with Netflix lately. I will say that Netflix is a big enough deal that any browser should be able to run it perfectly with zero tweaking.
  • Try The Great Suspender [google.com] -- it suspends tabs that are not in use.

  • The article being linked to freezes in Chrome. Is that his point? Internet Explorer 10 won't load it either (due to a bad certificate) but Firefox does.

    PS, my CPU fan has just gone crazy with Firefox going bezerk, and now even Chrome is struggling to cope after I reloaded and managed to get the page to render. Maybe the problem is that his web site sucks and has far too much advertising and other embedded garbage on it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mfearby ( 1653 )

      Oh, just lovely. His web site is one of those annoyingly infinite scrolling/loading abominations.

  • No (Score:3)

    by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @01:21AM (#54424457)

    Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management,

    Sorry..... SECURITY trumps resource management, and Chrome is much more secure than Opera thanks to being miles ahead in process sandboxing.

    especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too.

    So stop doing bad things. You've gotten into a lazy habit of holding too many tabs open. Yes, tabs have their place. Their place is not to have 10+ tabs open; if you find yourself opening more than 5 or 6, you need to concentrate efforts on bookmarking things to check back later and close tabs.

  • Chrome performance (Score:3)

    by rnturn ( 11092 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @01:29AM (#54424477)

    I thought Chrome was going to give me a better `browsing experience' than I'd been getting from Firefox which still seems to refuse to work well with the majority of the Javascript it encounters. Alas, Chrome was actually worse than Firefox. Javascript seemed to be less of a problem but memory utilization was through the roof with my 8GB desktop swapping all the time and grinding the whole system to a halt while that was happening. What has made Chrome much better is `The Great Suspender' add-on. It's nothing less than a damned Godsend. Set it up to suspend tabs after five minutes (even pinned tabs) and auto-unsuspend when you switch back to them and waiting for memory swapping is almost a think of the past. The only drawback is that the back button acts oddly when you unsuspend a tab--it'll take you back the `click to unsuspend this tab' screen.

    Opera on the other hand... well I've been mainly using Opera for LinkedIn as it seemed to run that site better than most other browsers. I still find that it's a bit of memory pig though I admit that I haven't explored whether there are add-ons that can control this a bit. I haven't bothered to switch to using LI with Chrome. Yet. I might be abandoning Opera if that test goes well.

  • CHROME USES TOO MUCH RAM!!! (Score:3)

    by XSportSeeker ( 4641865 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @01:35AM (#54424497)

    Oh yeah, le old complaint about Chrome using too much ram...

    I mean, go ahead, use Opera and tell us what you think of it. I don't think people should be trapped into using certain browsers only because everyone uses it, seriously.

    But the CHROME USES TOO MUCH RAM complaint is pretty stupid and it was several times explained why it behaves this way at this point.
    Put simply, resources of your computer that are not used are just that... not used. Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.
    Chrome was a browser developed to take as much advantage of your machine as possible. It's definitely not lightweight, so alternative browsers can be a good thing if your computer is crappy, but how much free ram it leaves behind is a very stupid reason for switching.

    Chrome uses separate processes for each and every tab to solve problems with one tab crashing the entire browser. It dynamically allocates as much ram as possible to pre-load stuff and speed up things. Just make a test yourself. Open Chrome, run as many tabs you like, saturate the ram... with a reasonable machine. Then open some other software that chews up ram... like, I dunno, something from Adobe CC. You'll see that even though Chrome was using all the ram, you are still able to open another sofware and use it without problems. That's because Chrome will set the limit of ram usage to a lower threshold.

    It's by no means perfect or anything like that, but if you are gonna criticize it, it's better to look a bit more into your complaints before spouting nonsense.

    • Re:CHROME USES TOO MUCH RAM!!! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pz ( 113803 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @03:37AM (#54424797) Journal

      Put simply, resources of your computer that are not used are just that... not used. Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.

      Except that modern OSes do a very nice job of utilizing all of that spare RAM as disk cache, and when the cache gets allocated away to greedy applications, everything else on the machine appears to slow down.

      There is no cogent argument against efficient use of resources when modern CPUs are more than fast enough to do things like view web pages.

  • I can't tell about Chrome on MacOS (because I don't have one), but maybe Chrome usage of system resources needs a bit more analyzis to be on point. I use it on both Windows and Linux-based system (Ubuntu/KDE right now) and it's working fine, even with multiple tabs in multiple windows, a situation that's very common for me (I keep things open in their own window during work).

    To me this sounds like the old complains we got when people look at their free RAM, and see it's close to 0, just because of some cach

  • As much as I don't trust Google, at least Chrome is (mostly) open source.
    Opera is not open source except for the third-party open source components that they used and modified.
    And given that it was adware not too long ago, I simply can't trust it.
    I need to trust my browser.

  • When IE was the standard, Chrome was blooming and Firefox was all the rage on our group (the Geek), from around 2006 through 2010, I used Opera almost exclusively. I can safely say that was the browser's best period, although I have been using Chrome and the odd Firefox the past 6 years.

    I've looked at Vivaldi, but it felt crude with a UI that passes a "Windows Millennium" - it just tries too hard to be fresh, when all it needs is to be simple. After this post, I will try back Opera's latest but with the amo

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