Google Chrome Beats Firefox

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give Google Chrome a shot, after having endured a couple of months of Firefox’s getting ever slower (even with fewer than 10 tabs open and not many plug-ins installed) and crashing more and more often.  Initially, I was somewhat reluctant to give Google even more information about me, my browsing habits, etc., but I got over it, as (1) I don’t do anything I am ashamed of on the Internet.  Embarrassing, yes, but nothing really bad or shameful; (2) Google probably has more information on me than I care to think about.

I liked the aesthetics of the browser.  Initially, I was somewhat skeptical of the fact that Chrome starts a new process each time you open a new tab, as I was worried that the memory usage would get out of control.  I often have more than 50 tabs open in Firefox (one of the reasons it is slow ), and although the amount of memory taken up by Chrome varies considerably from process to process, the average is high enough to get me worried.  The upside is that it improves security and prevents one tab from slowing down the rest.  The latter is important to me, as I often find that, even if I don’t have 50 tabs open in Firefox, one (or a few) tabs can slow down the entire program or cause it to crash.  Regardless, many reviews on the Internet says that Chrome uses less memory than Firefox, although this depends heavily on the number of Firefox extensions installed.  While my experience and crude arithmetic indicate a higher total memory usage, I have not noticed many slowdowns with Chrome.

Today, I opened Firefox for the first time in a couple of weeks, became frustrated within 60 minutes by how suddenly it would slow down, even if I had only opened 0-2 new tabs, and decided to abandon Mozilla.  The only Firefox extension that I will miss is the Del.icio.us extension.