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0 pointslaumars7y ago0 comments

As you alluded to at the start of your post, Chromes speed improvements were more technical than it was due to a lack of bloat. In fact Chrome consumed more memory than FF did at that time and that was down to it being multi-processed (ie one heavy page wouldn’t slow down the rest of the application in other tabs) but that came at a cost in terms of RAM used.

Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.

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_ea1k7y ago

Honestly, I hate the term "bloat". Most of the times when I've seen bloat blamed, the real cause has been a bad algorithm somewhere. Just as was the case with Chrome, its often the case that using more RAM (and maybe more "bloat") can make things faster.

gregmac7y ago

After fixing bad algorithms, dealing with performance and resource utilization basically comes down to a series of trade-offs. In most cases:

Less RAM = More CPU or more disk space (and much slower)

Less CPU = more disk or RAM

Less disk = more network, RAM and/or CPU

darkarmani7y ago

> a bad algorithm somewhere

Along the lines of a custom memory manager, that never releases memory back to the OS. If you open tons of tabs, closing them wouldn't release the memory back. Which is a decent guess - it used the memory once, it will probably need it again.

laumarsOP7y ago

Yeah, i agree. And very succinctly put too.

apostacy7y ago

I think another factor is just that Chrome's speed changed the landscape of web design itself, which fed back into Chrome's popularity.

By making javascript so much faster, it allowed web designers to do things that only Chrome could do.

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