I’ve finally forced myself to spend some proper time using and testing Google’s Chrome internet browser on my Macbook.
I must say I’m quite impressed…
Boy is it fast, and not just to load pages, but the whole app launching takes a fraction of the time of my regular browser, Firefox.
My biggest positive however is memory usage.
Those of you who end up with ten or twenty tabs open will, like me, probably notice your machines memory getting filled up, and also the processor can start to churn a lot, presumably trying to manage all the memory usage !
However one of Chrome’s much vaunted features is that every tab runs as its own process.
This is not something you really appreciate until you start using the browser for a while, but pretty soon you can appreciate how this helps keep the memory and processor footprint of the browser down to a minimum.
Obviously the Firefox plugins that you may have installed are not available for Chrome, however the only one I’m truly missing is 1Password which is kind of an essential in my day to day life.
