Chrome Fatter Than the Bloated IE8: Researcher

Just a couple of days ago, Devil Mountain Software tested IE8, and declared it a "memory hog." After running their same 10-site test on Chrome, DMS has decided that the real hog isn't IE8, but Chrome.

It makes total sense. Each one of Chrome's tabs runs as a separate process. The set of sites was the same as for IE8's test:

www.cnet.com, www.news.com, www.infoworld.com, www.zdnet.com, www.nytimes.com, www.foxnews.com, www.boston.com, channel9.msdn.com, www.dilbert.com, www.palmbeachpost.com, www.arstechnica.com

The test results:

With a peak working set (324MB) just shy of IE 8’s updated 332MB mark, Chrome put a massive hit on available memory for our 2GB Windows XP (SP3) test system. And when we switched our focus to the average working set, Chrome actually topped IE 8 with an impressive 267MB footprint (compared to 211MB for IE 8).
Of course, both browsers look absolutely porcine when compared to the lean, mean Firefox 3.01 (151MB peak, 104MB average working set size). And lest we forget, IE 7 continues to hover somewhere between the fit & trim Firefox and the obesity that defines Chrome/IE 8 (209MB peak, 142MB average).

One area where the Mozilla.org byproduct shares common ground with Chrome is average CPU utilization. Both products chew-up CPU bandwidth much more aggressively than either of the IE variants, with Chrome actually outpacing Firefox by 2 percentage points (45% to 42% for FF). Contrast these numbers with IE 8 (24%) and IE 7 (13%) and you begin to see that, when it comes to gobbling up CPU cycles, Chrome and Firefox are in fact birds of a feather.

Much like IE8, it's obvious that Chrome was built with state-of-the-art hardware in mind. I'm not sure how it will run on a netbook.

That's the kind of software I hate: less efficient, and depending on the hardware to make up for its deficiencies. Don't get me wrong, though: I love its speed. Give it some of the missing features I want, and I might switch to it full-time.