Chrome is the Windows Vista of Browsers.
I read this article and I think that is the only way to interpret the outcome.
Let me start by saying that people generally hated Vista because it was slow. Vista was slow because it believed hardware was the solution to all problems. People who dislike Chrome hate it because the solution to Chrome's RAM problems are... more hardware. Of course, Google fans will burn you at the stake for making this comparison.
The reality is, Vista was a good operating system. If you had the right hardware. It was modern, it was sleek. And if you had the performance parts to make it shine, it ran VERY well. My 17 inch Alienware laptop from back in the day was a great example.
That being said. For most people Windows Vista sucked. Especially early on. And, amusingly, many Microsoft fans will offer the exact same advice as this article. There were things you could turn off to speed it up, or 3rd party software you could run to help out or as a last result, buy more hardware. To be clear... this is LITERALLY the exact same things suggested in response to people complaining about Chrome using too much RAM.
So, is Chrome bad? No. And yes. And no. Chrome does some fundamental things differently from other browsers. As a result it does some thing better and some things worse. That is the truth in a nutshell. So, whether or not Chrome is good or bad really depends on your usage.
What the article highlights is that Chrome's strong suit is a small to moderate number of tabs with a few low demand plugins and very few high demand ones, like Flash. This should keep the RAM and CPU utilization in a "safe" range for most PC users. However, if you push it too far, the browser creates exactly the sort of situations it is meant to handle, but which wouldn't be experienced on another browser for the same reasons.
I think that there is a decent segment of society for whom Chrome is either ideal or OK (single tab users). So, if you fall into one of those groups, sure Chrome is good. If not, you might be better to look into something else.
As for the article... it is lunacy. The notion that RAM is there to be used is a poor statement at best. The tweet that drove me to write this was about a user with 7GB of memory tied up in Chrome.
Were it not for Chrome, no one would ever claim RAM was a spec that someone should look at when building a PC primarily for web browsing. In other words, like the isolated threads causing many of the failures that they protect against, they also create a previously non-existent demand for RAM. In fact, Windows is very much designed with limited RAM usage in mind. The OS will page off memory long before you hit 100% because it reserves some for itself for "just in case".
Generally, you should have enough RAM to meet expected typical peak work loads. Maxing it out as a rule of thumb is something you should only be doing in a budget device.
I don't think any PC manufacturer would put 12GB of RAM into a machine explicitly for the purposes of web browsing. In fact Best Buy Canada lists just 3 Chromebooks at the moment, and they all have just 2GB of RAM.
Things like addons to suspend inactive tabs are just band aids that highlight that this truly is a problem for many, just as similar suggestions being commonplace for Vista were indicative of the fact that it was a widespread issue for many.
My suggestion. On a budget PC with 2GB of RAM or less, avoid Chrome if you use more than one tab. If you're in the 2-4GB range, see above. If you're in the 8+GB range, unless you tend to have large numbers of tabs open you're probably free to choose whatever browser you want.
Final note: this isn't meant to condemn Chrome. I use it frequently. This was simply meant to point out that the article was only partially right, and for all of the wrong reasons. They paint Chrome's flaws in Apple-esque light of "you're using it wrong" and claim that the memory usage is there for your sake. It isn't (or at least may not be). It IS like that for a reason but those reasons may not align with your needs. In that case, those changes aren't there for your sake. Software is a game of compromises. Google's compromises are better for some than they are others, the same way IE's, or Fire Fox's compromises suit others better.
Chrome is a fantastic browser if you're not the type of user to push it past its limits for your machine. If you're running Chrome and frequently find it taking up several gigs of RAM or frequently crashing tabs or plugins, you're probably in the group of people that should switch. You could follow the advice in the article, but many of those are trade-offs that defeat the purpose of using Chrome over something else. I'd argue if you're taking that advice that you would probably be happier using something else.
Let me start by saying that people generally hated Vista because it was slow. Vista was slow because it believed hardware was the solution to all problems. People who dislike Chrome hate it because the solution to Chrome's RAM problems are... more hardware. Of course, Google fans will burn you at the stake for making this comparison.
The reality is, Vista was a good operating system. If you had the right hardware. It was modern, it was sleek. And if you had the performance parts to make it shine, it ran VERY well. My 17 inch Alienware laptop from back in the day was a great example.
That being said. For most people Windows Vista sucked. Especially early on. And, amusingly, many Microsoft fans will offer the exact same advice as this article. There were things you could turn off to speed it up, or 3rd party software you could run to help out or as a last result, buy more hardware. To be clear... this is LITERALLY the exact same things suggested in response to people complaining about Chrome using too much RAM.
So, is Chrome bad? No. And yes. And no. Chrome does some fundamental things differently from other browsers. As a result it does some thing better and some things worse. That is the truth in a nutshell. So, whether or not Chrome is good or bad really depends on your usage.
What the article highlights is that Chrome's strong suit is a small to moderate number of tabs with a few low demand plugins and very few high demand ones, like Flash. This should keep the RAM and CPU utilization in a "safe" range for most PC users. However, if you push it too far, the browser creates exactly the sort of situations it is meant to handle, but which wouldn't be experienced on another browser for the same reasons.
I think that there is a decent segment of society for whom Chrome is either ideal or OK (single tab users). So, if you fall into one of those groups, sure Chrome is good. If not, you might be better to look into something else.
As for the article... it is lunacy. The notion that RAM is there to be used is a poor statement at best. The tweet that drove me to write this was about a user with 7GB of memory tied up in Chrome.
Were it not for Chrome, no one would ever claim RAM was a spec that someone should look at when building a PC primarily for web browsing. In other words, like the isolated threads causing many of the failures that they protect against, they also create a previously non-existent demand for RAM. In fact, Windows is very much designed with limited RAM usage in mind. The OS will page off memory long before you hit 100% because it reserves some for itself for "just in case".
Generally, you should have enough RAM to meet expected typical peak work loads. Maxing it out as a rule of thumb is something you should only be doing in a budget device.
I don't think any PC manufacturer would put 12GB of RAM into a machine explicitly for the purposes of web browsing. In fact Best Buy Canada lists just 3 Chromebooks at the moment, and they all have just 2GB of RAM.
Things like addons to suspend inactive tabs are just band aids that highlight that this truly is a problem for many, just as similar suggestions being commonplace for Vista were indicative of the fact that it was a widespread issue for many.
My suggestion. On a budget PC with 2GB of RAM or less, avoid Chrome if you use more than one tab. If you're in the 2-4GB range, see above. If you're in the 8+GB range, unless you tend to have large numbers of tabs open you're probably free to choose whatever browser you want.
Final note: this isn't meant to condemn Chrome. I use it frequently. This was simply meant to point out that the article was only partially right, and for all of the wrong reasons. They paint Chrome's flaws in Apple-esque light of "you're using it wrong" and claim that the memory usage is there for your sake. It isn't (or at least may not be). It IS like that for a reason but those reasons may not align with your needs. In that case, those changes aren't there for your sake. Software is a game of compromises. Google's compromises are better for some than they are others, the same way IE's, or Fire Fox's compromises suit others better.
Chrome is a fantastic browser if you're not the type of user to push it past its limits for your machine. If you're running Chrome and frequently find it taking up several gigs of RAM or frequently crashing tabs or plugins, you're probably in the group of people that should switch. You could follow the advice in the article, but many of those are trade-offs that defeat the purpose of using Chrome over something else. I'd argue if you're taking that advice that you would probably be happier using something else.
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