I gotta admit, Google’s Chrome browser looks really cool, and is quite responsive… most of the time.
When I use firefox, I limit it to 75 Meg. of memory usage so it doesn’t kill my computer in case something starts getting out of whack. I don’t know if there’s a way to do this in Chrome – maybe? Anyway, today I’ve been using both FF and Chrome with heavy preference to Chrome. I’ve been trying to use it in almost every way I normally use FF. Occasionally something depends on a plugin I have in FF so I gotta boot that up too.
While doing this, I noticed that my computer – not so much the browser – is slow enough in other tasks to notice it. Say, booting up Photoshop. That takes a bit of extra effort with a minor ‘hang’ in there too. That’s not all – MS Excel, Word and others behave about the same.
Then I check out the task manager:
Looks like Chrome is eating up a healthy total 239,276 K of memory when you combine all the processes. It is SLOWING DOWN my computer, but the browser is still nice and speedy. Add a few more tabs, even it starts to slow down and take a while for screens to render when switching between already open sites in different windows or tabs.
Now, this is after an extensive 1/2 day of using it, but Firefox hasn’t behaved like this for me – ever. Verdict: Chrome is good, but not yet perfected… obviously.
Anyone have any suggestions on capping memory usage?
Have you heard about Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs? If not, YOU NEED TO check it out. I believe this is absolutely going to change the web how we know it. Is it web3.0? I’m not sure, but I bet someone will come up with a buzzword for it.
Don’t bother reading the page at first, just watch the video (embedded below) to get an idea about how powerful this really is:
Basically Ubiquity lets you build your own on-demand mashups. Not in the sense that yahoo pipes does, but in the sense that any user can just type what they want to do, and embed that in an email or perform actions like calculate math shown on a page without cut & paste, etc. I’d call it micro-mashups.
Well, I built my first Ubiquity command to see how easy it would be, and it’s super simple. (Ok, I just took someone else’s code as a base – since it’s all OS anyway – and changed/added some things.)
How to use it:
- Install Ubiquity Firefox Extension
Reboot your browser (all FF extensions require this, which is a pain in my opinion, but the good news is that any command you subscribe to won’t require the browser reboot) - Subscribe to the command. Give it a few seconds to about minute (mine took a bit even though it’s a fast computer) to process in your browser.
- Right click any word on any page, and select “Ubiquity -> Shop” OR use control+space to bring up the Ubiquity menu and type “shop X” where X represents whatever you want to search for prices on.
Here’s more commands:
- Find more commands at Mozilla Labs Wiki
I’d love to hear feedback, folks.