Will Chrome OS collapse under the weight of its own Web browser?

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August 04, 2009
Will Chrome OS collapse under the weight of its own Web browser?
The latest Chrome beta release shows Google returning to its piggish ways
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What are they thinking? That's the question that ran through my mind as I pored over the latest Chrome 3.0 beta test data from the exo.performance.network site. It seems that the folks from Mountain View aren't content with securing a privileged spot on your desktop. They want to steal all of your PC's RAM, too.

At least that's how I'm interpreting these latest numbers. In a follow-up to an earlier post documenting the RAM footprint of the second Internet Explorer 8 beta, the xpnet.com research staff has re-created its original test scenario in an effort to revalidate their data points against the shipping versions of IE 8.0, Chrome 2.0, and Firefox 3.5.

[ Track your Windows PCs' performance with the free InfoWorld Windows Sentinel tool -- and contribute your performance data anonymously to the exo.performance network. ]

But while the data for these shipping browsers is interesting -- IE 8.0 is still a bloated pig, while Chrome 2.0 is better behaved and Firefox is as skinny as ever -- the really juicy stuff involves the current beta release of Chrome 3.0. It seems that Google's browser-cum-OS project is getting hungrier. The latest build gobbles up over a half-gigabyte of RAM while rendering a selection of popular media and technology Web sites.
Read more: http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/will-chrome-os-collapse-under-weight-its-own-web-browser-050