Matt Bowcock // mbowcock.com

I’ve been playing with Chrome since I downloaded it yesterday and have a couple of observations -

Its fast - much faster to start than Firefox, Opera, or IE7 - and pages start loading quicker

As far as memory usage is concerned for 1 page (1 tab) Chrome uses less memory.  As you add tabs Chrome utilizes more memory per tab than Firefox, Opera, or IE7.  I assume this is a result of the tabs being contianed in their own process - for 7 tabs I had 10 Chrome processes running.  The overhead to create each process certainly contributes to the greater memory usage.  That said - as I use the other 3 browsers the memory usage creeps up significantly whereas Chrome’s memory usage creeps much more slowly.

Due to each tab running in its own independent process I was able to kill one of the processes without closing the other tabs.  I assume the same works when a process crashes due to a problem with a plugin, or some other error.  When the process does crash you’re tab will remain with the image below -

Chrome Error - Aw Snap!

I’m not sure how well flash is working - I’ve been to a couple of flash heavy sites that load with content missing but other sites have loaded flash content correctly.  I’m not sure if its flash related or something unrelated.  

There are very few plugins available for Chrome - even the Google toolbar isn’t available - but there are some and there does appear to be support for themes.  So far though its a nice piece of software - I’m not sure what it brings for the average user who gets similar or more functionality in IE or Firefox (or Opera).