Researcher: Chrome's isolated tabs make it memory 'pig'

By comparison, Firefox and IE7 spawned 25 and 43 threads, respectively, while IE8 Beta 2 spawned a whopping 153.

Barth praised Chrome's each-tab-is-separate design. "It's a completely modular architecture," he said. "Our guess is that the initial 25 threads handle the user interface functions, bookmarking, all the basic stuff, but then beyond that, it uses just two fricking threads for each tab." All told, Chrome spun off 12 discrete instances of itself to handle the 10 test tabs.

At the same time, IE8 Beta 2, which also isolates each tab -- Microsoft also cited anti-crash and security concerns for using the technique -- spawned just six instances, but more than three times the number of total processor threads, to handle the 10 open tabs.

"Chrome is a very pure browser design, and that gives them an edge over Microsoft," said Barth. "IE is so convoluted by this point. It traces its origins back to Mosaic, so just from a common-sense standpoint, it has to be more complicated. That's why each process in IE8 is fatter than each process in Chrome."

Although the same criticisms he leveled against IE8 earlier also apply to Chrome -- in particular, that they're likely to stutter on older machines running single-core CPUs and on PCs with meager amounts of memory -- he ended up applauding the isolated tab model both push.

Especially Chrome's. "Google wants in the enterprise, but it can't when a Web [Office-style] suite can be taken down because the next tab has Dilbert.com on it, and fails," Barth said. "It can't have people saying'There goes my 15-page document.' Google knows they need this kind of architecture to penetrate the enterprise.

"So understanding their goal, I'm giving them a pass. I think it's worth giving them the benefit of the doubt," he added. "But IE, that's just more of the same."

And what of Mozilla's Firefox, which has managed to build a market share of nearly 20 percent, mostly by appealing to users dissatisfied with IE?

Based on his tests, Barth had unkind words for the open-source browser. "It's looking dated," he said, referring not to its appearance but to how it handles tabs. "It will never get the kind of tab isolation that you can get in IE and now Chrome. It's looking like yesterday's design."

But Chrome he's excited about. "You've got to admire what Google is trying to pull off," he said.

Devil Mountain operates Exo.performance.net (Xpnet), a community-based collection network that gathers performance data and other metrics from more than 3,000 PCs. Users can join the network by downloading and installing a small utility, DMS Clarity Tracker Agent, from Devil Mountain's site.

Google Chrome can be downloaded in a version for Windows XP and Vista.