Tag Archives: chrome

Running Ubiquity on Google Chrome

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It's been a while since I started working on Ubiquity for Opera. It's my limited, but for me totally awesome, port of Mozilla's Ubiquity project, originally only for Firefox, to the Opera browser.

I had several people ask me through my blog or email to write a version for Google Chrome. And, by popular demand, here it is! To my surprise, it took much less than I had originally thought. I had a few small problems though, from the event handlers, different from Opera UserJS model, to style attributes for dynamically created elements, and other minor things as well.

It's still lacking Ajax/xmlHttpRequest support, but that shouldn't be a huge problem.

I uploaded it to userscripts.org too. You can see it here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/85550.

The code, as usual, is up on Github

http://github.com/cosimo/ubiquity-chrome/.

If you try it, I would be interested to know what you think. Have fun!

Main browsers memory usage

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Here's the results of a small "experiment" I made today. I wanted to directly compare memory usage of as many different browsers as possible. I understand it's not a really scientific experiment, but I think it shows some interesting results nevertheless.

You can try it too, and report your results if you want.

So I setup this test on my machine, Windows Vista 32 bit, 3 Gb of RAM, a fresh new account and:

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0.6000.16764
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4
  • Apple Safari 3.2 (WebKit 525.26.13)
  • Google Chrome 1.0.154.43 (WebKit 525.19)
  • Opera 9.63 (Build 10476)
  • Opera 10.00 Alpha (Build 1139)

For every browser, I fired up the same 3 tabs:

I kept every browser opened, but I had to switch between Opera 9.63 and Opera 10 because Chrome doesn't distinguish between the different Opera processes. I guess because both are named opera.exe in the Windows process list. However…

I used the about:memory tab of Chrome to find out the memory usage statistics. However, I could have used the Windows task manager in the same way, or FAR's process list plugin.

Here's the results:

So here we can see that Firefox and then Opera use the least amount of memory, with a few Mbytes of difference. In Firefox 3 Mozilla worked a lot to keep memory usage low and this (basic) results confirm it. Again, not to defend Opera on this, but Opera has Ad Blocker, Speed Dials, Bookmarks+ Sync, a full Email client and what-not already builtin. It would be nice to do another test with Firefox plus the most popular and used extensions…

And now we can compare the situation when we remove Opera 9.63 and add Opera 10,
which is still in alpha stage:

Another impressive result is that Opera 10 uses less memory than every other browser, and at the same time adds support for WebFonts, passes Acid3 with 100/100, has a new Spell Checker… Do you need more? :)