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by seba_dos1 2930 days ago
It definitely does. Chrome is borderline unusable on 8GB RAM - more than a few tabs open make it go into swap hell, while Firefox works well with thousands (Chrome doesn't even have the concept of unloading open tabs!). Also, you can't even disable tab shrinking in Chrome, let alone move tabs to the left border of the window, as I do with Firefox. This results in an UI that's practically unusable with the only way to navigate the tabs being the mouse wheel.

Chromium used to perform visibly better than Firefox with somewhere around one to five tabs open, so sometimes, if I didn't have the browser running and didn't want its full session to load, I've started Chromium just to quickly check one URL - however, recent versions of Firefox made it comparable in such cases, so the only use case for Chromium I have now is to deal with badly coded websites that assume it's the only browser out there.
3 comments
bitmapbrother 2930 days ago
>Chrome is borderline unusable on 8GB RAM - more than a few tabs open make it go into swap hell,

I'm currently using Chrome on a 4GB system with 10 tabs open with no performance issues or fans screaming. To claim that Chrome is borderline unusable on 8GB of RAM is a lie.

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bwbw223 2930 days ago
> is a lie

Or maybe people have different standards/expectations?

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taborj 2930 days ago
I think this is dependent on many factors. Right now I'm on a laptop with 8GB of RAM, I have a VMWare VM running locally taking up 3GB of RAM, and Chrome with 6 tabs open. Yes, I'm getting near swap territory, but everything is cruising along nicely...
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bthrm 2930 days ago
I’m sure they have telemetry and know that almost nobody leaves hundreds of tabs open.

When you tell me you open thousands of tabs, I wonder if you’re just stress testing the browser. I expect software not to work well when I stress test it.

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seba_dos1 2930 days ago
I'm sure nobody leaves them open with Chromium as it's impossible.

My common browser usage is to have low hundreds of tabs open - right now it's a bit higher than usual, 1086, although it's not the record. It's just regular browsing, topic research, some social media and stuff left for later. Works well - under Firefox with Tab Center Redux, that is. I've tried switching to Chromium in the past, when Firefox used to be visibly slower, but I've never could use it for longer, always went back to Firefox as Chromium's UX was horrible. With recent versions, I don't even feel the need to check out Chromium ever again.

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