[crazygringo]

Has it drifted?

I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too.

Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.

[dazzlefruit]

Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over Chromium) didn't.

The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became much less sluggish over time. (Is that only their performance improvements or did hardware get better faster than they grew?)

Also maybe "light" and "fast" shouldn't be lumped together. Chrome can definitely be fast when it has enough resources. That and sandboxing seem to make it much _heavier_ in RAM.

[eric-hu]

As a web developer I also have to tell you that my industry has gotten more cavalier about using resources. Unless your benchmark is browsing sites that you know have not changed in 15 years, the heaviness you feel could be from development teams using shiny new frameworks.

[dmazzoni]

Chrome isn't using all that RAM.

The web pages you visit are.