[thelukester]

Agreed. On my 2GB netbook, Chrome was one of the first apps I installed. At the time, it was a lean and lightweight browser. But recently Chrome's memory bloat has gotten so bad, I had to switch to Firefox. One killer is the GPU process often taking 200+MB.

Before giving up, and switching to FF, I tried the --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer switches to disable the GPU process but that prevented videos from playing at full speed. Some people here mentioned Chrome runs great on their rigs with 16GB of RAM. But for the rest of the world, Google should force their devs to use Chrome on a machine with a mere 2GB.

How is it that sites like anandtech and investing.com run fine on my old iPhone 3GS, yet take up 256+ MB in Chrome, more RAM than the phone has? Somehow the 3 year old phone loads and displays the sites smooth as butter. Apple is doing something right or Google is doing something terribly wrong to webkit.

[acdha]

> How is it that sites like anandtech and investing.com run fine on my old iPhone 3GS, yet take up 256+ MB in Chrome

You can't install buggy plugins or extensions on your iPhone. Try removing some of your Chrome extensions down and you'll be back in the 50MB range.

[thelukester]

> Try removing some of your Chrome extensions down and you'll be back in the 50MB range. Thanks, but I'm a extremely tech savvy user. When I first noticed Chrome getting slow on my netbook, I created a fresh profile and removed all my extensions.

It's clear from my own experience, posts here, and benchmarks that Chrome has strayed from it's original design goals of being a lightweight browser. My reference to this iPhone was just to point out that I think it's a issue with Chrome itself, and not the underlining webkit browser.

[acdha]

> It's clear from my own experience, posts here, and benchmarks that Chrome has strayed from it's original design goals of being a lightweight browser.

It's clear that it's fashionable in certain circles to claim this. It's also clear that these claims are based on subjective impressions rather than anything measured, which makes me suspicious given that an effect of that magnitude should be obvious and I haven't seen any sign of it.

If you have actual data showing that the current Chrome browser performs worse than it used to, I'm sure the Chrome development team would love to see it.

[chenster]

I've uninstalled EVERY plugins in Chrome. It still freezes up occasionally. Very very annoying. Had to keep remind me that it's a good time to take a break when that happens. No, it's not the Flash plugin as many have mentioned because it is also disabled/uninstalled. So what now?