1

Hi I was a firefox user but I switched to Chromium a while ago and I feel like Chrome uses uses more cpu browsing the web than firefox...

I have this psensor app installed on my ubuntu 12.10 which I constantly check and I can tell I feel like FF is better for the sake of my laptop because I spend a lot of time browsing the web. even though I disabled loading flash and plugins while browsing the web but I still feel like chromium is overusing the cpu...`

for the record I don't have any heavy plugins so it's not the plugins which wastes cpu... I heard that chromium is not officially supported that's why it may have a poor performance compared to firefox although I get every available chromium update...

should I switch back to FF? I'm hooked with chromeuim deeply ,that won't be near anything easy...

Improve this question
1
  • There are long-standing (since 2012 erra versions) unresolved issues with Chrome CPU usage related to the real-time phishing and malware protection system. Diasbling it solves the CPU problem for most affected systems, but obviously that is not ideal.
    – Caleb
    May 14, 2014 at 10:13

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5

Chromium will use more memory then Firefox as the amount of tabs goes up (this is by design).

While running Chromium press Shift+ESC to bring up the chromium task manager. Click the 'Stats for Nerds' button and see which process in Chrome is using the most memory. You can use this to check what memory is used.

A few graphs from Tom's hardware "Web Browser Grand Prix 9: Chrome 17, Firefox 10, And Ubuntu"

We use the Internet's Top 40 Web sites (according to Quantcast) for our memory and page load reliability testing. Unlike our startup and page load times, this test uses live sites; the test sites are not hosted on our local Web server.

Chrome's memory usage is measured through its about:memory flag, while the other browsers are measured with the Windows Task Manager/Ubuntu System Monitor. Each browser is opened with the Google homepage as the only tab. Memory usage is recorded, and then the additional 39 tabs are loaded. Once all tabs report as loaded, we inspect each page for broken elements and reload any pages that have not opened properly before recording the 40-tab memory usage.

Next we close all tabs except the original one containing Google's homepage and re-record the memory totals. Finally, we wait two minutes and record the final memory usage figure.

enter image description here

enter image description here

enter image description here

enter image description here

This test is from 2012 but the numbers still seem to stand. The only thing this does not cover is the usage of HTML5.

Conclusion

Overall, Internet Explorer and Chrome are the winners during periods of light usage. They also seem to manage memory best. Safari and Firefox shine more prominently during heavy loads. Chrome and IE9, however, are hogs when it comes to heavy use, and Opera for Linux demonstrates poor management.

My opinion:

Stick with the browser you -like- and works for your.

Improve this answer
6
  • 2
    OP has written: "I feel like Chrome uses uses more cpu". The answer is about RAM.
    – user25656
    Sep 5, 2013 at 9:55
  • 1
    The OP is making a mistake ;-)
    – Rinzwind
    Sep 5, 2013 at 12:13
  • 3
    Chrome has had a long standing issue (since v20) that causes it to consume huge ammounts of CPU (think ~30% cpu baseline when idle with nothing open) on some systems. The stuff in this answer is about the expected behaviour of RAM usage which is fine, but it's quite possible the OP actually does have an unsolved problem with CPU consumption. This problem seems to be caused by the real-time phising and malware protection engine as disabling this solves the CPU usage for most of the problem systems.
    – Caleb
    May 14, 2014 at 10:09
  • 4
    was the question "post anything desperately remotely related"?
    – arsaKasra
    May 14, 2014 at 16:19
  • @Caleb That's funny, reminds me of when there was that bug awhile ago that was in Chrome for months where the javascript profiler would not work at all on an AMD cpu.
    – NoBugs
    Aug 2, 2017 at 5:36
0

Can't compare a running browser and memory management of a browser. Those are two different things. Considering the fact PC's today are so fast the entire argument of memory management is just mute. I would argue it is more about stability of these browsers than speed.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .