Linux Google Chrome Revisted

When I looked at simple Web pages, Google Chrome seemed to have a smaller footprint than Firefox. The real question is how do the two compare when viewing a more complex Web site, such as HootSuite? How does Google’s Web Application compare to Prism?

Why use HootSuite as a benchmark for this test? HootSuite is alway running, so that I can track my social media accounts. To make it more challenging, I want it to run as a Web application on machine with only 256 MiB of memory, which is running Xubuntu.

I decided to try Google Chrome because the RSS (amount of real memory in use) for Firefox with HootSuite running was 91,114 KiB. I installed the Prism extension to Firefox, but never could get it to work. In hopes of reducing the memory footprint, I installed Google Chrome and created a Web application. HootSuite ran OK in Chrome, so I ignored checking memory usage, while I installed six other distros of Linux on two laptops.

The ‘ps -el’ command showed seven processes for Chrome Web application, with a total RSS of 193,241 KiB. Since the ‘ps -el’ command only shows the thread group leaders, I ran the command ‘os -eLl | grep chrome | wc -l’, which listed 31 total tasks for Google Chrome as a Web application. Running the same test for displaying HootSuite in the Google Chrome browser showed a total RSS of 195,098 KiB. Other than getting rid of the menu, location, and navigation bars, a Google Chrome Web application is not much different than the browser. If you click on a link in a Web application, it opens the browser, and the system came to a grinding round of swapping.

Compared to the Google Chrome browser, Firefox’s RSS of 91,114 KiB is a real lightweight contender.  Although the Mozilla Prism Web site says there is no Linux Prism application, Ubuntu and openSUSE 11.2 have one. openSUSE even has a Firefox add-on called prism-refractor. On Xubuntu, I created a Prism application for HootSuite. The RSS for the Prism application was 74,776 KiB. A signification improvement over the using the Firefox browser to run HootSuite. When I created a Prism application under openSUSE, I did not get the same level of reduction. Under openSUSE the total RSS for the three processes was 84,255 KiB.

Google Chrome not only loses the battle for being a lightweight browser, it also has serious flaws. For me, the most annoying was the file uploaded dialog box, which would only go down one level in a directory tree. Downloading files was not a problem. In my opinion, the upload problem alone is a show stopper.  Final conclusion is that Google Chrome for Linux is not a challenger to Firefox. It would be great if the Mozilla developers would put some effort into a Prism application for Linux, and a extension for Prism that worked.