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Comment by Tomis02 | Hacker News Reader

One process per tab is not a feature. It is (or should be) invisible for me, the user, and from my experience it creates more problems than it's worth (first time I tried Chrome it simply stopped my computer dead by running 10 heavy processes on a single-core CPU - so much for performance). It's a bad design decision that will only pay off when I have a 20-core CPU. Sandboxing for individual tabs? Just about the same.

My point is that saying "Chrome came and shook things up introducing features no existing browsers had" is a bit of a stretch. When it came out Chrome was basically not very different from Internet Explorer 6 (feature-wise), and it seems to have stayed that way (I like full page translation but that's it).

We should be fair and say that Google Chrome has a large market share because it has Google behind it. It doesn't have much else going for it.

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Back when I switched from Firefox to Chrome, FF was a very heavy browser that took up a lot of memory. Chrome was very light-weight and nimble. Clearly, that has changed since then but it was a big competitive advantage.

One process per tab is a feature. If a tab crashed in FF, typically the whole browser would need to restart whereas in Chrome the tab could be closed and re-opened without affecting the other tabs. I think that's a pretty significant feature.

Auto-updating every 6 weeks is another feature. As a developer, I don't have to worry when an update comes out since I know 90%+ will be on the new version.

While I think part of the reason Chrome has a large market share is clearly because of Google, I don't think it's the main reason. There are many other factors.

> I think that's a pretty significant feature.

The problem here is that you trade a lot of performance for stability that you should have to begin with, so in the end you have worse overall performance just so that a fringe case is covered. What's the worse that can happen if Chrome crashed? You could lose all your tabs because the default setting is "open homepage" instead of "reopen the pages that were open last", but that's your fault.

But let's investigate this more deeply - browser crashes have two major causes - internal bugs and plugins. What used to happen was that Flash (or Acrobat Reader, or whatever) would crash and it would bring down the whole browser. The solution is (of course) one separate process for the plugins. Problem solved. Going beyond that and fitting every tab with its own process to account for the fact that your business isn't really building browsers is of little comfort to me; you shouldn't be dereferencing that NULL pointer to begin with.

Opera has auto-update as well. I guess we'll have to disagree on the reason Chrome has its market share.

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