Google has been on the market for a very long time. Starting out as a simple search engine website who could’ve thought that they would become one of the biggest market holders in the world in so many things?
One of the most notorious pieces of technology from google is their chromium-based internet browser – Google Chrome.
On the PC market, it doesn’t matter what operating system you use, you can pick and choose which browser to use. While the market offers a big amount of suggestions, this article will be focused on Google’s very own Chrome browser.
Chrome is fantastic. It has a full feature set with addons, google account integration, a huge market for extensions boasting over 185,000 addons, and a reliable suite of smartphone apps, which are both present on androids, windows phones, and iOS platforms. It even offers services like pop-up blockers and filtering of advertisements.
Due to this, it’s easy to understand why chrome is the leading browser with most users on the market. Astounding 310 million people, which is 70% of the whole market share use Chrome. In countries like India, this market share is even higher netting 75.48% of browser market share in March 2020. Online games are becoming more and more popular everywhere, and India is no exception. With betting for online video games becoming easily accessible Google chrome is at the sweet spot with their strong engine to power browser games like Indian bitcoin slots. Some of these companies have even created their own personalized extensions for their customers to make gaming even easier. This helps Indian players keep their privacy and ease of access to their favorite games.
Google also boasts the best mobile platform integration out of all. As we already mentioned, it’s present on all of the major platforms, and syncing data between these devices couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is to log into your account and you’re good to go.
With the release of Chrome 69, Google has dumped the old sharp-looking design for the much slicker and aesthetically pleasing rounded system. It’s crucial to note that after the release of Chrome 71, we were once and for all forbidden from going back to the old interface.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. With RAM hogging Google has made itself a name. Any number of memes, articles, news pieces have been made about this subject. Most probably, this is not the first time you, dear reader, are hearing about this issue. With a famous RAM bug that google fixed a while ago Chrome continues eating our computer’s resources like there is no tomorrow.
What Chrome uses so much RAM for?
The answer to this question is quite easy in reality. Just think about it – nowadays most of what we do is located in our browsers. Watching movies? – Browser. Youtube? – Browser. Writing something? – Google Docs / Browser. Whether it’s just pastime or work-related we always have our browser open. Emails, messages, videos, research, writing, presentation making, are all associated with browsers. These tasks take a lot of resources and one application running all of these together will cause certain instabilities. It’s not a secret that sometimes, some tabs will crash. The way Google avoids the issue of 1 tab crashing and closing down everything else is by creating a separate process for each of the tabs you have open so that if 1 crashes – others do not go down with it.
Apart from separate processes, Google has also incorporated a prerendering feature, which helps load the pages faster. The way this is done is via a small piece of code requesting a prerender in the HTML of the page. This request is never sent out to the network, however, your browser will pre-render specific parts of the page locally. This helps reduce latency and overall gives the feeling of the page loading faster.
The prerender content is stored in the PrerenderManager, which maintains this directory with all of the necessary information created by the same profile.
However this creates problems in connection with resource contention, handling of dynamic media like videos, audio, plugins, and canvases, some bugs, which cause cancellation of pages on certain corner cases, server-side effects are also present and sometimes it even messes up cookies, sessionStorage and etc.
It’s also worth noting that the more tabs and extensions you have installed the more resource-heavy Chrome will become.
Conclusion
Google Chrome has been on the market for a long time now. The browser has had its fair share of problems but Google being a responsible company, has been taking care of their product and offering one of the best services out there with not even Apple being able to compete with its Safari browser.
Honorable mentions should go to the Firefox browser, which is a very good alternative to Google Chrome. In my humble opinion it is at least on par with the chromium-browser. In India Alibaba’s UC Browser is becoming more and more popular, netting 12.06% market share as of now in India alone.
In the end it always comes down to a personal preference. These browsers offer a lot of functionality and all of them are oriented onto slightly different aspects of the internet. Some are better for privacy, some are better performance-wise, some have a slicker design. It’s up to the user to pick and choose which one they would like to use.
