> How are you current Firefox users finding the RAM usage, especially compared to Chrome?
I'm fairly sure that multiple studies have shown that Chrome uses more RAM than Firefox. But that's not what's important - all that matters is whether the browser appears snappy to the user. That's much more so the case with Chrome than it is with Firefox.
That's correct. Snappiness is what really is important. Mozilla conduct a parallel project called Snappy to improve that specific metric.
Note that Memory consumption is somewhat related to Snappiness: if it is too high, the program will slow down (paging, longer garbage collecting pauses, ...) and feel less snappy.
I don't think memory's the bottleneck on most modern systems, so it seems like Google made the right choice by allowing greater memory usage in return for better end-user performance.
You're right in that Google's made excellent engineering tradeoffs to keep Chrome snappy, but note that memory is, sort of, the bottleneck on modern systems. Specifically, the channel between memory and the CPU:
I'm not sure exactly why this happens, but it does use a lot more memory than you'd expect. Right now, I have 13 Chrome tabs open, Mail.app, a Terminal session, Colloquy, and TextWrangler running but with no documents, but it has 1.14 GB wired (as in, can't swap) and 1.66 GB active. That's a total of 2.80 GB memory in use.
But also, it takes a while to swap (upon which it beachballs all over the place), and it's not very intelligent about when to swap.
It's a 2.00 GHz quad-core machine, so I have plenty of CPU power. It's just that when I get working on more than one or two things at once, switching between them swaps everything to heck.
I'm fairly sure that multiple studies have shown that Chrome uses more RAM than Firefox. But that's not what's important - all that matters is whether the browser appears snappy to the user. That's much more so the case with Chrome than it is with Firefox.