
Microsoft Has First Major Impact on Chrome - adrian_mrd
https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/google-chrome/212361/microsoft-has-first-major-impact-on-chrome
======
The_rationalist
Microsoft most major chromium impact is to move input handling off the main
thread which has been empirically a massive success on Edge.

This would allow chrome to have lower input lag than native GUIs if it's not
already the case.

They are also working on many cool things, openXR support for example. They
are improving chrome devtools (and their integration within vscode) They are
doing many performance related fixes. And they are massively modernizing
windows apis used by Chrome. E.g better performance for sensors through new
windows 10 API. And the smart use of a Kalman filter for sensors.

They are also helping chromium to support windows ARM 64 bit

A real time view of what they are doing: [https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/q/author:*.microsof...](https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/q/author:*.microsoft.com+AND+status:merged)

~~~
pdonis
_> Microsoft most major chromium impact is to move input handling off the main
thread which has been empirically a massive success on Edge._

I'm confused by these statements (not just yours but in the article as well)
about how Edge performs so well; I have not seen anything like that on the
Windows 10 systems I am forced to use (for work). On those systems Edge takes
forever to load, forever to open a new tab, and will randomly make the mouse
cursor disappear when it's doing something it considers more important than
responding to my input.

~~~
cptskippy
Neither the Chromium or nonChromium based versions of Edge behave like that.
It seems like your work machine has something impeding performance.

~~~
pdonis
_> It seems like your work machine has something impeding performance._

I thought it might be that, but it so happens we had to get a Windows 10
machine for home use for a particular purpose, and Edge on it is also slow
(though perhaps not quite as slow as my work machine). Both are Dell laptops,
so it's possible that Dell puts some extra OEM stuff in that hurts
performance.

~~~
SyneRyder
I'm on a Lenovo X1 Thinkpad and Edge definitely doesn't feel slow to start
here (it's instant), and while pages are maybe a bit slower to load than
Firefox Quantum, I wouldn't call Edge slow. I can't compare against Chrome
though - I don't use it because it chews through battery.

I think I have seen that disappearing mouse issue though, and mostly I use
Edge when I double click on a PDF file and forget I don't have a PDF reader
installed....

~~~
Faark
Not slow for me as well. It's my second browser beside FF and has the far
better text to speech. Hard to compare performance, since my usage pattern
differs widely between the two. But my biggest complaint would be tabs
sometimes crash-and-reloading and some websites not rendering
(bugs.chromium.org is an example).

Wonder how annoying the switch to chromium will be :/

------
Waterluvian
Help me confirm I understand the status quo.

My laptop with 32GB of RAM running Chrome streaming twitch or YouTube is
currently writing the stream to my SSD before rendering it?

That sounds like very low hanging fruit in terms of battery gains. Any
arguments for why this has been like this?

~~~
azernik
Probably because Chrome was built not to assume enormous amounts of RAM.

~~~
Waterluvian
My point is that when the resource is available, it can't be intelligently
used? Heck, shouldn't you just let the OS call the shots and simply say, "I've
got ephemeral data for you to keep warm."

~~~
skywhopper
Sure, if the OS has an API for that. If it doesn't, then the Chrome developers
have to figure out what to do.

~~~
Waterluvian
Isn't the API just storing in RAM and letting a page file do its thing?

~~~
akelly
How do you make sure that the video doesn't push something far more important
to the pagefile? Does windows have a way of telling it the priority of an item
in memory, or do you have to trust a caching algorithm?

------
doe88
What I find fascinating with MS's decision to use Chrome was their willingness
to take the hit and learn a new code base from scratch (and not even their own
moreover). Usually inertia wins at big companies but not in this case.
Regardless of the final outcome I really am impressed by the engineering
effort needed behind this decision.

~~~
BuckRogers
Regardless of meme-ish behavior over MS being incompetent on software, they're
actually aces at it. If not the best entity in the world, they definitely know
software. If anyone can pivot, manage a team to learn a codebase as large as
Chromium at the drop of a hat, it's Microsoft. I only invest in index funds,
but I'd place my bets on Microsoft over FANG, zero hesitation.

~~~
green-eclipse
"Best entity in the world."

Would love to see some data or citations behind these bold claims.

------
techntoke
This is why I love Arch Linux. You can already do this with Chrome, Firefox or
other browsers:

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-
daemon](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon)

Impact is pretty good but not as significant as I had hoped.

~~~
carlosrg
You can probably do something similar in Windows moving the profile directory
to a RAM disk.

~~~
beatgammit
The great thing about Arch Linux is that someone has already come up with the
steps to do it and put it in a convenient place for others to find. Arch Linux
is more than just an OS, it's a community of power users.

------
codedokode
The idea not to save data to disk means that they have to be kept in RAM, and
Chrome will take even more of it. It's fine if you have an expensive system
with tens of gigabytes, but what if you have only 4 or 2 Gb?

Also, why save energy when you are on AC power most of the time?

I remember that watching a long video on Youtube in WinXP could take as much
as 400 Mb of RAM. Are they going to increase memory consumption?

~~~
Jonnax
A raspberry pi can have 4gb of ram. Cheap android phones come with 4gb ram
these days as well.

At some point software needs to stop catering for miniscule percentages of
users.

~~~
Faark
I'm currently on 4gb (ram sticks slowly died one after another, hope to
replace the pc soon) and yes, Firefox taking up an entire gb is pushing it.
Windows takes about 2gb for itself, leaving annoyingly little for other tasks.

~15% of steam users have 4gb or less [0]. And I doubt gaming PCs drag the
total average down. So yeah, only a "miniscule percentages of users" caring
about ram usage of browsers doesn't seem based in reality we still live in.

[0]
[https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey)

------
dbg31415
I hate Chrome.

But Firefox drains my battery faster trying to run a VR simulation with an a
realistic crypto mining rig and a USB hair dryer. My MBP's fans kick on full-
blast when I start streaming video sin Firefox. And... worst Firefox crashes
every time my computer goes to sleep now -- this has been happening for about
the last month. When it comes back up I have to re-sign-in to about 20
sites... yes, password manager, but... with 2FA on most it's just tedious.

Like for a browser that respects privacy may fall to like for a browser that
doesn't kill my battery.

~~~
robin_reala
There’s ongoing work that’s just (this week) starting to land to improve macOS
battery life via CoreAnimation. That should help in the medium term.

As for crashing on sleep, that’s not normal behaviour. Maybe try refreshing
Firefox via about:support? You’ll lose extensions etc but if nothing else it
could help to narrow down the problem if it comes back.

~~~
dbg31415
Thanks for the heads up! I've got different extensions running in Chrome and
Firefox, but according to Activity Monitor, Firefox's energy impact is 26.29,
and Chrome's is 3.25. I've got Hacker News up in both, and that's the only tab
that's open.

When I open a new video on YouTube, it spikes to 160ish, then drops to 100,
then eventually settles into the lows 60s.

In Chrome, it shows similar... spiking when the video starts to stream around
160, but then quickly drops down to the high 30s.

Keen on seeing what the changes bring! (=

I just did a reinstall. Hope it helps the crashing issue.

At the end of the day, I really don't trust Google. But... if it comes down to
having an extra hour on my laptop it's a bit of a tough call.

Thanks!

------
loulouxiv
Shouldn't they start by getting Chromium as standard compliant as current Edge
? As of now every browser supports SVG-in-OpenType except Chromium. When
Microsoft will proceed with their shortsighted migration to Chromium engine
there will be two browser refusing to comply to this widely accepted standard.
Microsoft, would you please at least try to minimize the push in the "Web
standards are whatever Google likes" direction your decision will provoke ?
This is the very worrisome aspect of this move.

------
greatjack613
If its not caching to disk, doesn't that mean that ram usage will skyrocket?
As it is chrome is a memory hog, imagine now with all of those videos in
ram....

~~~
vidanay
Ram is meant to be used. Ram should be 100% utilized

~~~
amirmasoudabdol
You seem to be ignoring a very important factor here, energy consumption. RAM
usage has a direct effect on battery usage and battery usage is an important
factor and selling point these days.

~~~
slovenlyrobot
RAM _capacity_ has a direct effect on energy, usage not nearly much if at all.

Hardware has been around to selectively put banks into low power saving mode,
but I've never heard of any commodity OS that supported anything like that.
It'd require active organization of physical pages to take advantage of, if
common controllers even supported it

~~~
sephamorr
Note that most of RAM's power consumption comes from reading and writing (a
function of memory clock speed). Allocating the RAM itself is likely to
meaningfully increase power draw, but accessing it will.

~~~
belltaco
Are there any benchmarks around showing this? And how much extra power draw it
is.

------
z3t4
So MS's plan is to put a rebranded Chrome browser on Windows? Will that keep
people from downloading Chrome? Then what incentive will G have to keep
improving Chrome?

~~~
lallysingh
Because desktop Windows is nearly irrelevant?

~~~
saagarjha
Surely you're being sarcastic?

~~~
lallysingh
Not compared to mobile.

------
yalok
I wonder if there’s a feature request to completely pause all Chrome/Chromium
processes, when the browser windows are all in the background and low-power
mode is on. I like to have lots of browser tabs and windows opened all the
time, and in my experience with Chrome on Mac, the processes from these tabs
eat most of the battery, if there’s any JS running in them...

For now, I just manually pause all processes with Chrome in their name, and
then un-pause them once I need a browser...

~~~
millstone
How do you manually pause a process on Mac?

~~~
dwaite
SIGSTOP / SIGCONT

------
lerey
Well I hope this guy doesn't write a post for every little pull request a
Microsoft employee sends to Chromium

~~~
bitwize
It's Paul Thurrott. If somebody high up at Microsoft takes a particularly
satisfying dump, Thurrott will have a blog post about it.

------
rdiddly
My first thought: They added Clippy to it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo)

Junk comment, sorry.

------
neonihil
I smell some kind of a DRM coming.

