Mozilla Firefox vs Google Chrome

Google Chrome, it only needs a whole year (Dec 2008 - Dec 2009) to be the third most widely used browser in the world (4.4%).


We will compare Google Chrome with Firefox 3.5 (No Add-On).

Memory Usage

Firefox is the lightest browser in the world, I also consider Google Chrome as a very light browser but it consumes about 10-20% more memory than Firefox (depend on the number of tabs opened). But we will see that the larger consumption of memory is not a waste. Let's go to the next comparison.

Display

When you heard about Windows Vista, you'll imagine an Operating System with a wonderful display, and that's what you get on Google Chrome, the name shows what's inside. Firefox is still using a standard display for the user interface, buttons, and theme. Google Chrome will blind your eyes, it has a much better display (on both browser theme and webpage display) than Firefox, and it consumes less memory and CPU usage compared to Opera, another browser that has a magnificent display.

Page Load Time

No doubt, Firefox is the best on page load time, Google Chrome takes several more seconds (or milliseconds) to finish loading a webpage. Personally I won't mind waiting a few seconds more in order to get a better display, but there are users out there that will kick their keyboard and yell at a slower browser.

Conclusion (and facts)

It's all about appearance and performace, everyone has their own preference. For those who love eye candies, Firefox will bore them. For those who prefer speed, Google Chrome will waste their precious browsing time (a few milliseconds perhaps).

 And we will see a comparison from Google Trends

Blue = Firefox and Red = Chrome

We can see that at Chrome's first launching day, lots of people look for it (on Google of course) and that's a very good start for a new software. Then after the 'frenzy' was over, the search volume returned to a reasonable amount, but still that's not a small number for a new software (even the new release of Firefox 3 doesn't make the search volume for 'Firefox' show a significant increase). Slowly but surely, Chrome's search volume goes up over time. It will catch up Firefox's search volume before 2011 unless Google does something stupid and mess everything up.

Dual Core? Quad Core? Nope, 48 Core!

"That's insane!" was my first reaction when I read this article's title. It's still 2009 and a Quad Core processor is more than enough, why would you need a 48 Core?

After I read the article, I changed my opinion. That's a cool project, the processor wasn't made for a usual computer, it's for a super computer capable of doing a lot of thing that human can do. The 48 core processor contains 1.3 billion transistors and nicknamed “single-chip cloud computer”. It executes commands quickly and smoothly.

...powerful enough to do more of what humans can.
...can carry 64 gigabytes of data per second.
...can accommodate a maximum of 64GB of memory.

So they're trying to make a computer that is stronger than human mind. A computer that (probably) is smarter than human. This is the time when computer will takeover the world (well it's close to 2012 after all - just kidding). With this kind of computer, everything will be easier, all difficulties will be solved by the computer.

But, there are some problems:
1. Needs a huge amount of power
2. Easily overheated
3. Hard to synchronize every core

Fortunately Intel anticipated that, the processor will use "adaptive mode", unused parts of the processor will be turned of when idle. And for the synchronization problem, they're still working on it.

Awesome!

Sources:
http://news.cnet.com
http://news.bbc.co.uk
http://www.wired.com

Related articles:
100 Cores 
Thousands of processing cores