LOL

Yeah, if I knew precicely what was leaving my network in the telemetry data and could trust 100% that if I was ok with it today, that tomorrow and next week, and next month and next year it would not increase and expand to phone home information that I do not approve of then I'd leave it enabled too. Unfortunately however, there is far too many cases out there of companies gathering data that they claim to be "unidentifiable" that in fact contains enough information that smart people can use to forensically turn into identifiable data which later on leaves the company who did it fixing a security bug and saying "gosh gee willikers, we didn't intend for that to happen"... I trust Mozilla probably more than any other organization as far as their software goes, but not to the point where I'm positive they'd never gather data that completely unintentionally is identifiable and leaks personal information. It's just safer to disable telemetry gathering in all software universally than post-facto deal with information leakage sadly.

As another example of this, the Steam hardware survey I've filled out a few times as it lets you see the data before it is sent to Valve. I approve of almost all of their data gathered. Well, except for the fact that it takes a complete list of every single piece of software you have installed on the computer and sends it to Valve. That is not ok for me, and there's no way to say "everything but that" so I don't submit the data and don't do their surveys anymore either. :)

I've got about 50-60 extensions installed and about 40 of them enabled currently.

Well hello, Bruce Wayne. Didn't know Firefox was the choice of browser for Batman.

Funny enough, one of my best friends first and middle name is Bruce Wayne, and he is a huge Batman fan. Although despite my best warnings about Arkham Knight, he went ahead and bought it anyway and was greatly disappointed. Had to find out for himself. :) For the record, just like in the movies though, he doesn't know or hang around Robin. :)

What kind of Chrome do you have? I'm on the latest version and if you had actually opened my attached screenshots, you would've seen that it easily takes up over 200,000K because each tab takes up memory. How many tabs do you have open and can you screenshot your Task Manager? I'd love to have your version, since that'd be ideal. :D

I'm most likely on hte 32 and not 64-bit version of Chrome, though. Does anyone think that changes anythign at all?

Well, I had been on a 32 bit system, but just today I switched to 64 bit.

Oh, you're on Win 10/8 I see. I'm still on 7 and here it's got an individual process for each tab. Maybe it's the new Windows? Can anyone confirm?

Also that's great, congratulations!

The process hasn't changed, it's still individual processes or grouped processes per tab. HOWEVER, I have tweaked some of the flags in Chrome://flags. (Like Enable experimental canvas features) And I've disabled flash. Also Ublock Origin has a much smaller memory footprint.

Also, I've only ever had four active extensions running.

Another thing too is that web browsers don't really use much memory at all. What does use a lot of memory is web content. The web page text, images and other content on the pages themselves gets downloaded to the browser, decompressed into memory and that takes up a tonne of memory. It's not unusual for a single image used for a background image on a website or something else to decompress in memory to 5 or more megabytes. Add all that up with video, audio or other things like animations, advertising, tonnes of javascript etc. and a single tab can take up hundreds of megabytes of RAM. That RAM is all allocated to the web browser process, and a user seeing that will think "my web browser is bloated!". No, the entire World Wide Web is what is bloated, the web browser just has to display it. The actual memory that any web browser uses itself internally for it's own GUI shell, etc. is miniscule compared to what the web pages themselves use that causes the browser process to use up RAM.

The modern web is designed without a lot of thought put into how much RAM a given page or piece of content uses up in someone's browser, or it's optimized for the most modern hardware quite often and intentionally uses resources.

When people look at the process list and see the browser using 800MB of RAM though they simply think "Firefox sucks" or "Chrome sucks" because they are bloated. They're not going to say "CNN.com sucks" or "doubleclick.net sucks" or whatever other websites, ads and other resources are loaded, which are what really cause the problem of resource usage along with addons.

Here's a good one: The encoder the user chose for their video sucks. I've seen youtube videos where things are smooth sailing, and if they choose another codec, everything bloats right up.

Yup. Flash normally gets executed in a separate process, so Flash video will use up RAM in the flash process. But nowadays everything is more and more defaulting to HTML5 video, so it is now a part of the browser process and hundreds of megs of decompressed video can end up in the browser's RAM usage in the task manager or resource monitor. Roughly the same amount of RAM used, but just in-browser instead of out of browser. Fire up 20 youtube video tabs and well... :)

It's both, though. Optimising RAM usage can make a big difference. Chrome on Android can open a lot of the same pages with less RAM. So it's a choice. Google tends to go for performance. I still dislike the choice they made in Android 5 to increase app performance at the expense of storage space and install time. I haven't noticed better app performance on my old Nexus 7 2012, but I certainly noticed less storage space available and the long install times.