Ubuntu – Why does Google search always count more results in Firefox or Chrome than in Chromium

Try to make it happen, then post output of free -m.

Also, please post details on what make and model of hard drive you're using, and output of df -h.

For reference, here is me looking at the %memory used by the biggest processes currently running on my system:

me@banshee:~$ ps wwaux | awk '{print $4 " " $11};' | sort -rn | head -n 10
8.1 rhythmbox
7.1 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
3.7 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
3.3 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
2.6 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
2.5 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
2.3 /usr/bin/X
2.3 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
1.9 /opt/google/chrome/chrome
1.9 compiz

Can you run the same command on your system, please, and let's see what your biggest processes are?

For reference, my system has 16G of RAM, and each of those chrome processes you see is therefore eating something along the lines of 300MB-600MB of RAM. So, yeah, they definitely do add up.

For further reference: those are my TOP memory-hungry Chrome processes; I actually have 72 current tabs open right now and they're eating about 0.9% of my RAM (about 90MB-ish) apiece on average - the actual range is from about 10MB on the low end to about 600MB on the high end. I haven't tried to check to see how much omgubuntu eats specifically.

A bit MORE reference: I set up a clean VM and installed chromium-browser; opening 12 tabs to http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ resulted in 1.3G used / 718M free (646M used / 1.3G free -/+ buffers/cache). So, basically, either something OTHER than Chromium is eating most of your RAM, or you have extensions installed in Chromium that aren't very memory-efficient and are significantly bloating it per process... if I had to guess, I'd say probably the latter. What extensions are you running?

Chromium will use more memory then Firefox as the amount of tabs goes up (this is by design).

While running Chromium press Shift+ESC to bring up the chromium task manager. Click the 'Stats for Nerds' button and see which process in Chrome is using the most memory. You can use this to check what memory is used.

A few graphs from Tom's hardware "Web Browser Grand Prix 9: Chrome 17, Firefox 10, And Ubuntu"

We use the Internet's Top 40 Web sites (according to Quantcast) for our memory and page load reliability testing. Unlike our startup and page load times, this test uses live sites; the test sites are not hosted on our local Web server.

Chrome's memory usage is measured through its about:memory flag, while the other browsers are measured with the Windows Task Manager/Ubuntu System Monitor. Each browser is opened with the Google homepage as the only tab. Memory usage is recorded, and then the additional 39 tabs are loaded. Once all tabs report as loaded, we inspect each page for broken elements and reload any pages that have not opened properly before recording the 40-tab memory usage.

Next we close all tabs except the original one containing Google's homepage and re-record the memory totals. Finally, we wait two minutes and record the final memory usage figure.

This test is from 2012 but the numbers still seem to stand. The only thing this does not cover is the usage of HTML5.

Conclusion

Overall, Internet Explorer and Chrome are the winners during periods of light usage. They also seem to manage memory best. Safari and Firefox shine more prominently during heavy loads. Chrome and IE9, however, are hogs when it comes to heavy use, and Opera for Linux demonstrates poor management.

My opinion:

Stick with the browser you -like- and works for your.