Gmail’s interface is bloated, too…. I”m using an old laptop (256 MB, Windows XP)… IE was constantly zooming up from 15 MB of memory usage to 160 MB (at which point the laptop becomes useless)…. switching Gmail to “Basic HTML” seems to have solved that problem. (Foxfire was only slightly less bogged down).
I almost have to wonder if google’s javascript has code somewhere that says:
If (brwiser != “Chrome”) {
crashbrowser = malloc(100MB);
}
But Google’s prime directibve is “do no evil”, so I’m sure they wouldn’t do that.
I think that behavior is starting to spread among the Google apps. I’ve noticed in both Gmail and Reader that the Firefox throbber will, at times, be churning away even when the pages are idle. The only solution is to close them out.
I know from a little reading and a little snooping that part of what they’re doing is prefetching the emails, so that when you click to see an email it immediately shows up. The problem seems to be that closing the Gmail window doesn’t release the memory – you have to shut down the browser to get the memory back – but in the meantime it has flushed out other things via page faults that then have to be reloaded.