Bad News: Google Chrome Crashes Completely. Separate Processes?

So I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for a while now and I have to admit it: it took only these few hours to crash it. Yes, completely crash, not disabling one tab with some process to be blamed for it. Unfortunately I have not captured the screen since I switched back from English to Russian-language version of the browser to see how good the translation is (far from perfect as usually, actually) and I did not think the notification that Chrome crashed in Russian would help anybody here. But I have found a screenshot of what you are supposed to see if you manage to repeat my success:

So basically what I’ve done was opening 15 or so tabs in the browser to write my review today (and believe me, 15 is far less that what I usually have open in Firefox). Then I switched to other tasks that included reading a great number of tabs I already had open in Firefox so I did not think it was worth reopening the tabs in Chrome so I simply went back to Firefox (especially since I know I am not migrating any time soon – or at least until my crucial plug-ins are supported).

A few hours later I went back to Chrome and performed a few tasks in the browser – just out of curiosity to see how it performs after some time of running in the background. And I was disappointed to notice that it worked much slower than when I initially tested it. So I’m afraid that those same people praising Chrome for how fast it is will start complaining soon as it seems to consume much more memory with time – and that’s bad news since it’s one of the major complaints of Firefox users as well.

But I kept Google Chrome running anyway and continued with some other tasks. A couple of hours later I returned to see if anything changed. I did some reading on Google Reader and performed a couple of searches (on Google as well). But then all of a sudden (pretty unexpectedly as I did not notice any substantial speed decrease) Chrome crashed completely. Yes, completely – it did not allow me to use all my tabs but the one responsible for the problem as promised. It simply crashed, period.

I was embarrassed about it because I am naturally much more willing to say good things about applications and software I test than criticize them so I decided to do a quick search in Google Blog Search – this one returned a few posts with very similar examples described – but they were not numerous and some seemed to be intentional. I also tried a search on Twitter and it returned quite a number of results with some users mentioning how they managed to crash Chrome browsing Gmail or Google Maps – something unexpected to me:

So I may be embarrassed by the whole crash thing I caused without even trying but it is heartwarming to know that at least I am not alone. In anticipation of the comments that it’s a beta and I should keep that in mind before complaining, I would like to point out that I am not even complaining here – simply stating the fact for the record. After all, it is not difficult for me to open the browser again with all my previous tabs easily accessible.

But there is one thing about it that worries me quite a lot and that is the independent processes for all the tabs. This sounds like too much of an incentive to download Chrome and start using it – thus the heavy disappointment that it failed to work as promised. I am sure that the team behind the browser is clever and experienced enough to fix such problems in the next release(s), especially if more users opt in to sending Google crash reports (I will be sure to do it myself now at least). But the fact remains: we do seem to have immoderate expectations when it comes to anything launched by Google – thus many users will keep forgetting it’s a beta and is not supposed to be stable yet and will complain anyway. And when it comes to the most appealing functionality, it must be even worse.

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