Chromium Blog: August 2009

Bookmarks Here, Bookmarks There, Bookmarks Everywhere

Montag, 17. August 2009

As of today's dev channel build, we're adding a brand new feature to Google Chrome: bookmark sync. Many users have several machines, one at home and one at work for example. This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access.
To activate this feature, launch Google Chrome with the --enable-sync command-line flag. Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Account. Anytime you add or change a bookmark, your changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you've activated bookmark sync (using the same XMPP technology as Google Talk).
For more information on this, please see this email to chromium-dev.
Happy syncing!
Posted by Tim Steele, Software Engineer

Chromium Memory Usage

Donnerstag, 6. August 2009

There's been some public discussion lately about memory usage in Google Chrome. We think about our memory usage quite a bit so we're happy to see other people paying attention too. This has been a topic of discussion before, but our multiprocess architecture makes measuring memory utilization difficult with the standard set of tools. The crux of the problem is that Chromium goes to great lengths to share memory between processes. However, that shared memory is difficult to account for in the Windows Task Manager. On Windows XP, using the default Task Manager measurement of memory leads to double counting. On Vista, using the default view leads to under counting.
There are a couple of more accurate ways to measure memory utilization in Chromium (or Google Chrome). The easiest is to crack open the task manager that is built into Chromium which tries to account for our memory usage more holistically. If you want even more detail, you can click on "Stats for nerds" which is a link to about:memory.

If you don't fully trust Chromium's task manager or about:memory, the gold standard for measuring memory usage is to look at the system's total commit charge before, during, and after using Chromium. It's a little tricky to get right because you'll need to shut down other services that may kick in while you are running your test. Here's the basic procedure:

Shut down any unnecessary services
Reboot your computer
Using the windows task manager, measure the Total Commit Charge of the system*
Run the application you are seeking to test, in this case, Chromium
Measure the Total Commit Charge again
Close the application
Measure the Total Commit Charge one more time
Subtract your first measurement from your second, and you should have the memory used by Chromium
To validate your test, make sure that the first and last measurement are nearly identical

*On XP, Commit Charge shows up on the bottom of the Windows Task Manager. On Vista, look at the Performance tab of the Windows Task Manager and use the "Memory" number.
For more information on memory usage and how to measure it, check out the Memory Usage Backgrounder on chromium.org.
Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

Google Chrome Developer Tools for Eclipse Users

Dienstag, 4. August 2009

We recently announced the availability of developer tools for Google Chrome. We are now releasing ChromeDevTools, which enables JavaScript debugging using Eclipse.
You can set breakpoints, inspect variables and evaluate expressions all from within Eclipse. The screenshot shows the debugger in action stopped at a breakpoint.

The project is fully open sourced on a BSD-license and consists of two components, an SDK and a debugger. The SDK provides a Java API that enables communication with Google Chrome over TCP/IP. The debugger is an Eclipse plugin that uses the SDK and enables you to debug JavaScript running in Google Chrome from the Eclipse IDE.
We hope this project will help web app developers and welcome feedback as well as contributions.
Posted by Alexander Pavlov, Software Engineer

Chromium Blog

Bookmarks Here, Bookmarks There, Bookmarks Everywhere

Chromium Memory Usage

Google Chrome Developer Tools for Eclipse Users

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