Massive memory usage in Chrome isn't a bug, its a feature

I took a look at Chrome’s memory usage a few minutes ago. I switched back to Chrome last week or so after using Firefox for a while as my default. I didn’t have a particularly compelling reason to switch to Chrome from Firefox. I just loaded Chrome and it looked a little cleaner than Firefox and I liked having a simple, effective Instapaper extension in Chrome.

I have 6 tabs open in Chrome:

• My firm’s Harvest page;
• Basecamp;
• Podio (I’m exploring Basecamp and Podio at the moment);
• http://bit.ly/zsa80N;
• http://bit.ly/Accc2u;
• Google’s Policies and Procedures; and
• Chrome’s about:memory page.

This was Chrome’s memory usage:

Chrome has displayed that note about over counting its memory usage since Chrome was in the single digits (or low teens at least). With all of Chrome’s advances, the team still hasn’t fixed how Chrome measures its own memory usage? I’m beginning to think this bug remains unresolved on purpose. Contrast these metrics:

… with these metrics from Firefox 11 running the same tabs:

Maybe this bug report isn’t really a bug report, its a feature highlight.