Surface Pro 3 Discussion Thread

Chrome's offense is less noticeable when there are few tabs open. However, when you have say 10+ tabs open at once, you can sometimes see that each tab itself is using only 1-4%... but do the math, if each tab were using as much as 3%, then that still adds up to 30% or more total CPU usage. That's quite a bit for a modern machine.

If just perusing a couple of pages, Chrome is just fine. But when you have multiple web apps that must be kept open in the background, intranets, bug tracking, ticket tracking, enterprise wikis, webmails, those cycles start to add up very quickly. There was one point where something caused Chrome to hog as much as 80% of my overall CPU because I had something like 30+ tabs open and an extension was trying to update itself (thus update all the tabs simultaneously). My fault that it happened in the first place, but still not something you want to hear coming out of your tablet PC. I'm surprised at just how loud that little fan can get at 100% full power.

RE: bookmarks,
At least when under Win8, IE bookmarks are synced with your Microsoft account. (Google's take on it is better, since it syncs across browsers, not OS's). So any IE browser on Windows 8 on any Windows 8 machine in which you are logged in with your Microsoft account will have the same bookmarks. It's just not very convenient for people like myself who have computers on both Windows 7, Windows 8, Ubuntu 12/13/14, and Mac OS X. My personal analogy lately has been Chrome == Convenience, IE == Indispensable.

 

Thanks for the additional insight!

Jim

 

In case it hasn't been mentioned yet, Chrome's misbehavior regarding CPU speed was fixed a while back, see here: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=153139
There are still many thing wrong with it though, especially when it comes to touch. If IE or Spartan supported Chrome extensions I'd switch in a heartbeat, but alas, it looks like this is not happening.

 

Chrome still - in 32 as well as 64bit, in release as in beta-version - still consumes a lot more power than Internet Explorer 11.

Interesting side-effect: browsing on my vaio tap 11 is COMPLETLY silent/fan stays off with IE11, browsing with chrome starts the fans repeated and often.

Also, IE11 seems to be very efficient with weake systems - as example i can switch to my live-long-and-prosper-battry setings - which clocks down the haswell cpu in the vaio tap to 600mhz, and IE11 still is snappy & fast as with full clockspeed, chrome becomes a LOT slower.

 

I currently have two laptops, a Yoga 11s Haswell and an Asus UX303LA. (Yeah, I know this is a tablet forum, but a tablet will be my next purchase. Actually I just ordered a Surface Pro 3 from Amazon.) I never notice any fan noise when I am browsing with Google Chrome. In fact, I rarely have any sound from the fan on either laptop. Sometimes the fan does come on quietly when I am playing with a flight sim game, F18 Carrier Landing, on the Yoga.

Best regards, Jim

Edit: Another observation on my laptops. I have Battery Bar installed on both systems. I haven't noticed any difference in power consumption as reported by Battery Bar between IE and GC. Maybe I am just easy on demands. I have very few extensions and rarely have more than a couple of tabs open.

Jim

 

Hehe, its not chrome which is making noises - its the specific computer if its thermal sensors exceed a specific threshold and the fan is activated

Also, chrome is not insanely battery&power -consuming (it was, it had a nasty power drain bug until late 2014, but that one has been fixed) -its rather IE11 in touch mode, which is optimized almost perfectly.

 

I hadn't noticed Spotify & Polar Flow set themselves up to autostart in the desktop. Killing both of those made a significant improvement in battery. I also think Evernote desktop sync was using a bit too.

I use mostly OneNote, OneNote 2013 (desktop) ,IE Metro, News, Money, & easily get all day- 8+-9 hours, heavy inking, bright screen.

 

Well, as well, Windows 8 is a "tickless" system, so the Chrome bug wasn't very apparent to us. But what is apparent is how poor Chrome becomes when you start using it heavily and regularly. As old and outdated as Opera 12 is, I still use it because unlike Chrome it doesn't choke on content heavy pages. But I've recently moved to Vivaldi. I can't load a single page that has a lot of images without Chrome lagging to wait for the images to load. Just give me the contents and load the images later, darnit!

 

I have to say, as much as I like the few chrome extensions I have running, it does drive nuts how my TP10 grinds to a halt as I open a folder of eight pages. I happened gradually enough that I accept it (boiling frog syndrome..) but if it had performed like this when I first switched I probably wouldn't have stayed. They have pledged to improve things, hope they follow through.

 

Does anyone else have problems with IE just freezing at random times? I've checked for malware, and nothing else seems to bring this behavior (freezing) except for IE 11.