Continuing our search for more efficient web browsers, we discovered a project with some very interesting ideas. Its name is Polarity, and besides promising a drastic reduction in memory consumption, it also allows the user to open tabs using Internet Explorer's Trident engine as an alternative to its own engine. Without a doubt, it's a work in progress, but it's likely that many users will decide to follow it more closely...
My Experiments with Chromium
In these last few days I've experimented a lot with Chromium, the browser that serves as the base for Google Chrome and many other variants. In its natural state, Chromium suffers from certain limitations (for example, it can't play MP4 videos with proprietary codecs), but apart from that, it proves to be much more coherent in aspects like resource consumption. Needless to say, I can't recommend Chromium for daily use simply because it doesn't offer stable versions, but if you decide to accept the risk, the web has compiled builds ready to install. On the other hand, if you're interested in experimental browsers with a few rough edges, I have something more for you.
Introducing Polarity
Its name is Polarity. One of the first details to note about Polarity is that it promises much lower memory consumption compared to other browsers. Apparently this is achieved with a more aggressive "garbage collection" than normal, and although the numbers published by Polarity are very optimistic for my taste (45 megabytes in twenty tabs), they definitely point in that direction. Another point in favor of Polarity is that it can borrow Internet Explorer's Trident engine if the user has problems with a specific page. That access doesn't change the whole browser, but is "per tab".
Advanced Features and False Positives
Polarity has several advanced features that depending on the operating system and configuration can increase performance a bit more. All those parameters are experimental, and there is a possibility they may cause several crashes. To close, Polarity can generate false alerts in some security solutions. Chromium's download manager saw its installer as malicious, and something similar happened with one of its internal files against Bitdefender Free, but a quick scan on VirusTotal confirmed the false positives.
