I have been a big fan of RockMelt since the time it was launched. The way it manages social networking is simply superb. I faced few glitches in the beginning but since it is built upon an open source Chromium, the fix was easily available too.

But recently I started to face memory problems in the browser. Though I haven’t done a thorough research but a quick analysis on RockMelt’s performance as compared to other browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer and for that matter original Chromium browser, proved nasty to me.

In Task Manager, I noticed that opening one instance of RockMelt browser starts multiple RockMelt processes. I understand that it runs in a multi-threaded environment wherein each tab runs in its own memory. But do all social networking icons etc also run in their own process. Must be, I can’t think of any other way.

But 15 individual processes for just 4 tabs is too much and that too all 20mb+ memory usage.

What actually happens is, it starts hanging and system too starts responding slow and we end up shut down the browser and launch it again with few less processes.

Even Chrome does the same thing, with just opening up the browser launches 4 instances of Chrome.exe without having any website, just one blank tab. RockMelt is even one step ahead. Frankly speaking I never found Chrome hung.

Firefox uses one single process to hold all tabs but it’s performance is better than Rockmelt. But Chrome beats them all in performance.

I wonder why RockMelt, on the same platform, losing the race.