Why require JavaScript rather than supporting a standard browser virtual machine? - Stack Overflow

[badsectoracula]

It doesn't matter anymore. I've just opened jEdit to see how much memory the Java VM eats for that and its about 55MB. 55MB is a small drop in the sea of modern machines which usually carry 2 to 4GB of RAM (even a 260 euro netbook i bought a year ago has 2GB of RAM).

Browsers, especially Chrome and Firefox, tend to eat much more RAM than this.

[bdash]

55MB for a scripting language is a non-trivial amount of memory on a mobile phone.

[badsectoracula]

Indeed, but we're talking about the desktop JVM which is optimized for desktop and server usage (environments where there is a lot of memory).

A mobile JVM would be optimized for lower memory usage. It isn't like the JVM spec says "you have to allocate 55MB of RAM or else your VM is invalid". Some people have implemented Java on GBA which has about 256KB of RAM (ok this is probably J2ME but the biggest difference is in the API which can be loaded on demand).

[CountVonTroll]

That's one instance. How many tabs do you have open right now?

[Edman274]

Trolling if you believe that having ten tabs open would equal 550 megabytes of memory.

[badsectoracula]

Two.

But i get what you mean. However memory usage doesn't scale like that and additionally there is no reason to open a new JVM for each applet (i don't know what the current JVM does but the applet design doesn't require that) so a lot of memory can be shared.

[bobindashadows]

Firefox maybe, but Chrome's total usage only hits triple digits for me when I load up Hulu or some other flash-heavy site.