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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#211

Post by srgseg »

Deezul wrote: post #61

Feature Request: The ability to save and re-load tabs as a labeled set. An array of open tabs is often the result of an intentional workspace. If I could label a saved OneTab as "iOS Development" and have it launch iOS Dev Center, JIRA, bitbucket, and various API/documentation, it would make switching from casual browsing to work mode a breeze.

You can Ctrl or Cmd click a set of tabs, and it will restore them without removing them from the OneTab list. Thus you will be able to use OneTab to open sets of frequently accessed tabs.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#212

Post by k3n »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #187
tomkarlo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't open 100 apps on your computer and then complain about memory usage. Running 100 tabs at the same time, all of which may be running live JS processes, is about the same. It's a perfectly valid usage pattern but it's also going to eat a lot of memory. It's not like driving with your parking brake on, but it's like loading your car up with its maximum passenger capacity and then complaining that it's accelera…

I've done it before with earlier versions of Firefox on a system with fewer resources that yielded a substantially lower memory footprint. It is very possible to do a lot with less memory.

But this has been discussed ad nauseam, and it's unproductive to keep complaining about it. The fact should be obvious, at least by now, that sandboxing uses more resources. If you're fine with that, great! If not, do something to fix it or use a different browser.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#213

Post by kmfrk »

Just yesterday, I was thinking about something similar for Opera. Opera supports tab stacks (which are great), but many often go unused for days, so I thought about implementing a way to convert a tab stack to a simple tab with an overview of the sites that were open in it.

My main problem with this is that you can't order your tabs into groups - the extension may not even make a distinction between regular tabs and pinned tabs.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#214

Post by k3n »

chongli wrote: post #193
k3n wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit. Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you…

Tabs have replaced bookmarks as the means of saving stuff for later. Why is that? Because bookmarks require a lot more mental effort to organize and take more effort to delete when you're done with them. Bookmarks also take a lot longer to load than a tab (which is usually loaded already).

Very good point, and touches on a potential piece I'd like to write sometime. Used to, bookmarks were like a collection of good books -- easily filed away, organized, and still as good when you opened them a year later as when you last touched them.

But not anymore. They change. There's tons of them. And organization sucks, though FF isn't as bad as Chrome and IE, but the general paradigm of shortcuts needs to be re-evaluated. I don't like web-based services (for many reasons), and I've yet to find a fitting extension that works for me.

So yeah, I can see how this usage pattern has arisen, but I think the answer is ultimately up to innovation that has sadly yet to occur.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#215

Post by kirubakaran »

pizza wrote: post #119
bdcravens wrote: post #7

For a free product, the copy on their site feels a bit more "salesy" than I'm used to for a free product

I agree. It was the How do you make money? that made the whole page feel a bit.. off .. for me. I think taking it out would make it less confusing.

Not for me. It answered exactly the question I had in mind. I love the effort they put into the "salesy" page. I don't see why "salesy" is inherently bad. It sells well, even if it is free.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#216

Post by pbiggar »

srgseg wrote: post #204
andybak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what scenarios can I lose my list? What happens if I click it, close it's list tab, open some new tabs and click it again? Does the old list get overwritten? Is there any way to get it back?

You will never lose your list. If you store multiple sets of tabs, they will appear as "tab groups" in OneTab. If you accidentally close your OneTab tab, it will reappear when you click the blue extension icon or when you restart your web browser.

Brilliant! You should mention this on the site, it what I was looking to know.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#217

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

sp332 wrote: post #201
columbo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the money, it's about the complete disregard of quality. The applications we create should only use the resources they need.

If hogging lots of RAM makes my program legitimately run better, then that's what it should do! Chrome runs a process per domain (or something like that) for security and stability reasons. That adds a lot of overhead for lots of tabs. But that's OK because there's actually a reason for using all that RAM.

>If hogging lots of RAM makes my program legitimately run better

It objectively doesn't make your program run better to waste RAM.

If RAM usage goes up 2x every two years but RAM and hard drive speed go up 20% in the same time period, then using more RAM when you don't need it is making programs more sluggish to start and to suspend to disk, and it's making computers draw more power while sleeping (to keep that much RAM alive -- the D in DRAM means every bit in the RAM needs to be refreshed continuously).

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#218

Post by codemac »

learc83 wrote: post #185
tomkarlo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB of RAM is about $50 right now. If you have to replace that every $2 years, are you really complaining about the cost of $25 per year on your $1,000 computer system? It's a rounding error. Chrome, in particular, is generally be used for far more tabs (I have like 30 open right now on a MacBook Air) and increasingly complex web sites every year. It's easy to look at memory usage and complain, but the fact is that o…

>If you have to replace that every $2 years, are you really complaining about the cost of $25 per year on your $1,000 computer system? That's assuming you're using a computer with user upgradeable RAM, and not a new macbook pro.

This is where the physical waste really gets bad to me. I'm not weighing in on this discussion as far as more RAM vs better binaries because /I want both/.

But if you have to buy a whole new machine every two years when they only pieces of hardware that are getting better should be upgradeable (ram & display) it's pretty disheartening.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#219

Post by tomkarlo »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #187
tomkarlo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't open 100 apps on your computer and then complain about memory usage. Running 100 tabs at the same time, all of which may be running live JS processes, is about the same. It's a perfectly valid usage pattern but it's also going to eat a lot of memory. It's not like driving with your parking brake on, but it's like loading your car up with its maximum passenger capacity and then complaining that it's accelera…

I've done it before with earlier versions of Firefox on a system with fewer resources that yielded a substantially lower memory footprint. It is very possible to do a lot with less memory.

It's possible, but there are always competing goals - speed, security, reliability, features, memory usage. When capacity on one is growing quickly (and cheaply), it's not surprising it doesn't get the same priority as some of the others. In particular, I'm not sure how many extra users you'd get by reducing memory footprint versus adding features.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#220

Post by bnegreve »

jdietrich wrote: post #79

Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out. RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either D…

I disagree: a larger memory footprint means that a smaller fraction of the data is cached.

Since caches are up to 100 times faster, it does impact the reactivity of your program, in fact quite a lot.

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