For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ http://www.uzbl.org/
All of those are WebKit-based, which was Chromium's rendering engine until recently. The rest of Chromium is primarily UI and network code, along with their sandboxing system and extensions - WebKit's "ports" have their own implementation of said network code tying into the framework that they're porting to (GTK+ or Qt, usually), and all three browsers you list use the WebKitGTK+ port. uzbl, the one I've used the mos…
Ōryōki Web Browser
71–80 of 181 posts
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAM is meant to be consumed. If your browser is using 50MB of RAM and has to swap every background tab to disk then you're not utilizing the resources of your computer, and getting a crappy user experience as a bonus.
Sure RAM is meant to be used, but not when the browser just consumes it forever, until it begins grinding to a halt. What could a browser POSSIBLY be doing with 4-500MB of RAM PER TAB? It's a huge problem, and extensions like The Great Suspender should not have to even exist.
Each tab is a separate process. A separating operating system, you could say. Would you complain that your OS needs that much RAM? I wouldn't.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#73For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ http://www.uzbl.org/
For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually lightweight (if not html5-compliant) and not webkit-based: http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are very lightweight and don't bother with HTML at all:
https://www.google.com/search?q=spiders&espv=2&biw=1439&bih=...
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAM is meant to be consumed. If your browser is using 50MB of RAM and has to swap every background tab to disk then you're not utilizing the resources of your computer, and getting a crappy user experience as a bonus.
Yes, RAM is meant to be consumed, but I still find it incredibly hard to believe that my browser NEEDS multiple gigabytes of memory. Regardless of how much I have to spare.
I think that really depends on what you are asking your browser to do.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#75This project is solving the wrong problem. It's not the interfaces of web browsers that suck, it's the gigabytes of RAM they consume.
> ...it's the gigabytes of RAM they consume
We'd need a sandboxing and module system for Javascript to solve this. A problem that is both technically complex and not 'sexy', so don't hold your breath.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#76This page is a good example of what's wrong with HN.
Someone publishes their open source experiment in minimal browser UI design, and everyone shits on it for not being a built-from-scratch web browser with low memory usage.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#77This project is solving the wrong problem. It's not the interfaces of web browsers that suck, it's the gigabytes of RAM they consume.
RAM is meant to be consumed. If your browser is using 50MB of RAM and has to swap every background tab to disk then you're not utilizing the resources of your computer, and getting a crappy user experience as a bonus.
I have good gear but definitely not the latest and greatest of everything. My laptop is a macbook pro from 3 years ago. My desktop has an Intel 2600k and 16gb of ram. Both run on SSDs. I use my laptop for work. Rarely have less than 20 tabs open in chrome, which stays open for days/weeks at a time. I've got VMs running and xCode, sublime, ios simulator, bunch of terminals, bunch of node apps, couple corporate sec products and incremental backup software, etc, etc.... Not a single thing is slow about anything. And I'm anal about things being slow. I hate waiting for anything. Its the same on my older desktop, which I also game on. I don't shut down my browser before playing games to free up ram, or kill photoshop, etc.
Unused ram is useless ram. Its a problem when you're always out of ram. But get an SSD for the odd times you swap. You won't notice it. But either way, the only time my browser is slow is if I restart it and it loads my previous 20-30 tabs all at once. It'll do its thing for 10-20 seconds then done.
I get its a lot of ram but what I don't get is why this is impacting people so much? In this day and age most of what people do is in a browser. And if you only have a tab or two and you're working outside of your browser, and you think your browser is killing your computer? Maybe its time to upgrade or add some ram.
You can get 16gb of ram for $50/$60... I abuse my machines with multitasking all day and none of them feel slow because my browser uses too much ram. Both have 16gb.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#78For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ http://www.uzbl.org/
For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually lightweight (if not html5-compliant) and not webkit-based: http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
Savage
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, RAM is meant to be consumed, but I still find it incredibly hard to believe that my browser NEEDS multiple gigabytes of memory. Regardless of how much I have to spare.
Is this a problem a browser can solve? I mean modern websites are so large with so many crappy stuff and always loading something in the background - if you have 15-20 tabs with similar background loading web sites your browser is bound to consume a lot of memory. If I am not missing something obvious, aren't we blaming the wrong thing?
I'm not sure about that. Chrome's Task Manager says this HN post is taking 255mb and the front page 101mb.
Re: Ōryōki Web Browser
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If your browser is using 50MB of RAM If only that were a relevant remark. The tab with the linked Oryoki web page alone is using 250 megabytes for me. And a second tab of the same page is using an additional 230 megabytes. Somehow I don't think that that's well utilized RAM for the ~350 kilobytes of web content. This page uses 200 megabytes as a tab, and HN isn't exactly a heavy page.
It's not really chrome's fault. Blame it on increased screen resolution, copious amounts of available ram and a requirement to prefer using less cpu than less ram. Which also has the nice effect of using less energy. If you have ram and it is not being used, it is completely wasted, if you have cpu cycles and it is not being used you are just saving on battery and not over heating the laptop.
>Blame it on increased screen resolution
Maybe on 3 or 4K laptops. But aren't most 1388x768 or something equally dismal? Which isn't far off 1024x768. Anyways, a 1080p frame at 32bit depth is only 8MB.
Browsers are hardly low CPU, either. I'll see things idling at 10% of an i5. Which is like 200%+ of CPUs used for web browsing of yesteryear.
All this, and web pages are slower to respond. I recently used a page that loaded a grid of images. Changing by battery/throttling had a 2s impact on load time. CPU was pegged during that time.