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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

41–50 of 376 posts

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#41
Something I've found very useful for Chrome is "The Great Suspender" extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

It frees up lots of memory but still lets me keep lots of tabs around without having to be militant and killing them off as I stop using them.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#42

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

I don't know which Firefox you're using, but I want it. Mine is super laggy all the time, even with one or two tabs open. Opening a new tab takes half a second, visiting a new page takes half a second, going back takes half a second. It's extremely frustrating to use, and I don't even have that many extensions or history pages.

6 tabs, 1GB of RAM, ~20% CPU usage for me on Firefox. I have a few basic QoL plugins like LastPass, uBlock, and NoScript. It's absolutely ridiculous. I want to keep using FireFox, but it's forcing me to consider moving to another browser.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#43

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes. I don't…

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#44
post #39

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

I really doubt you and you dont provide any details about your setup either. I have exactly the same issues as the poster. I have about 20 tabs and it is costing 1.7GB ram. Note that I almost never reboot, so it may well be leaks, but even so, on eventual crashes, reloading my tabs is painfully slow.

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s). I can screenshot my Activity Monitor if that'd help?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#45
Yeah, Opera with Presto engine was amazing. It was the only browser that focused on UX, really fast and responsive UX. It also had real keyboard navigation, going through the links was easier, than using a mouse, temporarily enabling javascript or cookies in a tab was couple of keypresses away. Good times.

Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. And they are big and so deep in the government, that no one seem to be able to do anything about it.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#46
post #25

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

I'm assuming you don't have a GMail tab open. My Firefox memory usage steadily climbs if I have a GMail tab open.

Mmmm that's true, I don't. I tend to close GMail tabs once I'm done with them because I also noticed they tend to leak and are poorly optimized for non-Chrome browsers.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#47
post #37

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

I love "bookmark all tabs" commands. I tend to open a lot of related tabs and run out of time like the OP but I don't leave the all open, I bookmark them all with a few clicks and move on...

But I agree about the UI in general. My habit seems to require some monthly to quarterly clean up to keep it from getting to be too much.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#48
I downloaded the latest version of Opera this weekend after a lot of frustration with Chrome's drain on my Mac's battery life. Man was I shocked. It uses the same engine as Chrome (Blink) but somehow manages to double the amount of battery life on my machine. I could never get more than three hours on my Retina MBP before I tried it.

And it supports Chrome extensions, to boot.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#49

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

I don't know which Firefox you're using, but I want it. Mine is super laggy all the time, even with one or two tabs open. Opening a new tab takes half a second, visiting a new page takes half a second, going back takes half a second. It's extremely frustrating to use, and I don't even have that many extensions or history pages.

Based on my personal experience I think you are living in some parallel universe. Perhaps you post some other parameters about your system?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#50

> modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. firefox does not do this.

Firefox does something else stupid though: If your browser crashes/freezes (which, because no multi-process, 99.999% of the time is caused by bad JavaScript on a given page) it does the helpful thing of restoring your tabs. So now it's a race to close the offending tab before it can fully load.
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