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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#51

Post by 21echoes »

chongli wrote: post #37
21echoes wrote: post #19

> 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.

Firefox with Tab Groups and AwesomeBar fits very nicely with my workflow--

1. I dont have to think. I Cmd+Click links as I find them interesting, switch tabs as my attention changes, etc. and the tabs just stay there, waiting.

2. AwesomeBar searches over open tabs by default, and selecting a suggestion switches to that open tab rather than opening a new one.

3. When I have time, I can sort my tabs into labelled groups ("Work", "Research", "Shopping", "Politics", etc.)

4. Tabs are sync'd to and from my Firefox for Android automatically, so if I'm on the move and I want to pull up that thing on the tip of my tongue, it's right there on my phone as well.

I'm sure it's not perfect for everyone, but it works for me /shrug

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#52

Post by mkj »

semicolon_storm wrote: post #42
StavrosK wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If there are only 6 tabs it should be easy to narrow down which is a problem?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#53

Post by mixmastamyk »

semicolon_storm wrote: post #42
StavrosK wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vacuuming your profile might help:

    #!/bin/bash
    killall firefox
    for file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do
        echo sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM
        sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM
    done
I do it in my once-a-month cleanup script.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#54

Post by Hondor »

chetanahuja wrote: post #27
delecti wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, it's debateable whether that's a bad default to begin with.

Oh everything is debatable if you're inclined to debate. But as far as user experience goes, that shitty default (with no way to disable it) on chrome is a pretty one-sided debate.

The point of being debatable is that it's not obvious what the best answer is.

If it didn't load all the tabs, then you'd see an outdated version of the page when you clicked on a tab, or it'd load when you clicked on it, forcing you to wait right at the moment when you want it immediately.

Reloading all tabs sounds like the best option for people who use tabs to temporarily use several websites at once. That's what I do - never having more than half a dozen and closing them all when I'm finished on the computer. For people who use them in place of bookmarks, it would be better not to load them.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#55

Post by zie »

21echoes wrote: post #19

> 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…

Picture proof of memory usage: http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt

FF 1.3GB memory with 10 tabs and 5% of CPU, with FF in the background.

Switching tabs is absolutely not instant, opening new tabs is reasonable, bet definitely not instant.

I'd love your numbers ;)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#56

Post by pas »

chongli wrote: post #37
21echoes wrote: post #19

> 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.

it should (would?) look like a tree (or more precisely a forest), that'd show how you explored things, with text saved and indexed, and with the option to save even full pages too (for the last ~week or so).

it should be integrated with history (and the back button should not just show a dumb list on right click)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#57

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

zie wrote: post #55
21echoes wrote: post #19

> 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…

Picture proof of memory usage: http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt FF 1.3GB memory with 10 tabs and 5% of CPU, with FF in the background. Switching tabs is absolutely not instant, opening new tabs is reasonable, bet definitely not instant. I'd love your numbers ;)

I'm in a similar situation to the GP. Addons used to help:

BarTab Heavy - Allows unloading of unused tabs. Lets tabs act like temporary bookmarks. Tree Style Tab - Just great tab management. uBlock Origin + uMatrix - Lots less cruft loaded and running to slow things down. Session Manager - Lets me save windows with groups of tabs like bookmarks, works amazingly for looking things up and being able to restore a lot of references at once.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#58

Post by jdright »

21echoes wrote: post #44
jdright wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At this exactly time I have 27 tabs, this is the memory usage:

  Image	PID	Hard Faults/sec	Commit (KB)	Working Set (KB)	Shareable (KB)	Private (KB)
  firefox.exe	10604	0	1,529,308	1,491,692	           62,348	1,429,344
I'm on Windows 7, 39 days and 5 hours up time.

This Firefox instance is running since: 8:05:29 AM 05/12/2016

Firefox 50 (with a pending update).

Also, I see the process as a 32-bits image but I was sure it was 64-bits, will need to check on this.

And I have only: Facebook Ads Block, Ghostery and uBlock Origin.

So being Windows 7 and probably an 32bits Firefox install may cause all this difference?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#59

Post by sp332 »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #50
iMerNibor wrote: post #4

> 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.

It gives you a "restore session" page where you can choose which tabs to re-open.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#60

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

semicolon_storm wrote: post #42
StavrosK wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

254 Tabs, 3.3GB of RAM, ~2% CPU usage for me on Firefox 50.1.0. You've got something wrong (and I have too many tabs open)...
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