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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

91–100 of 376 posts

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#91
I just counted my open tabs in Opera 42, and quit it so I could see the memory use.

799 open tabs. 8.5GB. Restarted in around 10 seconds and it's currently using around 2GB. "Delay loading of background tabs" is checked, which I believe is the default now.

Not had any serious responsiveness problems. The browser extension I use to give me a list of tabs on my sidebar is a little slow when opening a new window, that's about it.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#93
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 use tabs, but have them organized into a vertical tree. This allows many more to be visible at a time. Since they are in a sidebar, you interface with them like bookmarks, but they don't spawn a new tab when clicked. Because they are organized into a tree structure, its easy to recall the purpose of each.

For example, a search engine tab might lead to a stackoverflow tab which might lead to a few documentation tabs. As long as you remember what the documentarion is for, you can tell what the SO thread is about, and what is was you searched.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#94

Has the author tried https://vivaldi.com/ (started from the remnants of original opera I believe)

It's literally just Chrome, with a different chrome (UI) and some new features in the UI. You're not going to get anything faster than Chrome if it uses the same engine (Blink).

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#95
> Safari may take a second or two just to open a new blank tab on a 2014 iMac

Is "blank" actually blank? If you have new tabs set to show Top Sites (the default setting), there's a notable lag that doesn't occur if you set it to Empty Page. Of course, changing it is a reduction in functionality, and it's silly that loading a simple grid of screenshots is so slow. Chrome, for its part, is even slower (on my machine) to actually load the new tab page, but it loads it asynchronously with the address bar responding instantaneously, whereas Safari lags out the whole UI.

I still use Safari myself, with new tabs set to Empty Page, because I don't really care about the screenshot-grid functionality (in either browser), and Safari has better performance in other respects, as well as lower power consumption. But it irks me that the default macOS experience makes you wait to open a new tab; it's a terrible UX for something that shouldn't be hard to optimize.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#96

> 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…

You have a magic firefox then. I try to use it that way too, but its sitting at 1.8GB of RAM and 25-30% CPU usage with 103 tabs and it routinely bombs on me after a week or two when it gets up to 2.5GB or so.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#97
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU at 20%, "loading didn't make too much of a difference"??? 20% is obscene for a process without interaction. Imagine a paused video player taking 20%, or a minimised word editor. Even at 58 videos or documents.

You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.

This is a huge problem. Javascript has become a blight on the web, and browsers really need to make it easier to manage stopping scripts on background tabs and such.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#99

> 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.

That's bizarre; I just held down C-t for a few seconds and tab were opening at the rate of maybe 5-10 per second and it is now using 630M of ram with 98 tabs open. A-1 to switch back to the tab I had open was instantaneous (though the tab bar was animated and took almost 2s for the scroll animation to finish)

I'm not sure how the GP has over 200 tabs open with less RAM used than 98 empty tabs though.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#100

> 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…

If you have Flash installed and don't have an adblocker, for most textual content (not Imgur, YouTube), your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.
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