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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#101

Post by nothrabannosir »

syrrim wrote: post #88
nothrabannosir wrote: post #81

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.

I don't forget, I just don't forgive. It's unacceptable either way. Someone has to take responsibility---might as well start with the browser. Then we can push it down from there; maybe if browsers were held accountable for pages' resource usage they'd implement resource controls. Like they currently do with limiting setTimeout on inactive pages, but more comprehensively. And maybe they'd implement better inspection tools for resource usage (chrome was ahead of the game; I'm looking at you, Firefox )

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#102

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

firefox 50.1 on Xubuntu - currently at 6GB of memory, when it gets above 12GB I euthanize it and restart it. About 36 open tabs.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#103

Post by minitech »

PeCaN wrote: post #40
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…

Really? You're the first person I've heard that doesn't have that problem. My Firefox gets quite slow on both my home and work computers¹ at ~40+ tabs. The tab groups extension (which they removed from core, I guess to make room for Pocket and Hello²) does make managing lots of tabs much easier however. I regularly have to clean out my tabs or switching takes several seconds. I currently have 37 tabs open and Firefox…

> - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs)

has to intercept every request

> - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?)

has to intercept every request

> - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol)

might have to intercept every request, and why do you need this

> - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random)

has to intercept every request

> - uBlock Origin

has to intercept every request

> - uMatrix (possibly my single favorite Firefox extension; control JS and more, like NoScript on steroids and easier to use)

has to intercept every request

Stop installing so many stupid extensions. Random UA switching is especially pointless; “Decentraleyes” is a close runner-up. Firefox has performance problems, but I think you’re definitely seeing extension bloat if you have that kind of device.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#104

Post by nothrabannosir »

debacle wrote: post #100
owaislone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

not Imgur, YouTube

It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.

If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#105

Post by prewett »

sp332 wrote: post #61
seibelj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS. If you want a fast website, remove all JS and make everything simple. For maximum performance put the static site on a CDN. It isn't hard.

This only works if you have a reasonably small site. If you have a lot of pages, like a news site, you start running up against the fact that your filesystem is not a great database. You can get a significant speedup by putting content in a database with a good index.

I don't follow this. It's pretty hard to get any database to be as fast as serving a file off the disk, which is why caches on web servers are pre-rendered pages stored as files on the disk.

Filesystems are a great "database" for large quantities of information, as long as it doesn't change, and you don't need to do any queries on it. I think there is quite a lot of range between "reasonably small site" and "news site" for which static pages work well. You could even have a successful news site with static pages, as long as you didn't want things like comments and trending articles, because while there are lots of articles being created, news articles don't usually change.

Changing layout and themes, however, could be no fun with static files.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#106

Post by minitech »

throwaw12ay wrote: post #89

A technical question. Does using other format like XML or XHTML make rendering faster given the same amount of nodes + styles in the page? Can it help make browsers render a page faster?

No. It might make parsing faster if you optimized for it, but I don’t see any reason for the choice of text representation to affect rendering speed.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#107

Post by PeCaN »

minitech wrote: post #103
PeCaN wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You're the first person I've heard that doesn't have that problem. My Firefox gets quite slow on both my home and work computers¹ at ~40+ tabs. The tab groups extension (which they removed from core, I guess to make room for Pocket and Hello²) does make managing lots of tabs much easier however. I regularly have to clean out my tabs or switching takes several seconds. I currently have 37 tabs open and Firefox…

> - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs) has to intercept every request > - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?) has to intercept every request > - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol) might have to intercept every request, and why do you need this > - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random) has to intercept every request > - uBlock Origin has to intercept every request > - uMa…

So you're saying running some triggers when a request is made causes Firefox to use a ton of RAM and switch tabs slowly. Okay, I'm not exactly sure how that works, but I haven't poked around Firefox a lot.

> > - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol)

> might have to intercept every request, and why do you need this

You probably never thought of this, but because I use gopher.

> > - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random)

> has to intercept every request

…No, it doesn't (actually, it just changes some browser settings on a timer).

> Random UA switching is especially pointless; “Decentraleyes” is a close runner-up.

Ah, excuse me for caring about privacy.

In summary, you didn't actually look anything up, points for trying though.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#109

Post by CaptSpify »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #104
debacle wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not Imgur, YouTube It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter. If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.

I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#110

Post by rpwverheij »

kilroy123 wrote: post #87
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…

While I don't have _that_ many tabs open. I do usually keep 20 - 50 open in chrome. Same experience, with low / no memory foot-print; using The Great Suspender. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... I'm on a 2015 MBP with 16 GB of ram and like 20 extensions installed.

tnx for the tip, installed it. 1 million users, so it must be doing somethign right
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