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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#111

Post by dirkg »

Chrome is the culprit. For as much as they helped with V8 innovations, they've also done harm

- ignores usability basics: horrible UI with > 10 tabs, reloads all tabs, many other issues - all of these are things people have complained about forever, they refuse to fix

- memory hog: Chrome uses more memory than almost any other browser

- Google forces Chrome upon you since Hangouts etc will not work with other browsers

- for reasons passing understanding, the Chrome UI has been copied by every browser

Firefox is better at every single thing and has a far better extension model, which sadly they will deprecate again to copy Chrome. I find it very sad that its popularity and market share has fallen as the world has collectively dumbed down the browser UI.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#112

Post by chanux »

owaislone wrote: post #26
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…

> 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…

I wonder whether these good days would soon come to an end with process per tab model.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#114

Post by CaptSpify »

prewett wrote: post #24
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.

And, obviously, websites apparently don't want a fast website. Empirically, they want the slow, JavaScript frameworky, image heavy, ad heavy, social media link-ful they have. Unfortunately, as a user, I want their website to be the opposite of what they want their website to be.

I've been ad-blocking for a long time, but I've recently started default blocking all JS, remote-fonts, and even CSS. It's made my browsing significantly faster

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#115

Post by blitzd »

dirkg wrote: post #111

Chrome is the culprit. For as much as they helped with V8 innovations, they've also done harm - ignores usability basics: horrible UI with > 10 tabs, reloads all tabs, many other issues - all of these are things people have complained about forever, they refuse to fix - memory hog: Chrome uses more memory than almost any other browser - Google forces Chrome upon you since Hangouts etc will not work with other browser…

Firefox has it's issues as well, which they also 'refuse' to fix. For instance, much of the browser falls apart when using remote desktop (RDP) sessions - it can even break remote desktop sessions as a whole in some instances, if Firefox is left open. I got bitten by it enough times that I simply won't use it any more - and Chrome does not have these issues (though it is certainly far from perfect).

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#116

Post by Analemma_ »

CaptSpify wrote: post #109
nothrabannosir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sucks, but I don't know if they had much choice. Imgur is the classic example of the "treadmill" inherent to business models like image hosting:

1. All the existing image hosting sites suck

2. Someone gets sick enough of it that they launch a new one, with all the features people want: free, direct linking, no/unobtrusive ads, etc.

3. Because this new site is so much better, everyone flicks to it. Bandwidth costs skyrocket.

4. The operators need to cover their costs, so they start adding more ads and blocking direct links. The site starts to suck. Go to step 1.

Sometimes investor dollars get involved, but it doesn't change the basic formula. This is why we've seen Photobucket -> minus -> giphy-> imgur -> gfycat, and it will continue in his vein forever. I don't think there's any way to run a site like this profitably without pissing people off sufficiently that they go elsewhere.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#117

Post by hau »

cpt1138 wrote: post #12

Installing Ghostery, Privacy Badger and adblocker makes a world of difference in terms of how fast page loads are for me. Ads are not just annoying, they slow the web down considerably and make the mobile experience terrible.

Why would you use adblocker/ublock and 2 other extensions which are no more than a filter lists for adblocker/ublock?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#118

Post by FussyZeus »

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.

To be entirely fair: there's a lot of video content on there now too, with the gifv and related shenanigans. Personally I find it incredibly convenient that uploading gifs or mp4's there automatically converts them to gifv, gif and mp4. That's really handy, especially for a free service with no strings attached (that I know of) to offer.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#119

Post by chetanahuja »

Hondor wrote: post #54
chetanahuja wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

a "debatable" option shouldn't be the only option. Which is the case in chrome. No way to disable that behavior either from the command line or from the settings UI.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#120

Post by rtpg »

delecti wrote: post #6
iMerNibor wrote: post #4

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

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

It might not be a bad default, but here's the alternative: load a tab only when you've signaled you're going to look at it.

Even if you have 300 tabs open, your browser won't try loading everything at once, so you can do what you want.

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