Why are browsers so slow? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#141

Post by flukus » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:07 AM UTC

prewett wrote: post #105

sp332 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sit…

I'd imagine a hybrid could also be a good choice. If you're a news site you could keep the last weeks worth of stories in a CDN for instance.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#142

Post by Aoyagi » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:24 AM UTC

I wouldn't say browers are slow, it's just that sites are bloated to no end.

Then again, as is Chrome.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#143

Post by euwwpieupbui » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:25 AM UTC

unwiredben wrote: post #90

If you're in a recent Firefox, open a new tab to the URL "about:performance" -- it will show you a report on how your add-ins and tabs are affecting the browser. One of my coworkers used it to find that a tab from a IoT device controller page was slowing down the whole browser by doing lots of unnecessary page refreshes.

"about:performance may currently be slowing down Firefox"

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#144

Post by dispose13432 » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:26 AM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #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. An…

>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.

No one is forced into anything. It's just that the browser went from simply rendering HTML and some associated eye-candy JS to being an OS.

So JS, which used to be a relatively safe, interpreted language, turned into Java, a complicated JIT VM where every millisecond counts. In the process, security holes are introduced, and competing with the "Big Guys" is just too hard.

It's like why no one can compete against Intel for power and speed. It's just too expensive.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#145

Post by janci » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:27 AM UTC

Browsers are slow, but I can cope with it. But what I hate is that browsers are nondeterministic.

Try Ctrl+C,Ctrl+T,Ctrl+v,Enter combo. In opera it worked flawlessly everytime. In Firefox, it sometimes works, sometime it opens new tab without URL, sometime it pastes half of URL (?!) and navigatest there.

In chrome you never know what sugesstion will the address bar give to you. In opera, you were 100% sure that your bookmarks will be there, so you could do Ctrl+T, type first few letters and press Enter without looking.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#146

Post by richardboegli » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:29 AM UTC

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.

Try Pale Moon.

Forked from Firefox 27 and super fast.

http://palemoon.org

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#147

Post by thecopy » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:31 AM UTC

prewett wrote: post #25

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…

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

I have started to use HTML version of GMail. Really refreshing to have a snappy interface again. Manual Ctrl+R to refresh though. That tab is using 1.4MB of RAM.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#148

Post by anaisbetts » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:32 AM UTC

I didn't see the correct answer yet, so I'll just tell you, tabs have a delay to create because in almost all modern browsers you have to wait for a process to be created and for everything to be paged in, _then_ wait for a bunch of IPC calls to complete.

Old browsers didn't do this, so creating tabs was so fast! But they were also much easier to compromise. Tradeoffs.

Source: Electron maintainer

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#149

Post by jsz0 » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:36 AM UTC

Your problem might be disk IO speed related. How fast is your storage? Most browsers still do trash a lot of disk IO even if you have plenty of memory available. For whatever reason it seems like OSX is way more prone to having performance problems due to slow disk IO. I have plenty of RAM, CPU and GPU so whenever I see a performance hiccup I know it's time to clear some space off my SSD. Performance of my (several year old, third party) SSD goes off a cliff when it has less than 15% or so free space available. If I get it back to 20% free space it's back to smooth sailing again.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#150

Post by mentando » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 7:42 AM UTC

chetanahuja wrote: post #119

Hondor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it is debatable, if it is good.

For some it is obviously not, but for others it is a good default.

What's bad is that it cannot be changed. That is not debatable.