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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#161

Post by jholman »

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…

400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS.

Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does layout on fifty tabs at once, but who cares, I don't do that. I do find that I need to restart my browser every few hundred tab open/close cycles, which takes under 30 seconds (just did the restart, that dropped RAM use to 1.3GB, but it'll get back up to 1.9 pretty soon). Restarts used to be a lot less frequent, and a lot faster, before work required me to keep two slack clients open. Running multiple YouTube windows at once seems to be bad for uptime.

Regarding OP's complaints, opening a new tab take imperceptible time, a new window is about half a second (only marginally slower than notepad), and switching tabs can be done several times per second.

I have put ZERO effort into make Firefox run faster, unless you count running AdBlock. I haven't even bothered to figure out which is the best adblocker.

Why do people use Chrome, again?

(edit to add a few details)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#162

Post by AstralStorm »

kpcyrd wrote: post #72
zie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Well, one of those tabs is graylog and one is gmail. Do you have e10s enabled? (open about:support, check for "Multiprocess Windows")

This only works properly since 50+ version. You will get many issues if you try it in the old one.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#163

Post by raverbashing »

FussyZeus wrote: post #118
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.

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.

Yeah, that's it

There's a lot of gifs that are converted to video (because it is 10x smaller when converted to video)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#164

Post by lagadu »

abrowne wrote: post #76
21echoes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).

> FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta) The Developer Edition replaced Aurora, which was the alpha release, one version between the beta and Nightly.

AKA: the alpha :)

Credit to them though, Aurora was surprisingly stable for most of its lifetime, despite not even being a beta.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#165

Post by AstralStorm »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #102
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.

If you're using an integrated Intel GPU, immediately switch to modesetting X driver. Intel DDX leaks surfaces and that is attributed to process which allocated them.

Modesetting is faster too.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#166

Post by eridius »

twic wrote: post #8
rocky1138 wrote: post #2

"Why are browsers so slow?" Site downloads almost 500KB of fonts.

"Safari may take a second or two just to open a new blank tab on a 2014 iMac." He's not (just) talking about the slowness of websites, but of browsers themselves.

Except it doesn't. The author probably has some extension installed that's slowing it down, like sambe just said happened to them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227587).

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#167

Post by jholman »

weaksauce wrote: post #78
21echoes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 group…

You might (might not) find my extension useful. I made it for people that horde tabs like you and me. It's a page that lists tabs per window visually and if you click on one of the links it focuses the tab for you. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ and chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... It's also open source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist If…

I just installed it (Tabist reports 415 tabs in 9 windows). Looks tentatively useful, I'll keep it around.

If it's easy to add a by-date-last-opened to the order-by at the top, that MIGHT be useful? If it's easy to add the text of the window title to the table, that MIGHT be useful? Those are just top-of-my-head spitball ideas.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#169

Post by Fnoord »

jholman wrote: post #161
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…

400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does…

Try uBlock Origin. It performs even better than ABP, and hasn't sold out.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#170

Post by nachtigall »

olejorgenb wrote: post #134
21echoes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 group…

For the lazy: Awesomebar is just firefox's the built-in address bar. It can be configured to search simultaneous through history, tab (titles of open tabs), etc. Or one can specify what to search with this micro language: Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. Add % to search for matches in your currently…

Wow, using Firefox for 15 years and did not know. Here's a link to the docs I found now: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
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