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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#171

Post by nachtigall »

StavrosK wrote: post #36
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 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.

You might want to "Refresh" your Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... It help for me. Especially if you many add-ons over time that might have done all kind of things to your settings...

Backup/Restore your bookmarks etc. afterwards as it cleans up everything. Resetting everything afterwards took 1h for me but was totally worth it in retrospective.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#172

Post by Fnoord »

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.

Ghostery sold out, they sell your metadata to 3rd parties. Try uMatrix instead. It is as powerful as NoScript, but easier to use. For adblocker, consider uBlock Origin. Better performance, and didn't sell out.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#173

Post by bootload »

swiley wrote: post #160
bootload wrote: post #70

I wrote a simple bit of code to calculate the size of index pages with includes (js, css, images) and here's what I get: page resource total url (b) (b) (Kb) ---------------------------------------------- 33857 143 34.0 news.ycombinator.com 62690 55975 118.7 arstechnica.com 11844 223862 235.7 seldomlogical.com 218837 765943 984.8 newyorktimes.com l592771 545304 1138.1 guardian.co.uk The one thing I notice watching th…

This is why people don't read news articles. It's not that their lazy, it's that the sites hosting them almost feel hostile.

"It's not that their lazy, it's that the sites hosting them almost feel hostile."

Agree with that. A driver of the page size (JS, images, video) is advertising. Advertising and advertising techniques are distorting the news and ability to read it.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#174

Post by nachtigall »

euwwpieupbui wrote: post #143
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"

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199987

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#175

Post by mih »

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…

Been using FF for a long time and still was unaware of this. Thanks for the tip

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#176

Post by iopq »

vacri wrote: post #31
delecti wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"load all tabs" on restart is a terrible default for people who like to have dozens of tabs. I can't see any reasonable argument for it, for those users.

I actually want this to happen in all of my tabs because I want them to UPDATE. This is why I keep them open in the first place.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#177

Post by josteink »

alkonaut wrote: post #154

Wow this tab madness... I want one row of tabs, and I want to see the page title on the tabs. I get an itch when I get enough tabs that they just become little favicons so I can't see what the tab is doing (By that time there is a 99% chance it's garbage and I don't need it- but now I don't know!). I wish there was some system of grouping tabs, e.g. if I visit a newpaper site and Ctrl+Click 3 article links it would k…

> I wish there was some system of grouping tabs

Like Tab Groups? FireFox has had them since forever, but since "nobody" used them, it was removed. You now need an extension to regain that functionality:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

You also have tree-style tabs, which organizes tabs based on their parent tabs (those they were opened from):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

You have several options. Unless of course you use Chrome, in which case Google has said "fuck you" to actual power-users and choice ;)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#180

Post by hoschicz »

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.

Except then you will have to render the HTML on the server. Which increases the latency significantly.

I'd prefer to generate all the HTML files for a site every update, just like Jekyll or Hugo does.

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