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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#181

Post by josteink »

Klathmon wrote: post #38
RandyRanderson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only add-ons I use are ones to remove ads. If I didn't have them those ads would easily make the my overall performance much, much worse. I have a custom blank page loaded from SSD that has only a small amount of html5/pure js and it takes maybe 1000ms on an intel i5/3xxx. If I open a new tab without any other windows/tabs open it's very fast, maybe 100ms. A new private tab (doesn't load add-ons or my custom new…

Actually some adblockers were found to increase CPU and memory usage significantly.

> Actually some adblockers were found to increase CPU and memory usage significantly.

And then it was fixed. No reason to assume it still applies, unless you have new data.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#182

Post by jakub_g »

garaetjjte wrote: post #153

>Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs. Opera was sane: it did not reload a tab unless you asked for it. It just reopened everything from cache. Firefox also loads suspended tabs from cache. It reloads them(on first switch to tab), but no data is downloaded from server.

Not fully true. If you open a large session and have a network sniffer on, you'd see likely at least dozens of requests for favicon.ico from half of internet :)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#184

Post by sametmax »

Analemma_ wrote: post #116
CaptSpify wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is an additional components for imgur : it became more than an image sharing site, it's now a weird looking social network with a very niche community with its own rules and culture.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#185

Post by josteink »

wanda wrote: post #126
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…

Chrome is quite clearly targeted at the regular user, rather than the power user or developer/tinkerer. News flash: the regular user does not open 270 tabs, or even 10 tabs. You can tell me this claim is anecdotal, but since you have provided no evidence to substantiate your claims, I'd say the burden of proof falls on you first. > "Firefox is better at every single thing" Ouch. I mean, your post is littered with uns…

> Chrome is quite clearly targeted at the regular user, rather than the power user or developer/tinkerer. News flash: the regular user does not open 270 tabs, or even 10 tabs

If that is your impression, I got news for you.

Regular users don't even know tabs exist, and every single tab opened goes unclosed.

My wife had some 200 on her iPad. Every time she opens a tab and can't click "back" she says the internet is broken again.

(And ofcourse she can't find her previous tab in that mess of unmanaged tabs)

Regular users have a lot of tabs too, but for completely different reasons.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#186

Post by pawadu »

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…

10 minutes and 2-3 tabs on thingiverse.com can easily bring my firefox to its knees.

I think its a combination of badly written code, webgl and maybe even adblocker breaking some otherwise mostly working code.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#187

Post by zeveb »

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.

> It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.

I particularly like how imgurl flat-out refuses to work if you disable JavaScript. It's an image-viewing site. Browsers have been able to download images since the beginning, and have been able to render them inline since almost the beginning. There's no need for JavaScript at all, and yet imgurl deliberately choose not to work. 'Brazen disrespect' doesn't begin to describe it.

I don't mind that they try to use JavaScript to minimise the data they serve. They could always show one or a few images without JavaScript, and provide a link to more (and hide it when JavaScript is enabled).

Note that this has nothing to do with ad blocking — they could display all the ads they want to a non-script-executer.

'Brazen disrespect' really doesn't begin to describe it. 'Rank unprofessionalism' starts to.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#188

Post by com2kid »

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…

> Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus),

Same setup, but my Firefox leaks memory like a sieve. It will crash 2x a day easily.

That said, I also have LastPass installed, I am using uBlock instead of ABP (though uBlock uses less memory anyway), and I also have RES installed.

I have seen websites leak incredible amounts of memory. To some extent I don't even know how much it matters what browser is used, if the JS is bad enough.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#189

Post by zeveb »

iMerNibor wrote: post #4

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

It does, however, reload the tab's contents when you switch to it. The smarter thing to do IMHO would be to marshal the DOM & JavaScript context to disk, and load that, only reloading from the original page if the user clicks 'reload.'

I don't think that the disk space necessary to cache all this is scary, since after all the whole thing has to fit in memory anyway, and disks are order of magnitude larger than RAM.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#190

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #151
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…

I just installed Opera 12.17 to verify your claims. I was very disappointed. This reminds me of people that say their old Nokia phones were better than the smartphones of today. Funny how time distorts things.

You probably just don't appreciate the extra features Opera gives. Which, of course, is fine, but for many of us they are a dealbreaker. I'm still looking for another browser giving me real MDI with "click tab to minimize" functionality... Otter Browser kind of does but falls short in other respects. Vivaldi doesn't even try (they haven't even made the menubar native...)

By the way, if you are referring to speed rather than features, you need to take into account that when you try Opera 12.17 right now, you are trying a browser that has been frozen in time for years while the JavaScript on websites evolved. For this reason, it's now very slow (if not incompatible) in JavaScript-heavy websites like Facebook, Gmail, etc... but I can attest as a long-time user that it was indeed the fastest browser in its time.

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