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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#191

Post by chongli »

21echoes wrote: post #51
chongli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

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…

I use tab groups as well and I have hundreds of tabs spread among all the groups. I like this feature but manual organization of the tabs still feels slow and cumbersome. It also tends to be really slow to first open up due to the huge numbers of thumbnails involved.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#192

Post by roel_v »

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 used to do this too, and as of ~ 2 weeks ago, about half of all my stored tabs are replaced with 'New tab' after restarting the browser. No amount of screwing around in the profile and session_store or whatever it's called, or with plugins, will fix it. So now I'm weaning myself off 'tabs as bookmarks', and going back (after, what, 10 years?) to using bookmarks the way they were meant.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#193

Post by zeveb »

iopq wrote: post #176
vacri wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I think that the mechanism I suggested elsewhere would handle this best: each tab's complete state (DOM, JavaScript &c.) should be marshalled to disk at quit (and checkpointed periodically, in case of crashes); on startup, all tabs are loaded and their DOM & JavaScript contexts restored. If a tab's context had it set to update periodically, then that periodic-update context would be restored; if not, then the remote server would never be contacted until and unless the user hits reload.

This seems so obviously correct to me that I wonder what I'm missing.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#194

Post by madeofpalk »

debacle wrote: post #100
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…

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.

> don't have an adblocker [...] your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.

Except for when Adblocker (used to) makes your browser work harder https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#195

Post by progval »

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 allows me to quickly open a new tab and do something if I am in a hury.

Otherwise, I press Ctrl+Tab long enough to go through all the tabs and wait for it to load them all.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#196

Post by the8472 »

roel_v wrote: post #192
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 used to do this too, and as of ~ 2 weeks ago, about half of all my stored tabs are replaced with 'New tab' after restarting the browser. No amount of screwing around in the profile and session_store or whatever it's called, or with plugins, will fix it. So now I'm weaning myself off 'tabs as bookmarks', and going back (after, what, 10 years?) to using bookmarks the way they were meant.

the session manager addon would have helped in that situation. it creates regular snapshots of your session which can be used to restore things if something like that happens (which is rare in my experience)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#197

Post by timonovici »

com2kid wrote: post #188
jholman wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

My worst problems were with Toptal's website. I even tweeted them about it, but it still leaked memory like crazy. Maybe they fixed it already, but I wouldn't know - they didn't have articles that interest me in a while.

Anyway. I have Firefox with uBlock, on Archlinux. With JS disabled. 400MB, about a hundred tabs. I do recommend using it that way. I also have Chromium, for things that require JS - youtube, facebook and the like.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#198

Post by madeofpalk »

sametmax wrote: post #184
Analemma_ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imgur was originally developed 'as a gift' for reddit. As any HN commenters would tell you, your business model should never rely on external companies.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#199

Post by Jaruzel »

jasikpark wrote: post #79
chongli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

https://pinboard.io works relatively well as a way to save links for later.

I use a hand-cranked version of this, and have been for over 10 years, I call it WebBookmarks.

It's a small bookmarklet that when clicked takes the current tabs URL and adds it as an escaped param onto the WebBookmarks URL and launches WebBookmarks. Then in the WebBookmarks form the Title and URL are already filled in, I assign a category, and click save. Job done.

I do this and do not use local machine bookmarks at all, as I use so many different machines (linux, windows, tablet, phone etc) during the course of a week, that keeping all those locally stored bookmarks in sync would be a nightmare.

It works for me, although I've not touched the code in forever so it's looking a bit dated - simply because it's rock solid.

It surprises me that more people don't do this.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#200

Post by alexbecker »

anaisbetts wrote: post #148

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

Commenting just to add visibility to the only plausible answer I've seen to the question as posed. Thanks for not getting sidetracked into arguments about adblock/JS engines/layout/fonts/etc.
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