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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#201

Post by Manishearth »

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 certainly ahead in the implementation of Web Platform features

This is debatable.

Web components is implemented in Chrome because it was a spec pushed by Google, so they had an implementation being built while things were still being decided. Firefox has an implementation too, just not turned on by default (presumably folks are waiting for the standard to settle?). Similarly, Firefox used ES6 internally for years, so any lag that may have existed (I don't recall any, but ICBW) would probably again be due to standardization. Chrome might be ahead in the implementation of features. You can't call them Web Platform features if they've not been standardized fully.

> and a large number of CSS properties.

Chrome being ahead in a "large number of CSS properties" is objectively false. I keep track.

Firefox has 324[1] properties implemented (I am not counting prefixes as separate properties) when I last counted (a few months ago), Chrome has 304[2]. Firefox has 88[3] properties not in Chrome and Chrome has 68[4] properties not in Firefox. Furthermore, if you look closely most of the Firefox-but-not-Chrome properties are solid green in the Firefox column, which means that they have been implemented in an unprefixed form (which in turn means that the property is probably specced and stable), whereas nearly half of the Chrome-but-not-Firefox properties are light green, which means that they're only implemented in the prefixed form, so the property is either custom or unstable.

I'll admit that these numbers are generated from Firefox Dev vs regular Chrome and Firefox dev has newer features enabled. I made that page to get an idea of Stylo/Servo progress and to help inform what stuff folks should work on next, not for comparing Chrome and Firefox.

Running in Firefox stable to get fairer numbers gets me 301 properties enabled, 69 Firefox-but-not-chrome, and 72 Chrome-but-not-Firefox. This does mean that Chrome has a slight higher number of properties implemented when comparing stable versions. 3 properties is certainly not "a large number of CSS properties", and again, many of the Chrome-only properties are prefixed and will either never be implemented or are unstable and have good reasons for not existing in Firefox.

The numbers aren't perfect. In particular handling implemented-but-disabled properties, properties that are still getting standardized, and properties that will never be standardized is tricky and can't be done in an automated way. But the numbers should be close enough, enough to say that at the very least Chrome and Firefox are at par when it comes to implementing CSS properties.

[1]: https://manishearth.github.io/css-properties-list/?stylo=sho...

[2]: https://manishearth.github.io/css-properties-list/?stylo=sho...

[3]: https://manishearth.github.io/css-properties-list/?stylo=sho...

[4]: https://manishearth.github.io/css-properties-list/?stylo=sho...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#202

Post by alexbecker »

TwoBit wrote: post #85
lukaa wrote: post #23

On Android you should check Polarity browser.It's faster than any other browser.

Every time I try one of those third party browsers, it's fast but can't render many pages right. It's as if they are taking some shortcut that works only 80% of the time.

Rather than any one shortcut, they're probably implementing 20% of the W3C specs that together cover 80% of their test pages. Unsurprisingly, this is both much easier and much faster.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#203

Post by jakub_g »

I am one of the tab hoarders and I think the general attitude of browser vendors/developers towards us is "you're doing it wrong" (they might be right). FYI Having huge amount of RAM helps (a bit) and on Windows, Firefox works quite well with up to 100-200 tabs.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#204

Post by varjag »

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…

This Firefox instance I reply from has a bit under 1.3Gb allocated, with 7 open tabs. Three of the tabs are primitive blog articles, a couple weren't even loaded until I clicked on them now. Adblock Plus, PassFF and NextPlease are the only extensions running; I remember though the extensions didn't make a dent in memory footprint.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#205

Post by coldtea »

artificial wrote: post #138
minitech wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs) has to intercept every request > - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?) has to intercept every request > - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol) might have to intercept every request, and why do you need this > - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random) has to intercept every request > - uBlock Origin has to intercept every request > - uMa…

It's hardly stupidity. You're discovering different people have different priorities and that privacy is valued by some more than others.

>It's hardly stupidity. You're discovering different people have different priorities and that privacy is valued by some more than others.

Those BS plugins do very little for actual privacy (and even less if one is actually a target) and very much for CPU/memory.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#206

Post by majewsky »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #53
semicolon_storm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vacuuming your profile might help: #!/bin/bash killall firefox for file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do echo sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM done I do it in my once-a-month cleanup script.

Looking at `find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name \.sqlite`, there are some more such databases for window.localStorage and the like. So this could be generalized to

  find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name \*.sqlite -print -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#207

Post by miguelrochefort »

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 have ~1000 open tabs (across 50 windows) in Chrome on Windows.

I have ~300 open tabs in Chrome on Android.

Although they're probably not all loaded, I don't notice any major performance problem.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#208

Post by SeanDav »

> "You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? "

I currently have nearly 400 tabs open, across 7 browser windows (Firefox).

The main reason for this is context switching. I have tried several context switching type addons but not found one yet that is reliable, simple and fast. Right now if I am programming, I have 2 browser windows I use for that. For news and related articles of interest, 1 browser window. For games and related, 1 window, etc, etc.

Firefox and Tabmix plus makes this easy and relatively painless. Chrome would have about 12 million processes and use 4.7 petabytes of memory for same use case (I exaggerate a smidgen)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#209

Post by zeroer »

madeofpalk wrote: post #198
sametmax wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depending on external companies is a problem, but the problem is that a gift isn't a business model.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#210

Post by [deleted] »

madeofpalk wrote: post #198
sametmax wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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