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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#221

Post by chrisan »

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…

> 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 have the same feeling, but judging by all the others keeping hundreds of tabs open I feel like I am missing out on a big reason.

Could anyone explain why they keep all these tabs open? None of the sites I frequent do I care about page load times, plus often I would want to refresh for latest news anyways. Most documentation sites are very fast to load. I guess I could see SPA apps that auto update as being something to keep open..

Do you just type into the address bar and switch tabs based on url or tab title thus not caring if you can see the titles or not?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#222

Post by Yizahi »

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…

Unfortunately mine is usually climbing to 2.5 Gb with 20-30 tabs if left open for several days. As a side effect it starts using 12% CPU constantly and any script heavy page load just sends it into (Not Responding) state for 30-60 seconds. uBlock and LastPass only now, too lazy to reinstall all the other addons :) .

But it is still better then Chrome performance vise. Chrome is just generally laggy and unresponsive often (no idea why).

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#223

Post by alkonaut »

josteink wrote: post #177
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/ad…

Yeah I suppse more like the tree on, but I was kind of hoping to see it stacked in a horizontal row of tabs still, which i suppose is really silly since screens have gone from wide to wider to ultrawide so there is ample space on the sides.

Yes, I'm using chrome and edge, only because FF sucked at the time I switched and even though I have heard good things about FF recently I tend to only switch every 5 years or so. So I guess I'm not really a power web user, as I seem to rather not switch browser than be able to customize it.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#224

Post by the8472 »

legodt wrote: post #216

My Firefox instance has recently picked up the nasty habit of every time I move to a different tab, the web area is white save for a spinning grey loading icon in the center for a good half second. I've never seen anything like this before recently and it's a real bummer on speed

Before e10s this would likely have been a temporary hang, simply displaying the old content until the new finished rendering.

That said, there are improvements for that on the nightlies.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#225

Post by badminton1 »

laumars wrote: post #219

All of these anecdotal benchmarks people are doing are silly because you're overlooking so much detail: * SSD or slow spinning disk (makes a massive difference if your computer is swapping out tabs to cache). * Have the tabs been loaded or not (a new browser session will open placeholders for the tabs without loading the site, but an older session will likely have dozens -if not more- of those sites loaded) * Fronten…

If you have 100 tabs doubtfully all of them are relevant. That's more like a user problem.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#226

Post by kutkloon7 »

timonovici wrote: post #197
com2kid wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How can a site leak memory? Javascripts is garbage-collected.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#227

Post by [deleted] »

timonovici wrote: post #197
com2kid wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#228

Post by pawadu »

barrkel wrote: post #212
pawadu wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I opened up 12 tabs on thingiverse.com on FF, clicking on random links on the page, scrolled to the bottom of several of the expanding lists, and desktop Slack (implemented using Electron) is still consuming more CPU than FF on my laptop. (Lots of extensions, including Tree Style Tabs, Session Manager, Tab Mix Plus, uBlock Origin, RefControl, Cookie Controller, etc.)

close everything, restart the browser, go to thinigiverse, open some random design pages and browse a few of the design files (the blue ones).

now watch your memory and CPU usage :)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#229

Post by pfisch »

mapcars wrote: post #220
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…

>400 tabs >like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. >under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM Any proofs? Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.

That is not my experience. Maybe the mac version isn't so great?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#230

Post by elktea »

hau wrote: post #117
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.

Why would you use adblocker/ublock and 2 other extensions which are no more than a filter lists for adblocker/ublock?

Privacy badger is a little different, afaik it doesn't use lists.
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