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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#241

Post by nicoburns »

lagadu wrote: post #164
abrowne wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta) The Developer Edition replaced Aurora, which was the alpha release, one version between the beta and Nightly.

AKA: the alpha :) Credit to them though, Aurora was surprisingly stable for most of its lifetime, despite not even being a beta.

Even more impressive, the Nightly versions of both Chrome and Firefox are (almost always) stable enough for daily use. I use them as my everyday browsers at work, and they probably crash / have bugs about 1 day out of every 2 months.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#242

Post by nicoburns »

Senji wrote: post #124
syrrim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.

Maybe tabs not currently being viewed should have their JS throttled? Is this an option in FF yet?

Not yet, but they're working on it:

https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quan...

and a preliminary version of this feature is in Chrome 56:

https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5701844080787456

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#243

Post by bzbarsky »

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

The spinner means the UI process has switched tabs but the content process hasn't painted the tab content yet. Possibly because it's doing something else (like running script).

Is there a particular site that causes this to happen when you have it loaded? If you're willing to spend some time troubleshooting or profiling this, please let me know and I'll walk you through some ways to do that...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#244

Post by nicoburns »

Senji wrote: post #124
syrrim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.

Maybe tabs not currently being viewed should have their JS throttled? Is this an option in FF yet?

Not yet, but they're working on it:

https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quan...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#245

Post by nicoburns »

Senji wrote: post #124
syrrim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.

Maybe tabs not currently being viewed should have their JS throttled? Is this an option in FF yet?

Not yet, but they're working on it:

https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quan...

and a preliminary version is in Chrome 56:

https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5701844080787456

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#247

Post by mirsadm »

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…

Firefox is pretty sluggish for me on my MBP. It sits around 20% CPU usage idling on certain web sites. Playing back videos makes the fans spin up. It's just terribly slow.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#248

Post by nothis »

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…

Oh, so I'm not alone in wondering what the hell he was talking about. I often have like 50 tabs open in Firefox when researching something. I notice no delay when opening an empty tab.

If browsers are slow, it's mostly because of some horrible JavaScript running in the background, i.e. poorly optimized websites.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#249

Post by badminton1 »

laumars wrote: post #234
badminton1 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's an easy habit to make though. Like why some people have lots of stuff saved to their Windows desktop, or messy desks with paperwork from a dozen different projects arranged in a way that only the person sat at that desk could understand. I doubt many people set out to work that way, it's more a symptom of the "I'll leave that there and come back to it when I get more time" mindset. Except unfortunately one never…

"Leave it there and come back when i got more time" = Bookmarks :)

If it is a dynamic website, most of them have sessions that expire.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#250

Post by roel_v »

the8472 wrote: post #196
roel_v wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Well from the comments on the addon page, it seems it has the same problems with multi process as the built-in session manager, and tab mix plus' session manager, have (blank windows after restoring). But I haven't tried this particular addon, it might work.
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