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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

251–260 of 376 posts

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#251
post #169

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…

Try uBlock Origin. It performs even better than ABP, and hasn't sold out.

I myself made the switch from both Adblock and Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin, best decision ever!

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#252

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.

> Any proofs?

Ha ha, what proof would satisfy you, where my word does not, O doubting Thomas? If I was going to lie to you on HN, I'd also be able to fake a screenshot. Maybe you'd like administrator access to my machine, so you can satisfy your smug certainty of what is not possible?

I haven't had my FF (stock plus a few plugins) under 300 tabs in months. It doesn't stop me from playing AAA titles, max settings at high resolution, at 30-60 fps. Sometimes while running a VM (because Windows is a gaming OS, not a work OS). I only mention that to disabuse you of the claim that...

> you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time

I assure you, I can.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#253

> 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…

While I don't have _that_ many tabs open. I do usually keep 20 - 50 open in chrome. Same experience, with low / no memory foot-print; using The Great Suspender. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... I'm on a 2015 MBP with 16 GB of ram and like 20 extensions installed.

I vouch for The Great Suspender. Awesome extension.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#254

> 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 use Firefox on Mac and it's extremely slow. It's laggy, it's constantly freezing for seconds or two.

Having that many tabs opened is practically impossible.

On Ubuntu, the behavior is vastly different.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#255

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…

Nearly 400 tabs open across several browser windows. Firefox with Tabmix plus and noscript addons. Performance and memory use is very comfortable with very few browser crashes. I use Chrome for websites that use huge amounts of JavaScript links, which are pain to use with noscript. Chrome does not like a lot of tabs open and chews up memory and performance if forced to run large numbers of tabs.

This is mostly because Chrome starts a new process for each tab. However, Firefox is also heading in this direction.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Let me reiterate the first part of that sentence you've quoted: "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."

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

That depends entirely on how long the session cookies are set for, whether the user browses to other pages on that site since (thus potentially renewing their session cookie) and whether one even needs to have an active session to use that specific dynamic website. Suffice to say there's more exceptions your point than there are examples of it. eg message boards, youtube (and other similar video streaming services), imgur (and similar), etc. And even in instances where the session only manages access to that page, it's not a great chore to log in again.

To be honest I don't really understand why you're trying to lecture HN readers about sensible browsing habits. We're all tech-savvy enough to know how to use a browser. If we chose to adopt a workflow that's less CPU / system memory performant then we do so fully understanding the problems that might arise. The problem is many of us - myself included - grew up in an era when websites were a document rather than an pseudo-desktop application so often our ranting stems from a frustration at how bloated the web has become.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#258
post #124
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?

Use requestAnimationFrame instead of setTimeout to get a throttled heartbeat.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#259
I'm very surprised to see that nobody has mentioned OneTab.[1] With my use of Chrome, it performs fine with hundreds of tabs open until I attempt to reopen them after a restart, at which point I'll be waiting for about 5 minutes until I can do anything. Firefox seems better for this as it only loads tabs when I actively select them IIRC.

Regardless of performance, with that many tabs open I just find browsers unpleasant to use because you can't see the title of each tab and switching between them is a mess. OneTab is fantastic - I have it as a pinned tab on all my browser windows and I send it all the tabs I'm not actively using. For me it also doubles as a short-term bookmarking system so I don't clog up my pinboard.in bookmarks with articles I have not yet read etc.

[1]: http://www.one-tab.com/

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#260

> 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…

> 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…

Horrible Firefox performance on OSX was a symptom of a bad stick of RAM on a Mac at our company.
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