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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#271

Post by jsjohnst »

Yizahi wrote: post #222
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 o…

LastPass seems to be a common cause among my friends and others in this thread.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#272

Post by TeMPOraL »

Analemma_ wrote: post #116
CaptSpify wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.

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…

Maybe we need a more distributed model for image hosting for it to be sustainable?

I'm thinking about something like a P2P solution, IPFS-style. You could pay for upload space in two ways - either directly, the bog standard way, or with your own drive space. So for instance, you get 1GB free space for image uploads if you agree to set aside 1GB on your drive as a cache. Couple that with your own "seeding" CDNs storing all the images, and maybe this would be enough to distribute bandwidth costs across all the people who want their images hosted?

Not sure if the browsers are capable enough to pull something like this off without relying on some sort of plugin or an application.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#273

Post by arcbyte »

zeveb wrote: post #187
nothrabannosir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not Imgur, YouTube It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter. If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.

> It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter. I particularly like how imgurl flat-out refuses to work if you disable JavaScript. It's an image-viewing site. Browsers have been able to download images since the beginning, and have been able to render them inline since almost the beginning. There's no need for JavaScript at all, and yet imgurl deliberately choose no…

Amen

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#274

Post by olejorgenb »

olejorgenb wrote: post #134
21echoes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For the lazy: Awesomebar is just firefox's the built-in address bar. It can be configured to search simultaneous through history, tab (titles of open tabs), etc. Or one can specify what to search with this micro language: Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. Add % to search for matches in your currently…

The operator doesn't have to be the first char. This works too: "some tab I have %"

Another nugget I just found out about: alt-enter opens the what you typed in in a new tab.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#275

Post by wutbrodo »

mwill wrote: post #215
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…

How is this possible? I'm sitting here with an i5-4690, 32GB RAM, Firefox 50 with about 50 tabs open 1.5GB RAM usage, about half a second to get a usable new tab, and it crashes at least once every few days. Literally the only reason I'm on Firefox is tab groups, but my performace is basically identical with tab groups disabled.

There are factors other than browser choice that can affect this. For example, which OS are you on?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#276

Post by newscracker »

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.

> Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.

Perhaps it's because of what else is running on your system and your system's hardware and OS. I regularly use Firefox with a few hundred tabs open across a couple of windows. On Windows, I find that if I have IE or Edge or Chrome running, each with a few tabs, most of my RAM just goes to them. I also hibernate my system and restart it only once every few weeks.

I use several extensions with Firefox too:

- uBlock Origin (block ads)

- Privacy Badger (tracking blocker)

- Perspectives (distributed certificate checks and better error handling)

- HTTPS Everywhere (default to https on sites and avoid plain http)

- Self-Destructing Cookies (self-destruct cookies for a tab after closing it)

- Tab Mix Plus (better tab management)

- Session Manager (better session management between restarts)

- Tree Style Tab (hierarchical tab list management)

- TooManyTabs (almost self-explanatory)

- Lazarus (save form data to restore or reuse)

- Link Alert (so I know if a link is a file or an internal site link or external site link or a popup and can then decide if I want to click it)

- FoxyProxy (switch proxies easily)

- Foxclocks (handy clocks in different times zones)

- DownThemAll (easier downloads of multiple items, which I need occasionally)

- and many more

Although I experience slow starts and long shutdowns, in general, and in comparison, the browser is not RAM hungry compared to opening just a couple of tabs on Internet Explorer/Edge or about ten tabs or so in Chrome (with fewer extensions than above in Chrome). On OS X/macOS though, Firefox seems more RAM hungry, is a bit more sluggish and consumes more energy than Safari.

Shutting down the browser and opening it again will also help since Firefox by default does not load tabs until they get the focus (this "load tabs on demand" behavior has been around for quite sometime). It will load some stuff from the cache though. One more thing you can try is create a new profile (take care to get bookmarks from the old one) and see if that avoids any problems with extensions or other cruft in the older profile.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#277

Post by hau »

elktea wrote: post #230
hau wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It says in the FAQ section of the official site that the main difference between it and other blocking extensions is ease of use aka lack of setup. It also claims it's based on adblock code. So it's just adblock with lists preset? Indeed a little difference if you're able to setup adblock-like extension. And if we're discussing performance, you don't want an extension for every list out there.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#278

Post by joosters »

philbo wrote: post #261
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…

> That said, I also have LastPass installed... That's your problem, right there. I've been told that the main version of LastPass currently available from addons.mozilla.org has known problems that cause the browser to lock up and hang indefinitely. Instead, if you click through to list all releases and select the latest 4.x version, those problems should all be fixed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/l…

That's odd - it turned out I had version 3.3.2 installed, I wonder why the auto-upgrade didn't happen? Are the 4.x versions beta releases?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#279

Post by newscracker »

olejorgenb wrote: post #274
olejorgenb wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the lazy: Awesomebar is just firefox's the built-in address bar. It can be configured to search simultaneous through history, tab (titles of open tabs), etc. Or one can specify what to search with this micro language: Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. Add % to search for matches in your currently…

The operator doesn't have to be the first char. This works too: "some tab I have %" Another nugget I just found out about: alt-enter opens the what you typed in in a new tab.

> Another nugget I just found out about: alt-enter opens the what you typed in in a new tab.

If you're visiting a site by entering the address (as opposed to using search or a bang command on DuckDuckGo or using a bookmark/history entry), then you'd also appreciate the following shortcuts:

Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on Mac) for "www." prefix and ".com" suffix on the domain. Eg: type "google" (or Cmd+Enter) to go to www.google.com

Shift+Enter for "www." prefix and ".net" suffix on the domain. Eg: type "jsfiddle" to go to www.jsfiddle.net

Ctrl+Shift+Enter (Cmd+Shift+Enter on Mac) for "www." prefix and ".org" suffix on the domain. Eg: type "wikipedia" (or Cmd+Shift+Enter) to go to www.wikipedia.org

In my knowledge, the www..com autofill with Ctrl+Enter was pioneered by Internet Explorer, but Firefox is the only browser that took it to the next level as a built-in feature.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#280

Post by _asummers »

Fnoord wrote: post #169
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…

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

uBlock Matrix is good too, if you want to manage all the things. You basically white/blacklist all the image, css, xhr, etc. requests on the page and can set up rules like allow iframe from youtube.com on all sites, to allow the embed youtube frame to show up on pages. Many sites are broken on first load until you get your rules straight but they're trivially fixed. You just click on boxes to allow or deny the particular thing.

HN looks like: http://i.imgur.com/lfjkhkl.png

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