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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#281

Post by [deleted] »

bzbarsky wrote: post #235
kutkloon7 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Easy: add it to something that's alive while the site is alive. Here's an example that leaks some memory every 100ms while you have the site open: window.leakyArr = []; function leakStuff() { leakyArr.push("This is leaked" + Math.random()); } setInterval(leakStuff, 100); Of course if you unload the page this will all be collected. But if you have a page you leave open for a long time and it does stuff like this, it's…

[deleted]

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#282

Post by newscracker »

weaksauce wrote: post #78
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…

You might (might not) find my extension useful. I made it for people that horde tabs like you and me. It's a page that lists tabs per window visually and if you click on one of the links it focuses the tab for you. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ and chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... It's also open source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist If…

Thanks, I will definitely try this one since I use tons of tabs as an interface for "read it later" stuff and avoid forgetting about them altogether.

It'd be nice to include the favicon (if available) next to each link so that a visual scan is easy to perform. Otherwise a "Find on page" (Ctrl+F) would have to be used to find something in a list of a few hundred tabs. Sort options like the ones mentioned in another comment here about the date added, and additionally grouping links by domain, would also be useful.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#283

Post by laumars »

badminton1 wrote: post #267
laumars wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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, w…

Some of the websites you mentioned keep you logged in. So bookmarks work fine. I don't understand what is so upsetting about mentioning a feature designed for that use case. Then, not all HN readers are tech-savvy, being enthusiastic about technology is not the same as being tech-savvy. Then, if you don't like having your point refuted, don't engage into a conversation by refuting others' point of view in the first p…

> Some of the websites you mentioned keep you logged in.

Indeed. Which was the point I literally just made after you argued about sessions timing out.

> Then, not all HN readers are tech-savvy, being enthusiastic about technology is not the same as being tech-savvy.

It sounds very much like you believe you're educating people here. I'd be surprised if anyone reading this thread was unaware of the existence of bookmarks, or confused by the revelation that more tabs mean their "computer thingies" have to do more "thinking". But I can't prove that any more than you can prove most HNers are as technologically inept as you repeatedly suggest.

> Then, if you don't like having your point refuted, don't engage into a conversation by refuting others' point of view in the first place.

You're not refuting my point though because my point was never that tabs are better than bookmarks. I just commented on why people often end up working that way despite knowing better. It was an insight not a recommendation.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#284

Post by abrowne »

nicoburns wrote: post #241
lagadu wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I started using Nightly — instead of my usually Beta¹ — for the up-to-date GTK+ 3.2x compatibility, but I like some of the pre-release features, and it almost never crashes on me

1: On Ubuntu you can use their Firefox Beta PPA² as long as you don't mind that it replaces release-version Firefox.

2: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#286

Post by Certhas »

kahnpro wrote: post #269
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…

I don't know what Firefox you're using but I always find it very slow and sluggish compared to Chrome. Especially Google maps and YouTube. I always have to switch over to Chrome to use these sites because they always bring FF to its knees. I wonder if this is deliberate on the part of Google.

On a 4 year old MacBook Air running Firefox, google maps takes a second or so to open fully, after browsing around in two google maps windows for a while my memory usage is stable at 1.25GB.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#287

Post by tgb »

janci wrote: post #145

Browsers are slow, but I can cope with it. But what I hate is that browsers are nondeterministic. Try Ctrl+C,Ctrl+T,Ctrl+v,Enter combo. In opera it worked flawlessly everytime. In Firefox, it sometimes works, sometime it opens new tab without URL, sometime it pastes half of URL (?!) and navigatest there. In chrome you never know what sugesstion will the address bar give to you. In opera, you were 100% sure that your…

I do that in Chrome all the time. I hardly ever go to any sites except by typing the first ~three letters of the URL and mashing enter.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#288

Post by mwill »

wutbrodo wrote: post #275
mwill wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Win 10 / Arch on the same hardware, slightly better performance booted into Win 10.

Used to run Win8.1 on this machine, Win 10 runs it better.

Used to run Ubuntu on this machine, Arch runs it better.

It would make my day if there was a silver bullet that made FF fast, or at least not crash all the time. The same machine can handle literally 10 times more Chrome tabs without any trace of struggle. But I prefer FF for a few things, so sort of stuck in between.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#289

Post by n3t »

anaisbetts wrote: post #148

I didn't see the correct answer yet, so I'll just tell you, tabs have a delay to create because in almost all modern browsers you have to wait for a process to be created and for everything to be paged in, _then_ wait for a bunch of IPC calls to complete. Old browsers didn't do this, so creating tabs was so fast! But they were also much easier to compromise. Tradeoffs. Source: Electron maintainer

Is there no (unused) processes pool?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#290

Post by LoSboccacc »

owaislone wrote: post #26
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…

> 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…

> on OS X

About that, I've noticed some weird stuff as well while debugging why our web app was crashing the tab on chrome after extended use without a page reload.

After a hour normal workload, chrome on mac used almost a GB ram, while on windows was at 120mb. Same page, similar workflow etc.

I still have no idea what's going on but there's definitely something about how memory is handled across platforms.

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