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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#291

Post by yoklov »

joosters wrote: post #278
philbo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes, IIRC. They're still imperfect and can lag the browser quite a bit IME, but what can you do... Switching to a different password manager is not easy, and the ones I've looked at all have this/other problems.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#293

Post by scottmf »

chongli wrote: post #37
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…

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

No one seems to have mentioned Safari's "Reading List".

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#294

Post by badminton1 »

laumars wrote: post #283
badminton1 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bookmar…

Lots of accusations there. The only thing I suggested is to use bookmarks, and imply that it's highly unlikely that in an audience as diverse as HN ALL of them, or the majority of readers are tech-savvy... Run a survey if you want.

I made a reasonable suggestion without an intention to offend people. Hacker News is about sharing information. I am sharing information.

You want to start your Monty Python argument clinic in the Hacker News comment section? I am not interested. Take your unreasonable accusations elsewhere.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#295

Post by Bahamut »

dirkg wrote: post #111

Chrome is the culprit. For as much as they helped with V8 innovations, they've also done harm - ignores usability basics: horrible UI with > 10 tabs, reloads all tabs, many other issues - all of these are things people have complained about forever, they refuse to fix - memory hog: Chrome uses more memory than almost any other browser - Google forces Chrome upon you since Hangouts etc will not work with other browser…

Firefox isn't great either - I'm locked into an older version until Sauce Labs supports geckodriver because Mozilla made an awful breaking change in 47 to switch to a beta driver for Webdriver support, which prevents us from testing newer browsers, and their dev tools are far less robust than Chrome's.

Chrome also has the benefit of letting me use my Google account for managing my bookmarks, as well as automatically being logged into my Google services.

There is simply very little compelling reason for me to use Firefox typically as it offers me a subpar experience, and every time I do have to use Firefox's dev tools, I am saddened by their choices of hotkeys/UI/etc.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#296

Post by Crespyl »

Robin_f wrote: post #255
SeanDav wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's my understanding that Chrome is 1:1, while Firefox is M tabs on N threads, which has been a decent compromise in my experience so far.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#297

Post by Ajedi32 »

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…

I've been using this one for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#298

Post by PhasmaFelis »

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.

Can we stop the "sellout" business? Having a clearly stated and one-click reversible whitelist is neither dishonest nor bad for the user. I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself. You prefer maximum adblocking, and that's fine, but there's nothing at all wrong with giving us both the choice.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#299

Post by debacle »

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…

> they could display all the ads they want to a non-script-executer

But then it would be harder to track you.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#300

Post by annnnd »

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.

FF on Linux. Don't use maps, but YouTube works as it should (but then again, I only allow youtube.com, ytimg.com and googlevideo.com via NoScript).

It might be deliberate, at least in sense that MS pages never worked properly on Netscape / Firefox / Konqueror /... in the days of IE dominance.

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