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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#331

Post by cyberpunk »

mgkimsal wrote: post #320

Fascinating and frustrating at the same time, reading people going back and forth on their browser experiences. "I've got 450 tabs open, in any browser, ever, and I experience 0 lag - in fact, it tends to finish rendering before my eyes even focus! And I've only got 6 gigs on some old 386!" vs "I can't even move my mouse in FF/Chrome/Safari without massive memory spikes and random reboots!" At least some of the repor…

Doubt it.

Before the "Not me! I use w3m on a p3!" replies pile in, accept this as a generalisation warning..

I think most of us in this thread though generally use reasonably recent gear (our machines are the tools of our trade, personally I upgrade each year) and that we use our browsers extensively enough that even small issues around perf become quite noticeable...

I can't remember the last time I couldn't scroll smoothly or a tab didn't open instantly...

Maybe the difference here is those in the church of noscript and those without? After the initial pain white listing the various things you need, I've found the performance of Firefox on Linux to be brilliant. (currently around 100 tabs, some of which are sat on prime video etc, arch Linux, 16G, 50.1.0).

A lot of the extensions listed in this thread are doing quite a lot of work also, and sometimes on every request which probably doesn't help..

Disk caching could also be a problem for those of us without shiny new NVMe's in their laptops (pull the trigger on that one, it's worth it!).

The only downside of all the blocking stuff for me though is when you book a flight or something and the noscript/ublock combo prevents me from getting past the callback from your payment provider... I need some kind of giant banner that says turn off noscript and ublock when using britishairways installed somewhere :}

Or I'll just send them yet another snarky feedback message the next time I fuck it up (seriously, it calls t.co and doubleclick in serial!)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#332

Post by cyberpunk »

ksec wrote: post #307

It was the same thing i posted about Apps made with Web Tech. Opera 1x, managed to be a email client, RSS reader and Browser while keeping the size below 12MB. Chrome/Blink or Firefox all takes 40-50MB Download. I really wish they could Open Sources the old Opera. P.S- I am not sure if these Tab Problem is nerd only. Basically people are trying to gob too much information. But i have yet to see a Sane UI to fix this.

Yeah and QNX booted you into a graphical environment from a 1.44mb floppy..

I never really understand comments like these, what are you saying? You want smaller binaries? Less features?

Don't you have a spare 50MB on your 512GB SSD?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#333

Post by ilyabirman »

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

Why can’t they (a) have one process pre-created and ready for me before are press ⌘T or (b) don’t use a separate process to display an empty tab with Top Sites and create a process only after opening it? Or both :-)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#334

Post by khedoros1 »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #303
khedoros1 wrote: post #21

I'm not sure what the author is talking about. After my recent tab clean-up, I've got 35 tabs open. Opening a new one is near-instantaneous, and I can say the same thing about bringing up any other tab I have open, as long as it has been loaded since the last time I restarted my browser. I've got an Atom-based 2014 laptop at home. That one might take a second to open a new tab if I'm doing anything else on it at the…

I have a Intel Atom 1.6 GHz/2GB of RAM netbook afrom 2009 with Linux on it, and Firefox/Chrome is the only unusable app on it; other Linux applications seem to be fairly responsive on the hardware. I really feel the slowness on that one. Tab switching takes seconds, other interactions take seconds (especially on sites with javascript), Facebook.com is unreadable (script takes too long). It is just an anecdote, but at…

I've also got a similar machine (Lenovo S10-2), which I used as my primary laptop for a few years. Using the web on it was painful even 5 years ago. Almost as bad as the 2003 IBM laptop sitting next to it in my closet.

The author was talking about a 2014 iMac, 5 years newer than your netbook and likely 3-4x the price. They're running a modern OS with a browser (Safari) claimed to be 1.4x - 7x faster (by Apple's numbers on their Safari page) than the Firefox browser that I use. So that's what I'm wondering about. By the author's description, their premium 2014 computer isn't running a browser as well as my super-budget refurb 2014 computer.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#335

Post by antisthenes »

ksec wrote: post #309

The same could be said about Computer, OS, or any Apps. We have SSD, CPU, Memory and Network 100 to 10000x faster then what had 20 years ago, and yet Apps didn't get 100x faster. It is still not instantaneous. In someways i think it is because we have created far too much abstraction /layers.

Some things are near instantaneous, though.

I've discontinued use of optical media circa 2009 and replaced my OS drives with SSDs in 2010.

Eliminating spin-up times and random seek times for multiple small files has probably been the biggest performance boost in my user-side computing experience.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#336

Post by roddux »

rangibaby wrote: post #262
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…

People use Chrome because Google (Alphabet?) advertises it heavily including a nag screen on google.com. Also Firefox goes through noticeable cycles of being awesome and being a buggy slow mess. Chrome came out when Firefox was in a noticeable slump. Remember that in ?2008 being better than IE was the yardstick browsers were measured by and Firefox had passed that many years earlier, so I think they had lost their wa…

To save on having to have two versions of Firefox, you can start a new instance with:

  $ firefox --no-remote --new-instance --profile /path/to/alt/profile

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#337

Post by weaksauce »

newscracker wrote: post #282
weaksauce wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I hope it is useful for you! The favicon is actually already displayed but I didn't update the example gif yet.

Sorting by the date added/visited is a planed feature but a little tougher to get from firefox so it will take a little bit of work. The extension actually has a group by domain sort(but not strictly group by domain as it's grouped by window first)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#338

Post by lobster_johnson »

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.

For years my wishlist item is a project manager that can treat a single window as a project. A bit like a stateful, window-oriented Delicious/Pinboard.

For example, say I'm looking for a sofa to buy. I might open the ones I like in a bunch of tabs to mull over. However, if I'm at work, I'd like to just close the window. Since the project manager has associated the window with a project, I can just close the window. Later, I select "Sofa hunting" from the Projects menu and off I go with the same set of tabs.

I'd go one step further: Think of the project as a "pile of bookmarks" where the visible set of tabs is a subset of all boomarked tabs. For example, say I find a nice sofa. I add it to the pile and close the tab. The project now includes that URL, but it won't open a tab for it unless I go into the project browser and find it there and open it. So this disassociates the tab from the bookmark, but retains the "working set" that is my project session. Similar to how an IDE or editor might preserve which files I have open, but still maintain my entire project.

There are some extensions out there that do similar things, but don't get the ergonomics right. There's a couple of "session managers", but they are dumb: You "load" a session, and then "save" it. Changing the window doesn't automatically update the session, and closing the window destroys your session. Safari also lets you bookmark a bunch of tabs as a folder and reopen them again, but there's no link between the folder and the open window.

I once started on an extension like this for Safari, but the current browser extension APIs aren't great. For example, I'd want to sync the projects with something like iCloud, so that they're available on all devices; but I don't think there's a way to do this without involving a server app. I might try again, though.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#339

Post by weaksauce »

jholman wrote: post #167
weaksauce wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just installed it (Tabist reports 415 tabs in 9 windows). Looks tentatively useful, I'll keep it around. If it's easy to add a by-date-last-opened to the order-by at the top, that MIGHT be useful? If it's easy to add the text of the window title to the table, that MIGHT be useful? Those are just top-of-my-head spitball ideas.

415 tabs! Wow, that's even more than I typically have... 200ish over many windows.

One thing that is not 100% clear is that you can press cmd-shift-e to bring up the tabist page. or ctrl-shift-e if you are on windows/linux.

> by-date-last-opened to the order-by at the top

That's planned but not easily attained information from the browser so it'd have to be tracked by the extension from the startup of it.

> If it's easy to add the text of the window title to the table

That's how the extension works but there was a bug[1] that I fixed in firefox that needs to be propagated through the builds in order for it to show up in release. I believe it will land in firefox 51 which comes out early next year... yeah 2017-01-24 is when it will be released[2]. If you want it now you can get on the beta build and it will be fixed.

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1289213

2. https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

cheers,

hope this helps.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#340

Post by pc2g4d »

chanux wrote: post #112
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…

I wonder whether these good days would soon come to an end with process per tab model. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Yeah, to me it seems like a mistake given that such a high performance penalty will likely be incurred, and given the existence of Rust which could address a number of the security problems for which the multi-process model was devised in the first place.
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