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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#341

Post by govg »

mwill wrote: post #288
wutbrodo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny. I use Firefox on my Arch system, and at times I had to stop and remove tabs because they were becoming an unorganized mess (>600 tabs). I've never had much issues with responsiveness unless some particular website I've opened locks up, and with tab groups and tab load only on click, I can easily manage a lot of tabs without much memory use.

You could try checking your RAM, I used to have an issue with FF crashing quite frequently, but found that it was part of a larger issue of having corrupt RAM on board.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#342

Post by pascalxus »

I know the article mentions openning new tabs.

But When it comes to clicking on links and opening a new page, Browsers aren't slow. The software that runs on them is slow: all those applications loading too many libraries, widgets, videos, video ads, Angular and lots of code that's not needed.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#343

Post by chrisan »

posterboy wrote: post #324
chrisan wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 have the same feeling, but judging by all the others keeping hundreds of tabs open I feel like I am missing out on a…

You've got the question wrong. I could say an open tab works like a bookmark without having to organize and delete the bookmarks, but then I have to organize the tabs. Bookmark management is very crude in Firefox without add ons, so I have a tree view in either the tree style tabs or in the bookmark manager, without much of a difference. But then the pressing question is, why can't most of the tabs not just be closed…

I actually like Firefox's bookmarks with tags. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/categorizing-bookmarks-...

When I bookmark something I add various tags to it (b/c Ill never remember the title) and then can search by tags.

Anywho :)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#344

Post by newdayrising »

yoklov wrote: post #291
joosters wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SafeInCloud. That's what one can do.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#346

Post by rasz_pl »

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…

>I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open

no, you have 273 labels displayed in your browser UI, not open tabs. Opera 12.x can hold >100 real loaded and rendered tabs open at 1-2GB ram with ZERO influence on browser responsiveness.

Nowadays every single tab in Chrome/Opera 40.something/Vivaldi progressively slows down UI. ~50 tabs means about 1 second UI delay when going fullscreen on YT. Not to mention the most trivial website takes ~100MB of ram, while Opera 12.x was somehow able to do the same thing in ~10MB per website.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#347

Post by legodt »

bzbarsky wrote: post #243
legodt wrote: post #216

My Firefox instance has recently picked up the nasty habit of every time I move to a different tab, the web area is white save for a spinning grey loading icon in the center for a good half second. I've never seen anything like this before recently and it's a real bummer on speed

The spinner means the UI process has switched tabs but the content process hasn't painted the tab content yet. Possibly because it's doing something else (like running script). Is there a particular site that causes this to happen when you have it loaded? If you're willing to spend some time troubleshooting or profiling this, please let me know and I'll walk you through some ways to do that...

Sure, I'd be more than happy to try breaking this down, I'm going to try a nightly build now as other users have suggested and see how it feels

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#348

Post by sp332 »

prewett wrote: post #105
sp332 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only works if you have a reasonably small site. If you have a lot of pages, like a news site, you start running up against the fact that your filesystem is not a great database. You can get a significant speedup by putting content in a database with a good index.

I don't follow this. It's pretty hard to get any database to be as fast as serving a file off the disk, which is why caches on web servers are pre-rendered pages stored as files on the disk. Filesystems are a great "database" for large quantities of information, as long as it doesn't change, and you don't need to do any queries on it. I think there is quite a lot of range between "reasonably small site" and "news sit…

Lots of filesystems struggle with hundreds of thousands of tiny files. You also have to make sure that every tool you use can handle lots of files without blowing up. Searching without an index becomes difficult too.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#349

Post by mwill »

govg wrote: post #341
mwill wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny. I use Firefox on my Arch system, and at times I had to stop and remove tabs because they were becoming an unorganized mess (>600 tabs). I've never had much issues with responsiveness unless some particular website I've opened locks up, and with tab groups and tab load only on click, I can easily manage a lot of tabs without much memory use. You could try checking your RAM, I used to have an issue with FF crash…

I will definately look into this, because the Firefox that others are describing in this thread seems totally foreign to me.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#350

Post by bzbarsky »

legodt wrote: post #347
bzbarsky wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spinner means the UI process has switched tabs but the content process hasn't painted the tab content yet. Possibly because it's doing something else (like running script). Is there a particular site that causes this to happen when you have it loaded? If you're willing to spend some time troubleshooting or profiling this, please let me know and I'll walk you through some ways to do that...

Sure, I'd be more than happy to try breaking this down, I'm going to try a nightly build now as other users have suggested and see how it feels

Excellent, thanks!

If you're using a nightly, you should be able to use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance... to profile it, because nightlies have useful symbols. Might be worth capturing a profile at the point when the spinner stops and the page is finally shown.

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