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WTF? Chromium (2016)

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Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#81
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The piece seems to suggest that a) multiple processes were the performance problem and b) that a field trial was causing that and "mak[ing] my computer unusable". Multiple processes do take more memory, but there's a good reason for them. While it's possible that it was a field trial that was causing issues here, there's no evidence to support that. Sadly, it was probably just excessive resource usage independent of…

The point of the post is that there is no way to opt out. We all understand more datapoints the better. But I also need to not be fucked with when I'm trying to work.

Not to worry, chromium is open source. Just pop open a text editor and trace the code from the option parser to see where it's used. How hard can it be?

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#82
post #7

Or just use Firefox, even if it is slightly slower than Chromium it's at least a browser that works for you not one that treats you as a pawn. A Chrome monoculture is harmful, even if Google has the best intentions which I don't think they do - they definitely value their profits over an open web.

>even if it is slightly slower than Chromium Funny thing is Firefox Quantum is both faster and eats less memory compared with Chrome. >not one that treats you as a pawn. And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that doesn't treat you like a pawn. For MS, Google, Apple, that chinese company which owns Opera you are just a pawn. (later edit : fixed the second remark).

Agreed 100%. I'd been using Firefox right since the early betas but at one point the scrolling performance grew so janky that I had to switch to Chrome. I hate the kind of bullshit chrome keeps pulling, specially the IE-like random standards that they keep inventing to make sure other browsers can't use certain features.

With quantum, Firefox is performing well. Even if chrome catches up I will not give up Firefox until it becomes so slow that I'm unable to use it normally. I don't care about the performance delta, just that it be good enough.

Go Firefox!

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is not slower, it's just that most websites are optimised and tested only or mainly under Chrome. Anecdotally.. Firefox was always slower rendering pages compared to other browsers. On some sites that I visited regularly, using FF was depressing. Later on, it started to suffer from caching issues on my machine. This caused a massive system slowdown. Tried Palemoon (non-blink\webkit, etc). It blazed through…

I thought Palemoon was basically firefox?

With some ugly UI stuff pulled out and some extra compiler optimisation flags set.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#84
post #80
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? All that is written in the article. The question is whether or not forcing users to partake in field trials is a good idea.

But that question doesn't make sense. It contains the assumption that the alternative would be to never ship broken features to users. While the actual alternative would be that they'd ship the same broken feature to all users. Because at some point there's no other testing left.

[deleted]

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#86
post #77

The Iridium website and logo look so professional and "enterprisey" that it looks like there's lots of money behind of it and they're going to screw you. A barebones or even text-only website would do them a favour.

I was curious what the site looked like, so I opened it. Okay, I've seen worse desig--WHAT?! Wow, a marquee! Nice.

Open the door, get on the floor Everybody walk the dinosaur

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#87
What happened to "Don't be evil?". Or they changed it to "Do not eval?":D.

Bit off topic, but that guy experienced lagginess in UI due some rogue Chrome process. I remember some bug in VLC that slow down my computer to level, it was not even possible to type on keyboard.

And I wonder, why is this happening in era of multicore CPUs? Why there is no restriction (by default) for process, how many cores it can utilise? I mean the tooling is already there (cgroups on Linux), but they're not used by default.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#88
1. I'm not seeing the causal link between the flag and the symptoms. I often find "Chrome" "causing" the same problems, but typically you can judge from the memory use that an errant tab is allocating the world, and you've started drawing on swap, which of course slows things down. But here we've cropped the memory stats out of the screenshot from top (for the system as a whole; we can see a few processes consuming a few hundred MiB, but Chrome loves processes, and there could be several more below, and summing RAM usage from processes is a deceptively tricky beast), and I can see nothing to prove that the field trial is even to blame.

2. You get the browser for free. If everyone adopted this same attitude, Chrome would not be able to do real-world A/B testing on features; what should they do instead, just release it all or nothing? You might have been unlucky today, but perhaps tomorrow someone else's misery provides the needed data to prevent a bad feature from going out.

3. Vote with your "feet", and switch to Firefox? (or one of the other myriad of browsers out there…)

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#89

1. I'm not seeing the causal link between the flag and the symptoms. I often find "Chrome" "causing" the same problems, but typically you can judge from the memory use that an errant tab is allocating the world, and you've started drawing on swap, which of course slows things down. But here we've cropped the memory stats out of the screenshot from top (for the system as a whole; we can see a few processes consuming a…

What other serious alternatives are out there though? I know of Firefox and Edge. But aren't Opera and Safari now reskins of Chromium, to some degree?

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#90
post #80
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? All that is written in the article. The question is whether or not forcing users to partake in field trials is a good idea.

But that question doesn't make sense. It contains the assumption that the alternative would be to never ship broken features to users. While the actual alternative would be that they'd ship the same broken feature to all users. Because at some point there's no other testing left.

If they're shipping features that need testing, it seems like the Beta version is the right place to ship them, not the stable Chrome or Chromium build. As in: ship the possibly-broken features to people who have already opted into testing, and don't subject your users that chose the "stable" to random testing.

Getting the bad end of someone's unannounced feature testing is the kind of thing that makes me decide to use another browser for a few months, hoping that the problem disappears if/when I go back to it.

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