Browsers eating RAM • Hacker News Board

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#11

Post by zamadatix » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better.

Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm going to guess Safari doesn't really use 1/10th the memory of everyone else - maybe I'm just not familiar though!

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#12

Post by nerdponx » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

rovr138 wrote: post #5

Flotato, From homepage, >From browser tab to magic Mac app. >Break free from the browser and add web pages to your Mac dock. How about a mac app for Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and literally millions more? From their help page, > Dig in to making real Mac apps from websites with Flotato. Looks like you can create apps of your websites. And it looks like it does it using Safari's engine.

For anyone curious, the GNOME Epiphany browser on Linux has this feature as well. Incidentally, it's also based on Webkit2-Gtk internally (Webkit is the Safari browser engine).

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#13

Post by nerdponx » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

karmakaze wrote: post #4

> * Macbook 16" from 2019 with2.4 GHz, 8-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 RAM and an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB GPU Nice specs (32GB RAM) but perhaps not representative of the norm.

Indeed. I'd like to see the same tests on a dual-core from 2015 with 4 GB of RAM. Which is more like what most people use day-to-day.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#14

Post by The_rationalist » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

Chrome doing caching and therefore taking some RAM is correct behavior. What's not being measured is if and how much the chrome memory policy is adaptative to system memory contention, i.e If I open another app that make the RAM full, will chrome adapt by doing less future caching, by freeing some of the existing caches, by tuning the JIT to reduce throughout for reduced memory consumption, etc

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#15

Post by superkuh » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

Any multi-process browser is going to be an extreme RAM hog. Any JS-engine priority browser is going to be a CPU hog. Modern web browsers are not browsers, they are bloated virtual machines with a bit of browser tacked on.

If you want a browser for the web instead of a JS virtual machine you have to look backwards, not forwards.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#16

Post by nerdponx » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

rovr138 wrote: post #6

karmakaze wrote: post #4

> * Macbook 16" from 2019 with2.4 GHz, 8-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 RAM and an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB GPU Nice specs (32GB RAM) but perhaps not representative of the norm.

Depends on the audience. HN audience wouldn't be too bad.

8 cores and 32 GB of RAM is a seriously big computer. That's close to maxed-out for any off-the-shelf laptop or desktop, especially considering it's using a recent CPU architecture and chipset.

Edit: as of Feb 18, 2021, you can't even buy a 13-inch MBP with 32 GB of RAM. The 16-inch model with 32 GB of RAM and all other specs set to their minimum/default comes out to $2800 on the Apple online store. That is far, far outside the range of what most people have access to.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#17

Post by The_rationalist » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

QazCetelic wrote: post #8

Could it be similar to the "Linux ate my RAM" situation and that the RAM is used but still available?

What do you mean? If it's allocated to chrome it cannot be reused by other software. Even if it's allocated but unused

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#18

Post by barbacoa » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

Long ago man landed on the moon using 4 kb of ram. Today it takes 1 gb of RAM to open a chrome tab.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#19

Post by tpetry » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

https://chromeisbad.com/

I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver cpu activity.

Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the chrome developer tools are so damn good i can‘t get rid of it for development.

Re: Browsers eating RAM

#20

Post by moksly » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #11

Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better. Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm goi…

I use a MacBook Pro 2016 everyday. Safari is easily the best browser memory and systems wise, but I still mainly use chrome because it’s better at addblocking and synchronises with my non-Mac devices.

Chrome is fine though, as long as you don’t open 20+ tabs. Beyond that it’s not fine.

I replaced Firefox with Chrome because it kept ranging from a great to terrible user experience with various updates.

This is all anecdotal and based on personal experience.

On iOS I mostly use Safari even though that is kind of against my synchronised argument, but it works alright as I have found that I use my phone for very different web things.