Why do people continue to use Chrome? Inertia? Genuine love for Google's "services"?
Browsers eating RAM
21–30 of 171 posts
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#22https://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…
I find Firefox dev tools sufficient pretty much 100% of the time... have you considered it?
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#23Long ago man landed on the moon using 4 kb of ram. Today it takes 1 gb of RAM to open a chrome tab.
Going to the moon was a government project. We need the extra 1023 MB of RAM to store all the advertisements and user tracking scripts required for a company to do anything under capitalism.
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#24Long ago man landed on the moon using 4 kb of ram. Today it takes 1 gb of RAM to open a chrome tab.
and that 1gb of ram costs less than $5. That 4kb of ram costs, i bet, way more than the inflation adjusted $5 back then.
And chrome's UI is much more fancy, displays way more data, and has way more functionality, than the UI that was powered by the 4kb of ram.
It's a cute comparison, but ultimately, it's meaningless.
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#25Don'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…
Anecdata: I find browser RAM usage varies enormously depending on which specific websites you use.
The Flotato test uses Twitter and Gmail (for the first set; it doesn't specify the sites used for the 2nd set). Both Twitter and Gmail are large, complex, slow webapps which likely do some sort of advanced active memory management (extensive use of service workers, local storage, etc.). They also load mainly (exclusively?) 1st party resources.
The Brave tests use a large varied set of sites[0], which seem to be a combination of simple news & ecommerce sites. There are no complex webapps in the list. Modern news sites do have a reputation for being slow and heavy, but this will mostly be due to 3rd-party resources from ad companies; the sites themselves are simple and lightweight in terms of 1st-party content.
So they seem to be comparing very different browser usage patterns.
Given that, and looking again at the Brave tests: Safari does actually have lower memory usage than Chrome for most of their graphs. It just creeps slightly ahead of Chrome in the later tests.
[0] https://github.com/brave-experiments/browser-comparison-tool...
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#26Sure that's counting all processes? My Safari process stays the same size no matter how many tabs, but I'll get a bunch of web content processes. Although that would apply to Chrome, too, of course.
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#27Could 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
You absolutely can allocate memory without using up any backing resources. On Linux (which is where I have experience, but I assume macos works similarly), even after mapping some memory, it won't be backed by any physical memory (e.g. RAM) until you actually write there. And you can mmap files into your address space, meaning you can place a huge file you can access through memory, but it's not actually taking any RAM, the kernel is just doing the reading of each "chunk" of the file as you access them, unloading the old bits once you stop using them for a while.
Measuring memory usage is hard.
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#28Don'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…
The linked blog post doesn’t state it explicitly, but I suspect that the non-Brave browsers were not equipped with any kind of adblocking for the test. Brave has built in adblocking, so if my suspicions are true the test is rather disingenuous. At minimum Firefox and Chrome should have uBlock Origin installed and Safari should have Wipr or 1blocker installed to make it fair.
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#29Chrome is a pig for sure, but most attempts I see at measuring memory consumption are wrong. The two main ways they're typically wrong is either by misunderstanding how memory works (which is to be expected, it's subtle![1]) or by doing the measurement wrong (e.g. confusing CPU usage for RAM, or looking at the wrong process, or using a memory consuming extension in one setting but not the other). I think this post does both.
(Disclaimer: I worked on Chrome. I believe the conclusion "uses a lot of RAM" is correct, but it doesn't mean the reasoning that led to there is right.)
Re: Browsers eating RAM
#30https://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…
I find Firefox dev tools sufficient pretty much 100% of the time... have you considered it?
I use Firefox as my main browser (and always have -- just to give some context about where I'm coming from). But Firefox's developer tools are just not as good as Chrome's. Again, I use Firefox. But every couple months or so, I stumble upon some annoying instance where its developer tools are either inadequate or are just buggy (whether it's the element inspector not working, or pausing on a debugger statement and not giving me a source view, or applied CSS rules not showing up, or some weird behavior in the console, or...), and I have to resort to using Chrome's developer tools to get the issue resolved. This easily accounts for 90+% of my Chrome usage (i.e. more than the number of times I've had to resort to opening a website in Chrome because the developers didn't test it in Firefox).