“improves battery life by up to 0.5%” To me this line is quite ridiculous. We all know that Chrome is now the main responsible for battery consumption on any laptop and could be optimized much more.
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RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
11–20 of 161 posts
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#12“improves battery life by up to 0.5%” To me this line is quite ridiculous. We all know that Chrome is now the main responsible for battery consumption on any laptop and could be optimized much more.
Yes and that was compared to... a previous version of Chrome. So v94 is 0.5% better on battery that v93. I don't even get why this is news.
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#13How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?
Chrome became so bloated and crap and slow that in 2020 I moved over to Firefox (which has been imperfect, but better), so my anecdata suggests that browsers don't actually get faster overall, but ebb and flow as feature creep and optimization compete for dominance.
To me it feels like bloated browser profiles makes the browsers sluggish.
I get annoyed with how slow Chrome is, so I switch Firefox. After a while the Firefox profile gets bloated and I get annoyed and switch back to Chrome with a clean profile and it feels really quick again. Ad infinitum.
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#14How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?
Popular apps will be as slow as user can tolerate. Because if they're not slow enough, it invites developers to introduce another abstraction layer.
Good thing is, that it's possible to create truly groundbreaking apps using non-conventional techniques, as web becomes faster and richer with new APIs.
For example with Wasm and WebGPU it's possible to create AAA games running in the browser. Someone will do it. It'll be awesome.
I have one example to prove my words. I used iPhone 4S. With iOS 6 I was able to use navigator software which worked very snappy and awesome. Few years later with iOS 9, navigator was very slow, forcing me to buy new phone eventually. With iPhone 8 it returned to blazing fast. But it did not have any new functions. They just started to consume more memory, just because they can. My UX did not change a little bit. I just had to buy new phone with infinitely faster CPU and loads of RAM, just to keep my UX from degrading.
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome became so bloated and crap and slow that in 2020 I moved over to Firefox (which has been imperfect, but better), so my anecdata suggests that browsers don't actually get faster overall, but ebb and flow as feature creep and optimization compete for dominance.
To me it feels like bloated browser profiles makes the browsers sluggish. I get annoyed with how slow Chrome is, so I switch Firefox. After a while the Firefox profile gets bloated and I get annoyed and switch back to Chrome with a clean profile and it feels really quick again. Ad infinitum.
The Firefox profile manager and Chrome temporary files would let you test this theory.
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#16“improves battery life by up to 0.5%” To me this line is quite ridiculous. We all know that Chrome is now the main responsible for battery consumption on any laptop and could be optimized much more.
At the scale that Chrome operates, 0.5% energy reduction globally is massive. All these small gains also add for individual devices as well.
You mean the total energy saved across all devices? The only context in which anybody could give a fig about that is as it relates to total global energy consumption, of which it is an utterly neglible speck.
Edit: Had a go at putting some numbers on that for fun, and will partially retract my comment (no I don't, see below).
If it takes [1] around 0.01kWh to charge a smartphone, there are [2] around 6 billion smartphones, each is charged once a day and this saves 0.05 (wrong,see below) of that usage, the saving is on the order of 3GWh/day, i.e. around 125MW.
Total global energy consumption is [3] around 20 TW, so the saving is around 0.0006% of it, and this is a very generous estimate (chrome isn't all the consumption of a smartphone, not all phones are in active use and charging once a day, etc).
That said, in absolute terms it's more than I would have guessed - comparable to the electricity consumption of a small town (no, much less, probably less than the output of a single wind turbine - see below).
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-in-kwh-does-it-take-to-charge...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartph...
[3] https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/current_world_energy_...
Edit 2: On reflection, I think this is an big overestimate. I suspect the real saving is on the order of a few MW.
Edit 3: As the reply says, I missed a zero, which brings it down to probably on the order of a MW.
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#17How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?
It has been for more than a decade:
“What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away”
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the scale that Chrome operates, 0.5% energy reduction globally is massive. All these small gains also add for individual devices as well.
You mean the total energy saved across all devices? The only context in which anybody could give a fig about that is as it relates to total global energy consumption, of which it is an utterly neglible speck. Edit: Had a go at putting some numbers on that for fun, and will partially retract my comment (no I don't, see below). If it takes [1] around 0.01kWh to charge a smartphone, there are [2] around 6 billion smartp…
Yes, Google (and other global companies) actually cares about that. They work on fleet-level changes to make such differences worth it. It might not matter to you though.
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#19How come processors and browsers become faster every year but the internet feels as slow and bloated as ever? How long can this x% faster continue? There must be some theoretical optimum, how far are we away?
Not just the internet: case in point, the new Xcode 13 has some really embarassing performance problems on my mid-2014 13"MBP. I guess the Xcode team switched to shiny new M1 Macs between Xcode 12 and 13.
Re: RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the scale that Chrome operates, 0.5% energy reduction globally is massive. All these small gains also add for individual devices as well.
You mean the total energy saved across all devices? The only context in which anybody could give a fig about that is as it relates to total global energy consumption, of which it is an utterly neglible speck. Edit: Had a go at putting some numbers on that for fun, and will partially retract my comment (no I don't, see below). If it takes [1] around 0.01kWh to charge a smartphone, there are [2] around 6 billion smartp…
Everything is neglible in comparison to global energy consumption though, because we use energy for so many different things.
If everyone who is in a position to reduce the energy consumption of their small part significantly does their part then it will add up to a significant effort.