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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#151

Post by bitmapbrother »

zzzcpan wrote: post #45

Yeah, Opera with Presto engine was amazing. It was the only browser that focused on UX, really fast and responsive UX. It also had real keyboard navigation, going through the links was easier, than using a mouse, temporarily enabling javascript or cookies in a tab was couple of keypresses away. Good times. Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. An…

I just installed Opera 12.17 to verify your claims. I was very disappointed. This reminds me of people that say their old Nokia phones were better than the smartphones of today. Funny how time distorts things.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#153

Post by garaetjjte »

>Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs. Opera was sane: it did not reload a tab unless you asked for it. It just reopened everything from cache.

Firefox also loads suspended tabs from cache. It reloads them(on first switch to tab), but no data is downloaded from server.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#154

Post by alkonaut »

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 wish there was some system of grouping tabs, e.g. if I visit a newpaper site and Ctrl+Click 3 article links it would keep those tabs "under" the main site tab, and the tab would only display "nytimes.com (4)". As long as I'm viewing one of them, the tabs of that particular domain would expand and other sites would collapse.

Is there a browser or chrome plugin that does this?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#155

Post by jheriko »

Maybe the question should be "Why don't I spend time optimising browsers?"

Certainly that's my problem - I don't even try. Enough people with that attitude and browsers never get optimised...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#156

Post by sambe »

As usual, this is simply not true in general. If your system is doing 10 other things and is memory/CPU constrained then, sure, you probably know why it's taking so long.

If you have 100 tabs open of which 10 are rather badly-behaved, maybe the browser cannot do enough to mitigate it. But again, although this is a common power-user setup, it's not standard.

If none of the above, it's likely due to an extension. I was starting to blame Safari for slow tab opening and page loading recently and then I uninstalled an extension and everything became lightning fast again. I have around 100 tabs open across 4 windows. All major browsers are very fast for normal browsing in the default configuration.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#157

Post by debaserab2 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #109
nothrabannosir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not Imgur, YouTube It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter. If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.

I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.

Kind of - but no, not exactly.

Before imgur, there was photobucket, imageshack, whatever - they were beyond dumpy jankey messes that you truly didn't know what you were going to get when you clicked on them. There was a good chance a new window was going to open behind your current target, or that the images would be intentionally low res until you clicked into them (for more CPM's for the host).

Imgur came along and stole their bread and butter, but then they took on a bunch of VC money and had to figure out how they were going to profit. I'm not sure if they've figured it out, but their site has definitely suffered - although not nearly to the degree as the predecessors that they replaced.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#158

Post by pmlnr »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #151
zzzcpan wrote: post #45

Yeah, Opera with Presto engine was amazing. It was the only browser that focused on UX, really fast and responsive UX. It also had real keyboard navigation, going through the links was easier, than using a mouse, temporarily enabling javascript or cookies in a tab was couple of keypresses away. Good times. Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. An…

I just installed Opera 12.17 to verify your claims. I was very disappointed. This reminds me of people that say their old Nokia phones were better than the smartphones of today. Funny how time distorts things.

I kept using opera 12 for a long while - due to the unmatched ux of the email client in it.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#159

Post by detaro »

chanux wrote: post #112
owaislone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes. I don't…

I wonder whether these good days would soon come to an end with process per tab model. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

The developer edition was mentioned, and that runs Electrolysis already. Even the normal release does if you don't have incompatible plugins.

(FWIW, before electrolysis Firefox was unusuable with many tabs for me, now it is perfectly fine, so either I made a random setup change at the same time, some other optimization landed or it actually helps)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#160

Post by swiley »

bootload wrote: post #70

I wrote a simple bit of code to calculate the size of index pages with includes (js, css, images) and here's what I get: page resource total url (b) (b) (Kb) ---------------------------------------------- 33857 143 34.0 news.ycombinator.com 62690 55975 118.7 arstechnica.com 11844 223862 235.7 seldomlogical.com 218837 765943 984.8 newyorktimes.com l592771 545304 1138.1 guardian.co.uk The one thing I notice watching th…

This is why people don't read news articles. It's not that their lazy, it's that the sites hosting them almost feel hostile.
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