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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#21

Post by khedoros1 »

I'm not sure what the author is talking about. After my recent tab clean-up, I've got 35 tabs open. Opening a new one is near-instantaneous, and I can say the same thing about bringing up any other tab I have open, as long as it has been loaded since the last time I restarted my browser.

I've got an Atom-based 2014 laptop at home. That one might take a second to open a new tab if I'm doing anything else on it at the time.

Modern browsers handle a higher load than older ones did; a more complex web means a greater amount of more complex data, and that means more complex data management. The overhead is higher (there's a lower floor), but it allows the browser to scale better (higher ceiling).

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#22

Post by jayflux »

Surely there's a trade off, as we add more and more features to browsers, w3C specifications, add ons, JavaScript updates etc, a browser will inevitably get slower. Yes older browsers were fast, but they did little in comparison to today's virtual machines.

The fact that you can do this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo in a browser should tell you we've come a long way from them just being Document readers.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#24

Post by prewett »

seibelj wrote: post #7
rocky1138 wrote: post #2

"Why are browsers so slow?" Site downloads almost 500KB of fonts.

THIS. If you want a fast website, remove all JS and make everything simple. For maximum performance put the static site on a CDN. It isn't hard.

And, obviously, websites apparently don't want a fast website. Empirically, they want the slow, JavaScript frameworky, image heavy, ad heavy, social media link-ful they have. Unfortunately, as a user, I want their website to be the opposite of what they want their website to be.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#25

Post by prewett »

21echoes wrote: post #19

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

I'm assuming you don't have a GMail tab open. My Firefox memory usage steadily climbs if I have a GMail tab open.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#26

Post by owaislone »

21echoes wrote: post #19

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

> 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 remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the magic land.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#27

Post by chetanahuja »

delecti wrote: post #6
iMerNibor wrote: post #4

> modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. firefox does not do this.

Additionally, it's debateable whether that's a bad default to begin with.

Oh everything is debatable if you're inclined to debate. But as far as user experience goes, that shitty default (with no way to disable it) on chrome is a pretty one-sided debate.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#28

Post by owaislone »

prewett wrote: post #25
21echoes wrote: post #19

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

I'm assuming you don't have a GMail tab open. My Firefox memory usage steadily climbs if I have a GMail tab open.

or any Google drive document.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#29

Post by vacri »

21echoes wrote: post #19

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier b…

Yeah, the article got up my nose as well. I've got a couple of hundred tabs in tab groups in FF, probably about 50 have something in them (the others aren't loaded until I navigate to them). Opening a new tab is instant.

I get a fair bit more resource usage than you're reporting, though...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#30

Post by kalmi10 »

Sanddancer wrote: post #3

I don't have this problem, blank pages don't take "seconds" to load, even on my little atom-based tablet. The big question I have for people noticing this behavior is how many add-ons do they have. How many times is your "blank page" parsed by an enormous amount of code written in a language not known for its performance?

On one of my machines, Chrome has at least a second delay before actually starting to load a page if and only if hw-acceleration is kept enabled. I have also seen odd delays on other machines on other browsers that were related to hw-acceleration.

Yes, having a great number of intrusive extensions can cause issues, but there is no need to jump to conclusions as these issues can be present without the user doing anything "wrong".

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