Why are browsers so slow? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#311

Post by discreditable » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

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

Note that e10s currently only splits the browser into a content process and a browser process. I don't think they will ever move to 1:1 tabs per process.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#312

Post by laumars » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:18 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #294

laumars wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of the websites you mentioned keep you logged in. Indeed. Which was the point I literally just made after you argued about sessions timing out. > Then, not all HN readers are tech-savvy, being enthusiastic about technology is not the same as being tech-savvy. It sounds very much like you believe you're educating people here. I'd be surprised if anyone reading this thread was unaware of the existence of bookmar…

Lots of accusations there. The only thing I suggested is to use bookmarks, and imply that it's highly unlikely that in an audience as diverse as HN ALL of them, or the majority of readers are tech-savvy... Run a survey if you want. I made a reasonable suggestion without an intention to offend people. Hacker News is about sharing information. I am sharing information. You want to start your Monty Python argument clini…

With the greatest of respect, I think you're reading subtext in comments where there was none:

1stly I said "tech-savvy enough to run a browser". The context here is critical (hence my emphasis) because I'm not talking about our level of technical competence but rather the basics of using a browser (ie using tabs and bookmarks). You may disagree and think some on here are unaware of bookmarks but I think that's extremely unlikely. However I think taking proper context of my point into account, you likely don't disagree me. Which is why your rebuttals always crop out the context I included.

2ndly I was never offended by your suggestion to use bookmarks. In fact I didn't even disagree with you. I wrote about why some people don't use bookmarks and how I don't blame them for their arguably bad practices. It seemed that you misinterpreted that as an argument in favour of tabs and thus constructed arguments around disproving that point. That wasn't necessary as there wasn't ever a disagreement there. Maybe I should have been more clear early on?

Lastly I've not made any accusations about you. Let alone unreasonable ones. I may have disagreed on a few specific points but I think the "accusations" term is a tad exaggerative. If you feel I have said things that could be taken personally then I apologise, that was never my intention. :)

Couple the above points with your reiterating my counterargument about login sessions and hopefully you can see why I was a little frustrated at the weird direction this discussion took. At every turn you seemed hell bent on disagreeing with me even when we were agreeing. If you don't mind me asking, maybe your initial comment getting downvoted (wasn't me by the way!) left you feeling you needed to prove your point? I've never agreed with negative rep but that's a whole other tangent.

Anyway, since we never actually disagreed on the crux of the argument I think we should just chalk this down to a misunderstanding and get on with our lives :)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#313

Post by pawelmi » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

(disclaimer: I work for Opera) This year Opera has had a lot of focus on performance tuning under the umbrella of Power Saving Mode that was shipped in Opera 39. It was many small optimizations like for example reducing timer frequency in unused tabs or UI animation fixes as well quite advanced memory compaction that is now being upstreamed (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...). Recent Opera 42 features a small but nice update to startup p/restart behaviour - it schedules only the most important/recently used tabs for reload right away - which is quite useful for people like me who normally have dozens of tabs open all the time.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#314

Post by NoGravitas » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:25 PM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #35

prewett wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reader mode is such a relief. I wish there were a way to enable it by default.

There are extensions that enable reader mode by default, for example [Automatic Reader View][0].

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#315

Post by jbergens » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:27 PM UTC

syrrim wrote: post #88

nothrabannosir wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU at 20%, "loading didn't make too much of a difference"??? 20% is obscene for a process without interaction. Imagine a paused video player taking 20%, or a minimised word editor. Even at 58 videos or documents.

You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.

I never used to start 100+ normal apps. It would have dragged my old computers to a crawl.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#316

Post by kuschku » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #193

iopq wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually want this to happen in all of my tabs because I want them to UPDATE. This is why I keep them open in the first place.

I think that the mechanism I suggested elsewhere would handle this best: each tab's complete state (DOM, JavaScript &c.) should be marshalled to disk at quit (and checkpointed periodically, in case of crashes); on startup, all tabs are loaded and their DOM & JavaScript contexts restored. If a tab's context had it set to update periodically, then that periodic-update context would be restored; if not, then the remote…

> This seems so obviously correct to me that I wonder what I'm missing.

You are missing that

> should be marshalled to disk at quit

is not easily doable.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#317

Post by vizzah » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

As a Firefox user since v1 on Linux I have witnessed how slow some parts of the browser has become. For instance, textarea text typing can be so painfully slow with a visible lag between keystrokes.. that's not just on a certain websites and with spell-checking enabled, but with all options off on a blank page with single textarea element.. I guess there is no way to get rid of all the bloat of the ages..

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#318

Post by dvdgsng » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #177

alkonaut wrote: post #154

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 k…

> I wish there was some system of grouping tabs Like Tab Groups? FireFox has had them since forever, but since "nobody" used them, it was removed. You now need an extension to regain that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... You also have tree-style tabs, which organizes tabs based on their parent tabs (those they were opened from): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ad…

> Unless of course you use Chrome,

... then you could try Vivaldi, which has nice features when it comes to tabs (stacking, tiling, vertical tab list). No tree-style, though.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#319

Post by delecti » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:46 PM UTC

chetanahuja wrote: post #119

Hondor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of being debatable is that it's not obvious what the best answer is. If it didn't load all the tabs, then you'd see an outdated version of the page when you clicked on a tab, or it'd load when you clicked on it, forcing you to wait right at the moment when you want it immediately. Reloading all tabs sounds like the best option for people who use tabs to temporarily use several websites at once. That's what…

a "debatable" option shouldn't be the only option. Which is the case in chrome. No way to disable that behavior either from the command line or from the settings UI.

Google has been moving quite a bit in the direction of fewer and fewer options. I may like it the way things are, but I do agree it should be an option.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#320

Post by mgkimsal » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

Fascinating and frustrating at the same time, reading people going back and forth on their browser experiences.

"I've got 450 tabs open, in any browser, ever, and I experience 0 lag - in fact, it tends to finish rendering before my eyes even focus! And I've only got 6 gigs on some old 386!"

vs

"I can't even move my mouse in FF/Chrome/Safari without massive memory spikes and random reboots!"

At least some of the reports have to be expectations - I've sat next to someone and they thought I was "moving so fast" in my browser, and I was - at the same time - cursing how slow everything was running.

Someone reporting "no lag" might actually be experiencing what someone else reports as lag. Is there any way to adjust for our vague descriptions? Videos, perhaps, of what someone considers "fast" or "no lag" on a browser with 100s of tabs open?