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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#371

Post by slededit »

jholman wrote: post #161
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…

400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does…

To be fair a 32-bit process couldn't use more than 2GB even if it wanted to.

/LARGEADRESSAWARE would give it access to an extra gig but needs to be compiled that way.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#372

Post by imagist »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #366
imagist wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself. So do I, which is why I use Patreon and subscriptions. The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors, and helping companies compete on ads rather than the quality of their products. Maybe you don't care about your own attention or data security,…

> The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors No, I'm not, because I'm using ABP's vetted ad provider list. This risk of getting malware from one of those is greater than zero, but a whole lot less than the risk I accept by using the internet at all. I might get struck by lightning too, but I don't waste a lot of time worrying about it…

> I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous.

If you choose to participate in harmful systems, you are in fact partially to blame for the harm done by those systems, and simply staying that I don't get to blame you for our doesn't change that.

Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in fact I think removing ads would make capitalism drastically more likely to yield the positive results capitalism purportedly yields.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#373

Post by legodt »

bzbarsky wrote: post #350
legodt wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'd be more than happy to try breaking this down, I'm going to try a nightly build now as other users have suggested and see how it feels

Excellent, thanks! If you're using a nightly, you should be able to use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance... to profile it, because nightlies have useful symbols. Might be worth capturing a profile at the point when the spinner stops and the page is finally shown.

The issue appears to have resolved itself with a fresh install. I could not replicate the behavior in the nightly, and when I reinstalled the main release it did not manifest again either. Sorry to not be a better help, I'm trying to wrap my head around it...

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#374

Post by Fnoord »

imagist wrote: post #372
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors No, I'm not, because I'm using ABP's vetted ad provider list. This risk of getting malware from one of those is greater than zero, but a whole lot less than the risk I accept by using the internet at all. I might get struck by lightning too, but I don't waste a lot of time worrying about it…

> I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous. If you choose to participate in harmful systems, you are in fact partially to blame for the harm done by those systems, and simply staying that I don't get to blame you for our doesn't change that. Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in…

> Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in fact I think removing ads would make capitalism drastically more likely to yield the positive results capitalism purportedly yields.

Indeed. Ask yourself the following question: say a user is not interested in advertisements. Is it therefore not a waste of the advertiser's time and/or money to force the ads upon this user?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#376

Post by bzbarsky »

legodt wrote: post #373
bzbarsky wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent, thanks! If you're using a nightly, you should be able to use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance... to profile it, because nightlies have useful symbols. Might be worth capturing a profile at the point when the spinner stops and the page is finally shown.

The issue appears to have resolved itself with a fresh install. I could not replicate the behavior in the nightly, and when I reinstalled the main release it did not manifest again either. Sorry to not be a better help, I'm trying to wrap my head around it...

All good. It's frustrating when problems come and go like this, but not much we can do about it.

If this starts happening again and you get any more data on it, please email me: bzbarsky at mit dot edu.

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