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Why are browsers so slow?

ilyabirman.net

71–80 of 376 posts

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#71
post #66
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening a tab is the fastest thing about Firefox. I mean it plays a little animation, but you can ignore that and start typing immediately after ctrl-t.

You can disable the animation by setting browser.tabs.animate to false in about:config.

Ooh, snappy, thanks for the tip!

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#72
post #55

> 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…

Picture proof of memory usage: http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt FF 1.3GB memory with 10 tabs and 5% of CPU, with FF in the background. Switching tabs is absolutely not instant, opening new tabs is reasonable, bet definitely not instant. I'd love your numbers ;)

Well, one of those tabs is graylog and one is gmail. Do you have e10s enabled? (open about:support, check for "Multiprocess Windows")

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#73
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vacuuming your profile might help: #!/bin/bash killall firefox for file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do echo sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM done I do it in my once-a-month cleanup script.

I remember the days when leaving Windows meant not having to futz with cleanup scripts. What happened?

When was this? I recall having to use Cocktail with OS X (10.2-10.9) because the system maintenance scripts would never run if my laptop was off/asleep at midnight. In general, Unix users have had to use cron scripts almost since its origin.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#74
post #64

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 don't imagine many of those tabs are actually loaded.

Ctrl+tab'd thru all 56 tabs in this group, waited for them to finish loading, opened activity monitor: CPU at 20%, RAM at 811MB. So yea, a fair amount weren't loaded, but loading them didn't make too big of a difference.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#75
post #67

> 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…

How does someone even begin to function with 273 open tabs, let alone be productive?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226078

When I'm in my working tab group, that's like 8 tabs or so. Most of the tabs in the storage groups are months old (more like bookmarks I didn't have to hit Cmd+D to save)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#76

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…

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).

> FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta)

The Developer Edition replaced Aurora, which was the alpha release, one version between the beta and Nightly.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#77

> 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…

My coworker acts like your OP and has your problem writ large as expected. He knows it but it's his personality.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#78
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

Firefox with Tab Groups and AwesomeBar fits very nicely with my workflow-- 1. I dont have to think. I Cmd+Click links as I find them interesting, switch tabs as my attention changes, etc. and the tabs just stay there, waiting. 2. AwesomeBar searches over open tabs by default, and selecting a suggestion switches to that open tab rather than opening a new one. 3. When I have time, I can sort my tabs into labelled group…

You might (might not) find my extension useful. I made it for people that horde tabs like you and me. It's a page that lists tabs per window visually and if you click on one of the links it focuses the tab for you.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

and chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

It's also open source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

If you end up trying it, let me know if you find it useful/hate it or have something that should be added :)

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#79
post #37

> 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…

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

https://pinboard.io works relatively well as a way to save links for later.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know which Firefox you're using, but I want it. Mine is super laggy all the time, even with one or two tabs open. Opening a new tab takes half a second, visiting a new page takes half a second, going back takes half a second. It's extremely frustrating to use, and I don't even have that many extensions or history pages.

Based on my personal experience I think you are living in some parallel universe. Perhaps you post some other parameters about your system?

It's a 2013 MacBook Air, and my desktop is some custom thing with an i5, 16 GB RAM and a Samsung Evo SSD. They're both equally laggy, to the point that my browser froze for half a second while posting the previous comment (and regularly does so). However, after running the cleanup script in the sibling comment, it at least appears to not freeze.
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