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Why are browsers so slow?

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Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#81

Post by nothrabannosir »

21echoes wrote: post #74
EpicEng wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#82

Post by technojunkie »

shortformblog wrote: post #48

I downloaded the latest version of Opera this weekend after a lot of frustration with Chrome's drain on my Mac's battery life. Man was I shocked. It uses the same engine as Chrome (Blink) but somehow manages to double the amount of battery life on my machine. I could never get more than three hours on my Retina MBP before I tried it. And it supports Chrome extensions, to boot.

If only Opera had built-in Flash, I would consider this more. Too many sites require Flash still sadly.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#83

Post by freehunter »

jasikpark wrote: post #79
chongli wrote: 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.

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

You mean https://pinboard.in?

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#84

Post by TwoBit »

owaislone wrote: post #26
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…

I've had 30 tabs open on Firefox/OSX without detriment.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#85

Post by TwoBit »

lukaa wrote: post #23

On Android you should check Polarity browser.It's faster than any other browser.

Every time I try one of those third party browsers, it's fast but can't render many pages right. It's as if they are taking some shortcut that works only 80% of the time.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#86

Post by superkuh »

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.

I run a similar number of tabs in Pale Moon (browser) with slightly better performance. But most of this is because I make a choice not to use shitty website that are written in javascript instead of html.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#87

Post by kilroy123 »

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…

While I don't have _that_ many tabs open. I do usually keep 20 - 50 open in chrome. Same experience, with low / no memory foot-print; using The Great Suspender.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

I'm on a 2015 MBP with 16 GB of ram and like 20 extensions installed.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#88

Post by syrrim »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #81
21echoes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Why are browsers so slow?

#90

Post by unwiredben »

If you're in a recent Firefox, open a new tab to the URL "about:performance" -- it will show you a report on how your add-ins and tabs are affecting the browser. One of my coworkers used it to find that a tab from a IoT device controller page was slowing down the whole browser by doing lots of unnecessary page refreshes.
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