20 ms·

Why are browsers so slow?

• bootload 10y ago
  I wrote a simple bit of code to calculate the size of index pages with includes (js, css, images) and here's what I get: page resource total url (b) (b) (Kb) ---------------------------------------------- 33857 143 34.0 news.ycombinator.com 62690 55975 118.7 arstechnica.com 11844 223862 235.7 seldomlogical.com 218837 765943 984.8 newyorktimes.com l592771 545304 1138.1 guardian.co.uk The one thing I notice watching the index page being broken down, is the sheer number of resources requested. Didn't bother with JS/browser interaction which you can check with browser dev tools.
  • swiley 10y ago
    This is why people don't read news articles. It's not that their lazy, it's that the sites hosting them almost feel hostile.
    • bootload 10y ago
      "It's not that their lazy, it's that the sites hosting them almost feel hostile." Agree with that. A driver of the page size (JS, images, video) is advertising. Advertising and advertising techniques are distorting the news and ability to read it.
  • mixmastamyk 10y ago
    Would enjoy seeing the source.
    • bootload 10y ago
      it's evil and slow, I'll make a few mods and whack it up, got an email or twitter acct & I'll contact u. -- PR implemented in py using - Beautiful Soup 4 - Requests - htmllib Core idea is to grab an index url and determine size of page and resources by looking at urls likely to be pulled by page. JS not implemented from what I can read. Method is something like: * pull index page with requests by url * extract headers * build list of resource urls * look at content type to determine new request * extract images, text, css from urls in page * look at content length to determine size * total sizes
    • bootload 10y ago
      read away ~ https://github.com/peterrenshaw/pageglut https://github.com/peterrenshaw/pageglut
      • mixmastamyk 10y ago
        Thanks!
        • bootload 10y ago
          and write-up why ~ http://seldomlogical.com/2016/JAN/27/measure-that-page/ http://seldomlogical.com/2016/JAN/27/measure-that-page/
• rocky1138 10y ago
  "Why are browsers so slow?" Site downloads almost 500KB of fonts.
  • seibelj 10y ago
    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.
    • neltnerb 10y ago
      The OP isn't talking about rendering (at least as I understand it, which isn't well either), it's talking about why, after rendering, it takes so long to switch between tabs or why creating a new clean tab takes more than a millisecond. I, like the OP, don't understand why that part is hard. Does it have to rerun and redownload all the javascript each time you switch to a tab? Are we misunderstanding how websites work? Will removing all JS solve the behavior the author mentions? Obviously doing that will make pages load faster. But that's not what they seem to be asking. Is the OP question not meaningful because of some aspect of page rendering? Honest questions, I have basically no knowledge about this topic, but have wondered the same thing.
    • prewett 10y ago
      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.
      • marssaxman 10y ago
        Reader mode is such a relief. I wish there were a way to enable it by default.
        • NoGravitas 10y ago
          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-reader-view/?src=api https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
• Sanddancer 10y ago
  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?
  • PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    If your browser is designed from the ground up to support add-ons, but can't handle a couple of them without slowing to a crawl, your browser sucks. Don't blame the user for a problem with the software.
    • chadscira 10y ago
      Depends... What extensions do you have? I remember back when FF used to be considered fast. Then we went through the age of extensions. And shortly after that chrome came on the scene, and didn't support extensions (intentionally it seemed), for quite some time. Guess which browser won the user speed test...
    • khedoros1 10y ago
      > your browser sucks Why not all three? The browser implementation, user's choices, and the implementations of each individual add-on suck. The browser didn't limit the resource use of greedy add-ons (or inform the user of conflicts between them), the add-ons were coded either to do too much, or to perform their function with suboptimal code, and the user is the one that chose that set of software to use together.
  • RandyRanderson 10y ago
    The only add-ons I use are ones to remove ads. If I didn't have them those ads would easily make the my overall performance much, much worse. I have a custom blank page loaded from SSD that has only a small amount of html5/pure js and it takes maybe 1000ms on an intel i5/3xxx. If I open a new tab without any other windows/tabs open it's very fast, maybe 100ms. A new private tab (doesn't load add-ons or my custom new tab) opens quickly but not as quickly as a fresh restart w/ no windows/tabs.
• iMerNibor 10y ago
  > modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. firefox does not do this.
  • delecti 10y ago
    Additionally, it's debateable whether that's a bad default to begin with.
    • chetanahuja 10y ago
      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.
      • Hondor 10y ago
        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 I do - never having more than half a dozen and closing them all when I'm finished on the computer. For people who use them in place of bookmarks, it would be better not to load them.
        • chetanahuja 10y ago
          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.
          • mentando 10y ago
            Well, it is debatable, if it is good. For some it is obviously not, but for others it is a good default. What's bad is that it cannot be changed. That is not debatable.
• le_meta 10y ago
  It's not easy to index all those GUIDs and have them updated live for NSA
• RandyRanderson 10y ago
  Agreed, I have about 8GB of pages open right now not doing anything. Many computers don't have that much total ram. I think it's time to have per tab resource throttling. For example if a page uses over a certain amount of . compute resources, the cpu cycles allowed in the next epoch are halved . RAM it's memory accesses per second are halved in the next epoch . network traffic it's kB/s are halved in the next epoch This would allow all pages to still work but the resource intensive ones would be flagged quickly by users and developers.
  • warfangle 10y ago
    And immediately any webGL visualizations / games / necessarily resource intensive webapps are rendered useless as they're automatically throttled back by the browser.
    • RandyRanderson 10y ago
      It would be pretty easy to add a conspicuous button to "unlock" resources iff they were throttled. Being generous, I think the average user might actually push this btn once a month?
• cpt1138 10y ago
  Installing Ghostery, Privacy Badger and adblocker makes a world of difference in terms of how fast page loads are for me. Ads are not just annoying, they slow the web down considerably and make the mobile experience terrible.
  • vacri 10y ago
    I just use NoScript, and it's astonishing just how many sources some pages use. Just looking at the block list in NoScript for an online-newspaper sort of site, and there'll usually be about 20 javascript sources.
  • hau 10y ago
    Why would you use adblocker/ublock and 2 other extensions which are no more than a filter lists for adblocker/ublock?
    • elktea 10y ago
      Privacy badger is a little different, afaik it doesn't use lists.
      • hau 10y ago
        It says in the FAQ section of the official site that the main difference between it and other blocking extensions is ease of use aka lack of setup. It also claims it's based on adblock code. So it's just adblock with lists preset? Indeed a little difference if you're able to setup adblock-like extension. And if we're discussing performance, you don't want an extension for every list out there.
  • Fnoord 10y ago
    Ghostery sold out, they sell your metadata to 3rd parties. Try uMatrix instead. It is as powerful as NoScript, but easier to use. For adblocker, consider uBlock Origin. Better performance, and didn't sell out.
• ovao 10y ago
  I only notice the kind of "tabs are slow to open" behavior pretty randomly, and without knowing the state of the rest of my machine at those moments (is there something else pegging a few of my cores for some reason?) I can't confidently place any blame on the browser itself. For what they are, I consider modern web browsers to be exceptionally fast and reliable, and they tend to put a lot of other applications to absolute shame. They are imperfect, but still very, very good.
• shmerl 10y ago
  Fully parallelized browser using something like Servo and Vulkan for rendering graphics is your friend.
• alexnewman 10y ago
  We got some new rocking fast www.brave.com versions out that should be wayyy fast.
• 21echoes 10y ago
  > 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 back then than working with ten in today’s Safari or Chrome. But that’s a whole different story. What would you do today if you opened a link and saw a long article which you don’t have time to read right now, but want to read later? You would save a link and close the tab. But when your browser is fast, you just don’t tend to close tabs which you haven’t dealt with. In Opera, I would let tabs stay open for months without having any impact on my machine’s performance. 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. And it doesn't reload every page when I quit and restart my browser -- it only loads a tab when I click into that tab. And it has tab groups so that my current group has only about 8 tabs in it, and the other groups are sorted by topic. And on and on. I find it frustrating when people post these articles as if everyone has this problem, and don't provide enough details as to their setup so that people can help them fix it. I promise you -- if everyone around the world right now had the problem the author was having, it would have been solved. No one would stand for it. Rather than assume everyone is suffering just like you, assume that other people either a) don't behave the way you do, or b) have found a way to fix the problem.
  • prewett 10y ago
    I'm assuming you don't have a GMail tab open. My Firefox memory usage steadily climbs if I have a GMail tab open.
    • owaislone 10y ago
      or any Google drive document.
    • 21echoes 10y ago
      Mmmm that's true, I don't. I tend to close GMail tabs once I'm done with them because I also noticed they tend to leak and are poorly optimized for non-Chrome browsers.
• khedoros1 10y ago
  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).
  • NotOscarWilde 10y ago
    I have a Intel Atom 1.6 GHz/2GB of RAM netbook afrom 2009 with Linux on it, and Firefox/Chrome is the only unusable app on it; other Linux applications seem to be fairly responsive on the hardware. I really feel the slowness on that one. Tab switching takes seconds, other interactions take seconds (especially on sites with javascript), Facebook.com is unreadable (script takes too long). It is just an anecdote, but at least on Linux the browser is what makes older computers obsolete. PS: Interestingly, some minimalist WebKit-based web browsers seem to work fine on there (like uzbl), of course that comes with a huge downside of no sync, practically no addons, and so forth.
    • khedoros1 10y ago
      I've also got a similar machine (Lenovo S10-2), which I used as my primary laptop for a few years. Using the web on it was painful even 5 years ago. Almost as bad as the 2003 IBM laptop sitting next to it in my closet. The author was talking about a 2014 iMac, 5 years newer than your netbook and likely 3-4x the price. They're running a modern OS with a browser (Safari) claimed to be 1.4x - 7x faster (by Apple's numbers on their Safari page) than the Firefox browser that I use. So that's what I'm wondering about. By the author's description, their premium 2014 computer isn't running a browser as well as my super-budget refurb 2014 computer.
• jayflux 10y ago
  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 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.
• lukaa 10y ago
  On Android you should check Polarity browser.It's faster than any other browser.
  • TwoBit 10y ago
    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.
    • alexbecker 10y ago
      Rather than any one shortcut, they're probably implementing 20% of the W3C specs that together cover 80% of their test pages. Unsurprisingly, this is both much easier and much faster.
• michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  Something I've found very useful for Chrome is "The Great Suspender" extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... It frees up lots of memory but still lets me keep lots of tabs around without having to be militant and killing them off as I stop using them.
  • olejorgenb 10y ago
    Firefox also have extensions like that. I'm using http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en / https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/ It's marked as experimental, but I haven't had any trouble so far.
• zzzcpan 10y ago
  Yeah, Opera with Presto engine was amazing. It was the only browser that focused on UX, really fast and responsive UX. It also had real keyboard navigation, going through the links was easier, than using a mouse, temporarily enabling javascript or cookies in a tab was couple of keypresses away. Good times. Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. And they are big and so deep in the government, that no one seem to be able to do anything about it.
  • dispose13432 10y ago
    >Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. And they are big and so deep in the government, that no one seem to be able to do anything about it. No one is forced into anything. It's just that the browser went from simply rendering HTML and some associated eye-candy JS to being an OS. So JS, which used to be a relatively safe, interpreted language, turned into Java, a complicated JIT VM where every millisecond counts. In the process, security holes are introduced, and competing with the "Big Guys" is just too hard. It's like why no one can compete against Intel for power and speed. It's just too expensive.
  • bitmapbrother 10y ago
    I just installed Opera 12.17 to verify your claims. I was very disappointed. This reminds me of people that say their old Nokia phones were better than the smartphones of today. Funny how time distorts things.
    • pmlnr 10y ago
      I kept using opera 12 for a long while - due to the unmatched ux of the email client in it.
    • Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
      You probably just don't appreciate the extra features Opera gives. Which, of course, is fine, but for many of us they are a dealbreaker. I'm still looking for another browser giving me real MDI with "click tab to minimize" functionality... Otter Browser kind of does but falls short in other respects. Vivaldi doesn't even try (they haven't even made the menubar native...) By the way, if you are referring to speed rather than features, you need to take into account that when you try Opera 12.17 right now, you are trying a browser that has been frozen in time for years while the JavaScript on websites evolved. For this reason, it's now very slow (if not incompatible) in JavaScript-heavy websites like Facebook, Gmail, etc... but I can attest as a long-time user that it was indeed the fastest browser in its time.
• shortformblog 10y ago
  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.
  • technojunkie 10y ago
    If only Opera had built-in Flash, I would consider this more. Too many sites require Flash still sadly.
• throwaw12ay 10y ago
  A technical question. Does using other format like XML or XHTML make rendering faster given the same amount of nodes + styles in the page? Can it help make browsers render a page faster?
  • minitech 10y ago
    No. It might make parsing faster if you optimized for it, but I don’t see any reason for the choice of text representation to affect rendering speed.
• unwiredben 10y ago
  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.
  • euwwpieupbui 10y ago
    "about:performance may currently be slowing down Firefox"
    • nachtigall 10y ago
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199987 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199987
• Freaky 10y ago
  I just counted my open tabs in Opera 42, and quit it so I could see the memory use. 799 open tabs. 8.5GB. Restarted in around 10 seconds and it's currently using around 2GB. "Delay loading of background tabs" is checked, which I believe is the default now. Not had any serious responsiveness problems. The browser extension I use to give me a list of tabs on my sidebar is a little slow when opening a new window, that's about it.
• nimchimpsky 10y ago
  Has the author tried https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/ (started from the remnants of original opera I believe)
  • milankragujevic 10y ago
    It's literally just Chrome, with a different chrome (UI) and some new features in the UI. You're not going to get anything faster than Chrome if it uses the same engine (Blink).
    • elktea 10y ago
      The post is not about the performance of rendering pages, it's about the UI. So recommending a browser that uses a different UI seems reasonable.
      • bwat48 10y ago
        vivaldi's ui is web based and even slower than chrome's though
• comex 10y ago
  > Safari may take a second or two just to open a new blank tab on a 2014 iMac Is "blank" actually blank? If you have new tabs set to show Top Sites (the default setting), there's a notable lag that doesn't occur if you set it to Empty Page. Of course, changing it is a reduction in functionality, and it's silly that loading a simple grid of screenshots is so slow. Chrome, for its part, is even slower (on my machine) to actually load the new tab page, but it loads it asynchronously with the address bar responding instantaneously, whereas Safari lags out the whole UI. I still use Safari myself, with new tabs set to Empty Page, because I don't really care about the screenshot-grid functionality (in either browser), and Safari has better performance in other respects, as well as lower power consumption. But it irks me that the default macOS experience makes you wait to open a new tab; it's a terrible UX for something that shouldn't be hard to optimize.
• juskrey 10y ago
  It is not browsers. Take ay of them back to 2005 and they'll be lighting fast.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• dirkg 10y ago
  Chrome is the culprit. For as much as they helped with V8 innovations, they've also done harm - ignores usability basics: horrible UI with > 10 tabs, reloads all tabs, many other issues - all of these are things people have complained about forever, they refuse to fix - memory hog: Chrome uses more memory than almost any other browser - Google forces Chrome upon you since Hangouts etc will not work with other browsers - for reasons passing understanding, the Chrome UI has been copied by every browser Firefox is better at every single thing and has a far better extension model, which sadly they will deprecate again to copy Chrome. I find it very sad that its popularity and market share has fallen as the world has collectively dumbed down the browser UI.
  • blitzd 10y ago
    Firefox has it's issues as well, which they also 'refuse' to fix. For instance, much of the browser falls apart when using remote desktop (RDP) sessions - it can even break remote desktop sessions as a whole in some instances, if Firefox is left open. I got bitten by it enough times that I simply won't use it any more - and Chrome does not have these issues (though it is certainly far from perfect).
  • wanda 10y ago
    Chrome is quite clearly targeted at the regular user, rather than the power user or developer/tinkerer. News flash: the regular user does not open 270 tabs, or even 10 tabs. You can tell me this claim is anecdotal, but since you have provided no evidence to substantiate your claims, I'd say the burden of proof falls on you first. > "Firefox is better at every single thing" Ouch. I mean, your post is littered with unsubstantiated claims, but that has to be the biggest and least substantiated of them. For starters, I think Chrome is a good deal further down the line in terms of ES6/ES7 and WebGl. Chrome is certainly ahead in the implementation of Web Platform features like Web Components and a large number of CSS properties. I see a lot of websites which advise non-Chrome users to switch to Chrome to view the website in question -- which is horrible, but one could hardly say Firefox is therefore better at WebGl, for example. I've also used Firefox/Firefox Web Developer Edition/Firefox Nightly many times of the years and I have generally preferred Chrome's dev tools. The ability to simulate slow network connections and to drag and reorder DOM nodes is nice in Chrome, and in general I find the dev tools to be more reliable when I'm messing with CSS properties. The reality is that I have to use both browsers in my line of work anyway, but just wanted to say that. Obviously your retort will be that Firebug is the best, but that's kind of my point: I do not think you can say of Firefox that it is better at 'every single thing' if it must first be augmented by add-ons. Firebug will be discontinued eventually anyway when multi-process lands in stable Firefox. So, I wouldn't say Firefox is better at every single thing. Maybe Firefox with a dozen add-ons is better than Chrome at some things, but that's the point. Regular users, and even busy developers/tinkerers, do not want to waste time configuring and setting up their browser. They just want something that will work. Chrome works better out of the box for the regular user. ----------- Regarding Chrome's UI, I think it caught on for a reason: just like websites have become flat and streamlined, the browser has also become more minimal in its UI, and Chrome very much led the charge there. Of course, Firefox is to be applauded for allowing the user to pick and choose which bits of the UI are visible and which are in the menu -- that's a great feature, I wish I could configure/style Chrome. But before Chrome, this option did not exist (unless there was an add-on, it's been so long I forget), and the FF user interface had a dozen buttons, two text fields (address & search), a bottom status bar and so on. It was too much clutter. Chrome streamlined the browser UI and put things in a more logical order: tabs, then search/address, then web content. It was and is well-designed from a UI/looks perspective for the regular user. Clearly, you are a power user and possibly a developer, so you will perhaps be more prone to having hundreds of tabs open and more inclined to spend time making everything about your browser just so. I can appreciate that. I've poured hours into browsers, tiling window managers, etc. I just don't think I'd advocate dwm/xmonad/awesome-wm to a regular user, and neither would I say a window manager represents a superior product to a desktop environment. A product isn't superior if you have to assemble/mod it yourself. This is a cornerstone of Apple's success, and VLC Media Player's success, and Google Search's success, and so on: to provide something that just works, rather than something which needs to be modded. ----------- No one can deny that Google has far greater reach and clout when pushing its browser down people's throats, but many developers prefer Chrome now, and not just 'rockstars', but older developers too. I do not believe they are 'casuals', I think they genuinely prefer the way Chrome works, and I think its market share is not testament only to Google's marketing power, but also to the fact that it is a successful and effective web browser. Google Search maintains dominance today in search because of its marketing and its huge lead in terms of data, but it only reached its current level because it ultimately worked better than its competitor products. I think the same is true of Chrome -- when it started out, it represented a fast and sleek new browser product, and while it has gotten overweight as time has progressed, it still beats the competition out of the box. ---------- PS: I am not a Chrome salesman. I have many complaints about the product, (especially on mobile, where I think it is spectacularly weak, but that's another story). I just found your claims a little too rash. Even 'polemic' isn't adequate to describe it.
• maxgashkov 10y ago
  Oh, do I miss the days of debugging problems caused by Opera's overagressive caching of _everything_. NOT.
  • iopq 10y ago
    Just Ctrl-F5 then. That overaggressive caching made it faster than other browsers.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• Aoyagi 10y ago
  I wouldn't say browers are slow, it's just that sites are bloated to no end. Then again, as is Chrome.
• janci 10y ago
  Browsers are slow, but I can cope with it. But what I hate is that browsers are nondeterministic. Try Ctrl+C,Ctrl+T,Ctrl+v,Enter combo. In opera it worked flawlessly everytime. In Firefox, it sometimes works, sometime it opens new tab without URL, sometime it pastes half of URL (?!) and navigatest there. In chrome you never know what sugesstion will the address bar give to you. In opera, you were 100% sure that your bookmarks will be there, so you could do Ctrl+T, type first few letters and press Enter without looking.
  • tgb 10y ago
    I do that in Chrome all the time. I hardly ever go to any sites except by typing the first ~three letters of the URL and mashing enter.
• anaisbetts 10y ago
  I didn't see the correct answer yet, so I'll just tell you, tabs have a delay to create because in almost all modern browsers you have to wait for a process to be created and for everything to be paged in, _then_ wait for a bunch of IPC calls to complete. Old browsers didn't do this, so creating tabs was so fast! But they were also much easier to compromise. Tradeoffs. Source: Electron maintainer
  • alexbecker 10y ago
    Commenting just to add visibility to the only plausible answer I've seen to the question as posed. Thanks for not getting sidetracked into arguments about adblock/JS engines/layout/fonts/etc.
  • n3t 10y ago
    Is there no (unused) processes pool?
  • ilyabirman 10y ago
    Why can’t they (a) have one process pre-created and ready for me before are press ⌘T or (b) don’t use a separate process to display an empty tab with Top Sites and create a process only after opening it? Or both :-)
  • brucedawson 10y ago
    Creating a process is not instantaneous but it is very quick - a small fraction of a second. And nothing should need paging in unless your system is under enough memory pressure to have paged things out. If paging in is the problem then you need more memory (or fewer processes consuming your memory) or a fast SSD so that paging isn't slow. If you don't have a fast SSD then you should try to always have a few GB of RAM available, otherwise your system can't cache frequently needed resources and everything will be slow. Creating a new tab in Chrome is very fast for me, even on my six-year-old laptop. I can type Ctrl+T and instantly be typing a new URL/search-term. There are hundreds of things that can make tab creation slow - anti-virus, low-memory, malware, extensions, CPU contention, etc. It is likely that different people on this thread are having their browser experience slowed by different things. Only by monitoring your specific system, or performing experiments (try disabling all extensions) can you find out why browsing is slow for you. In some cases the slowdowns could be bugs in the browsers which happen to only affect some people, but in most cases I think it is external factors. chrome://tracing can be used to investigate slowdowns in Chrome. ETW tracing (see UIforETW) can be used to investigate slowdowns on any Windows machine.
• jsz0 10y ago
  Your problem might be disk IO speed related. How fast is your storage? Most browsers still do trash a lot of disk IO even if you have plenty of memory available. For whatever reason it seems like OSX is way more prone to having performance problems due to slow disk IO. I have plenty of RAM, CPU and GPU so whenever I see a performance hiccup I know it's time to clear some space off my SSD. Performance of my (several year old, third party) SSD goes off a cliff when it has less than 15% or so free space available. If I get it back to 20% free space it's back to smooth sailing again.
• darklajid 10y ago
  So, incidentally I noticed a couple days ago that Firefox on Android handles > 99 tabs with a special icon. I found that quite amusing.. http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo
  • jakub_g 10y ago
    On Chrome it's ':D' - I guess due to UI constraints
• garaetjjte 10y ago
  >Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs. Opera was sane: it did not reload a tab unless you asked for it. It just reopened everything from cache. Firefox also loads suspended tabs from cache. It reloads them(on first switch to tab), but no data is downloaded from server.
  • jakub_g 10y ago
    Not fully true. If you open a large session and have a network sniffer on, you'd see likely at least dozens of requests for favicon.ico from half of internet :)
• alkonaut 10y ago
  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 keep those tabs "under" the main site tab, and the tab would only display "nytimes.com (4)". As long as I'm viewing one of them, the tabs of that particular domain would expand and other sites would collapse. Is there a browser or chrome plugin that does this?
  • josteink 10y ago
    > 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-panorama/?src=search 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/addon/tree-style-tab/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... You have several options. Unless of course you use Chrome, in which case Google has said "fuck you" to actual power-users and choice ;)
    • alkonaut 10y ago
      Yeah I suppse more like the tree on, but I was kind of hoping to see it stacked in a horizontal row of tabs still, which i suppose is really silly since screens have gone from wide to wider to ultrawide so there is ample space on the sides. Yes, I'm using chrome and edge, only because FF sucked at the time I switched and even though I have heard good things about FF recently I tend to only switch every 5 years or so. So I guess I'm not really a power web user, as I seem to rather not switch browser than be able to customize it.
    • Ajedi32 10y ago
      I've been using this one for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
• jheriko 10y ago
  Maybe the question should be "Why don't I spend time optimising browsers?" Certainly that's my problem - I don't even try. Enough people with that attitude and browsers never get optimised...
• sambe 10y ago
  As usual, this is simply not true in general. If your system is doing 10 other things and is memory/CPU constrained then, sure, you probably know why it's taking so long. If you have 100 tabs open of which 10 are rather badly-behaved, maybe the browser cannot do enough to mitigate it. But again, although this is a common power-user setup, it's not standard. If none of the above, it's likely due to an extension. I was starting to blame Safari for slow tab opening and page loading recently and then I uninstalled an extension and everything became lightning fast again. I have around 100 tabs open across 4 windows. All major browsers are very fast for normal browsing in the default configuration.
• caub 10y ago
  network is slow, not browser
• mrmondo 10y ago
  Everything seemed to get slower and slower as JavaScript became more prevalent IMO.
• jakub_g 10y ago
  I am one of the tab hoarders and I think the general attitude of browser vendors/developers towards us is "you're doing it wrong" (they might be right). FYI Having huge amount of RAM helps (a bit) and on Windows, Firefox works quite well with up to 100-200 tabs.
• SeanDav 10y ago
  > "You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? " I currently have nearly 400 tabs open, across 7 browser windows (Firefox). The main reason for this is context switching. I have tried several context switching type addons but not found one yet that is reliable, simple and fast. Right now if I am programming, I have 2 browser windows I use for that. For news and related articles of interest, 1 browser window. For games and related, 1 window, etc, etc. Firefox and Tabmix plus makes this easy and relatively painless. Chrome would have about 12 million processes and use 4.7 petabytes of memory for same use case (I exaggerate a smidgen)
• edem 10y ago
  Why do we still have non-centered content on a website?
• legodt 10y ago
  My Firefox instance has recently picked up the nasty habit of every time I move to a different tab, the web area is white save for a spinning grey loading icon in the center for a good half second. I've never seen anything like this before recently and it's a real bummer on speed
  • leopld 10y ago
    It's an e10s (multiprocess) thing. Shame that you don't percieve the overall performance as improved, since that's something that e10s promises. But I know that the tab spinner stuff is something they're working on actively, hopefully it'll improve with time.
  • the8472 10y ago
    Before e10s this would likely have been a temporary hang, simply displaying the old content until the new finished rendering. That said, there are improvements for that on the nightlies.
  • bzbarsky 10y ago
    The spinner means the UI process has switched tabs but the content process hasn't painted the tab content yet. Possibly because it's doing something else (like running script). Is there a particular site that causes this to happen when you have it loaded? If you're willing to spend some time troubleshooting or profiling this, please let me know and I'll walk you through some ways to do that...
    • legodt 10y ago
      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
      • bzbarsky 10y ago
        Excellent, thanks! If you're using a nightly, you should be able to use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Profiling_with_the_Built-in_Profiler 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.
• bhaavan 10y ago
  Unimaginative, non-technical rant. Please find the bottlenecks, and provide a technical solution. The code is open source for you to read, and your patch will be constructive and helpful. Your idealist blog-post, not really that helpful.
  • fortytw2 10y ago
    the bottlenecks here are systemic, part of the wider "web development" mentality, rather than technical parts of browsers. build and use sites that template html, without js / huge styling, like HN or pinboard, and I promise you everything will be lightning fast
• laumars 10y ago
  All of these anecdotal benchmarks people are doing are silly because you're overlooking so much detail: * SSD or slow spinning disk (makes a massive difference if your computer is swapping out tabs to cache). * Have the tabs been loaded or not (a new browser session will open placeholders for the tabs without loading the site, but an older session will likely have dozens -if not more- of those sites loaded) * Frontend code. Are we talking low footprint sites like HN or dozens of JS and CSS heavy sites like Facebook, Office 365, etc) * Similarly to the above, media content. Streaming videos? Flash? etc. I bet you a 100 active tabs of MS Excel Online would perform crap in any set up while 100 inactive HN tabs would stand a better chance of not crippling your whole system.
  • partycoder 10y ago
    If you have 100 tabs doubtfully all of them are relevant. That's more like a user problem.
    • laumars 10y ago
      It's an easy habit to make though. Like why some people have lots of stuff saved to their Windows desktop, or messy desks with paperwork from a dozen different projects arranged in a way that only the person sat at that desk could understand. I doubt many people set out to work that way, it's more a symptom of the "I'll leave that there and come back to it when I get more time" mindset. Except unfortunately one never finds the time. I can't really blame people for doing that given our hectic modern lives.
      • partycoder 10y ago
        "Leave it there and come back when i got more time" = Bookmarks :) If it is a dynamic website, most of them have sessions that expire.
        • laumars 10y ago
          > "Leave it there and come back when i got more time" = Bookmarks :) Let me reiterate the first part of that sentence you've quoted: "I doubt many people set out to work that way, it's more a symptom of the "I'll leave that there and come back to it when I get more time" mindset." > If it is a dynamic website, most of them have sessions that expire. That depends entirely on how long the session cookies are set for, whether the user browses to other pages on that site since (thus potentially renewing their session cookie) and whether one even needs to have an active session to use that specific dynamic website. Suffice to say there's more exceptions your point than there are examples of it. eg message boards, youtube (and other similar video streaming services), imgur (and similar), etc. And even in instances where the session only manages access to that page, it's not a great chore to log in again. To be honest I don't really understand why you're trying to lecture HN readers about sensible browsing habits. We're all tech-savvy enough to know how to use a browser. If we chose to adopt a workflow that's less CPU / system memory performant then we do so fully understanding the problems that might arise. The problem is many of us - myself included - grew up in an era when websites were a document rather than an pseudo-desktop application so often our ranting stems from a frustration at how bloated the web has become.
• zbuf 10y ago
  What happened to the performance of the 'back' button? Pressing 'back' used to be quick, on the modern web its rather sluggish, like it re-loads the old page from scratch. I can forgive sites that are implemented as single page with their own 'fake' URLs (though that is still annoying). But even static content. Given the emphasis on browsers handling lots of tabs I'm surprised 'back' isn't implemented by, effectively, keeping the old page around for a bit and pausing its Javascript, then just picking up where you left off.
  • laumars 10y ago
    That's an issue with the site not having the correct caching headers. If it's static content with the correct caching headers defined then the browser should just load it from cache.
• xylon 10y ago
  I just don't know what this guy's complaining about. My PC is ancient and FireFox is responsive with dosens of tabs open.
• nanis 10y ago
  I tried to avoid both "real" and "fake" news sites like the plague. Firefox performs admirably. https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400 https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400
• rorygreen 10y ago
  I'm very surprised to see that nobody has mentioned OneTab.[1] With my use of Chrome, it performs fine with hundreds of tabs open until I attempt to reopen them after a restart, at which point I'll be waiting for about 5 minutes until I can do anything. Firefox seems better for this as it only loads tabs when I actively select them IIRC. Regardless of performance, with that many tabs open I just find browsers unpleasant to use because you can't see the title of each tab and switching between them is a mess. OneTab is fantastic - I have it as a pinned tab on all my browser windows and I send it all the tabs I'm not actively using. For me it also doubles as a short-term bookmarking system so I don't clog up my pinboard.in bookmarks with articles I have not yet read etc. [1]: http://www.one-tab.com/ http://www.one-tab.com/
  • j_s 10y ago
    Somewhat similarly, "The Great Suspender" for Chrome and similar extensions unload unused tabs after a configurable timeout, requiring a click to reload them. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
• Tomis02 10y ago
  Browsers are slow because objective metrics of quality (e.g. performance, usability) are irrelevant to the common user, despite what individuals may claim. People are very susceptible to branding and growing trends, and it's a hard pill to swallow. Back in the day when I was writing on the forums "guys, forget Firefox and use Opera, it's fast it's usable you have everything you might want in a browser with undeniable proof", the reply would eventually be "yes but Firefox has _this_ webdev extension and I can't do without it". So Firefox would get installed in their families' and friends' PCs, because that's what the web developer used. Also, the "safer faster better" marketing campaign, although that slogan would have been much more appropriate to Opera than Firefox. Fast forward a few years. Google Chrome comes out and everyone stops caring about those damn extensions; suddenly performance becomes a huge decision factor (nevermind Chrome was a resource hog compared to Opera, nevermind the horrible lack of features, nevermind the bad usability). I could go on, but you get the drift. There's no incentive for large market share browsers to significantly improve because the (mediocrity+marketing=success) recipe is proven to work, over and over. What would it take for Chrome to lose market share? A new hot hip popular company with lots of money thrown in advertising, like (extremely unlikely example) Tesla, with a new cute interface. Because people like new and shiny trinkets.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  Not dillo. It's also space efficient. 30M for many tabs. Also No Script is embedded by a formal technique called pure js devoidness.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ksec 10y ago
  It was the same thing i posted about Apps made with Web Tech. Opera 1x, managed to be a email client, RSS reader and Browser while keeping the size below 12MB. Chrome/Blink or Firefox all takes 40-50MB Download. I really wish they could Open Sources the old Opera. P.S- I am not sure if these Tab Problem is nerd only. Basically people are trying to gob too much information. But i have yet to see a Sane UI to fix this.
  • cyberpunk 10y ago
    Yeah and QNX booted you into a graphical environment from a 1.44mb floppy.. I never really understand comments like these, what are you saying? You want smaller binaries? Less features? Don't you have a spare 50MB on your 512GB SSD?
• ksec 10y ago
  The same could be said about Computer, OS, or any Apps. We have SSD, CPU, Memory and Network 100 to 10000x faster then what had 20 years ago, and yet Apps didn't get 100x faster. It is still not instantaneous. In someways i think it is because we have created far too much abstraction /layers.
  • antisthenes 10y ago
    Some things are near instantaneous, though. I've discontinued use of optical media circa 2009 and replaced my OS drives with SSDs in 2010. Eliminating spin-up times and random seek times for multiple small files has probably been the biggest performance boost in my user-side computing experience.
• lwhi 10y ago
  Browsers need to translate instructions using a current formal spec, whilst being forgiving to human error and allowing backward compatibility with past specs / browser quirks. They also need to evolve quickly to meet future potential spec requirements. I'm no expert in the development of browsers; but I'd hazard a guess that the problem isn't as straightforward as it seems… and performance will suffer as a result, especially since all this has to occur at runtime.
• pawelmi 10y ago
  (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-dev/oZw5F3fO-aU 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.
• vizzah 10y ago
  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..
• mgkimsal 10y ago
  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?
  • cyberpunk 10y ago
    Doubt it. Before the "Not me! I use w3m on a p3!" replies pile in, accept this as a generalisation warning.. I think most of us in this thread though generally use reasonably recent gear (our machines are the tools of our trade, personally I upgrade each year) and that we use our browsers extensively enough that even small issues around perf become quite noticeable... I can't remember the last time I couldn't scroll smoothly or a tab didn't open instantly... Maybe the difference here is those in the church of noscript and those without? After the initial pain white listing the various things you need, I've found the performance of Firefox on Linux to be brilliant. (currently around 100 tabs, some of which are sat on prime video etc, arch Linux, 16G, 50.1.0). A lot of the extensions listed in this thread are doing quite a lot of work also, and sometimes on every request which probably doesn't help.. Disk caching could also be a problem for those of us without shiny new NVMe's in their laptops (pull the trigger on that one, it's worth it!). The only downside of all the blocking stuff for me though is when you book a flight or something and the noscript/ublock combo prevents me from getting past the callback from your payment provider... I need some kind of giant banner that says turn off noscript and ublock when using britishairways installed somewhere :} Or I'll just send them yet another snarky feedback message the next time I fuck it up (seriously, it calls t.co and doubleclick in serial!)
• GGMethos 10y ago
  Firefox on GNU/Linux with this: https://github.com/dfkt/firefox-tweaks https://github.com/dfkt/firefox-tweaks and uBlock Origin and noScript. got 5 fully loaded tabs (one with video playing) and the full browser only uses 1.2GB total. I'm on a very tiny laptop with 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo. If I tweak Firefox and don't go overboard with like 150 tabs open at once it never maxes out my RAM on this machine. And the performance is always great unless the RAM maxes out (which has happened on a few occasions, which forces me to exit and reopen to fix).
• pascalxus 10y ago
  I know the article mentions openning new tabs. But When it comes to clicking on links and opening a new page, Browsers aren't slow. The software that runs on them is slow: all those applications loading too many libraries, widgets, videos, video ads, Angular and lots of code that's not needed.
• d08ble 10y ago
  Why for view HTML/1.0 1990 specification (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945) modern browser needs about:config 3000 variables for show it? Too many modules in this "Bot Machine".