11 ms·

Are They Slim Yet? Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari

94 points by nachtigall 10y ago

blakesterz 10y ago
I must use my browsers differently from others. I have Chrome and Firefox open on my main work machine here (Ubuntu 14) all day/night. Never have a problem with memory or anything else on either. When I travel I've had both Windows and OSX (two different Macbooks) and Also use Firefox and Chrome, also, never issues with memory. I currently have 12 open tabs in Chrome and 6 in firefox, just random websites, mail, youtube, github... no troubles. I see people complaining of memory issues in browsers all the time though, what causes these issues, and how is it I never see them?
- jbhatab 10y ago
  I regularly log in to 8 google accounts and have 4-12 tabs open on 3-6 separate windows. Issues come up on occasion that are fixed by closing chrome and reopening. Not sure exactly but that's my experience at least.
  - tradersam 10y ago
    > 8 google accounts and have 4-12 tabs open on 3-6 separate windows. If you don't mind me asking, why do you do this? I can't think of a reason to need to be logged into that many Google accounts at one time.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - dexterdog 10y ago
      Whenever I get a new account I set it up to forward to my main account and setup my main account so it can properly send as that account. This way I only ever need one account open.
      - chillingeffect 10y ago
        How many phone #s do you register with?
        dexterdog 10y ago
        Just one. I have an old gmail.com account from when they first started, but all of the newer accounts I get are google apps or gsuite or whatever they're calling it now. Those don't require a unique phone number.
    - BorisMelnik 10y ago
      lots of agencies have this need - social media agencies for instance need to be logged into all the gmail accounts of their clients at all times, so if they have 20 clients thats 20 logged in accounts.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Not sure what the number of accounts would have to do with resource usage. A logged in account is just a cookie.
    - rosser 10y ago
      > A logged in account is just a cookie. ...and the code, and all of the state from the objects that are, you know, "currently resident in main memory" while that logged in account is being accessed, and, and, and.
  - mikepurvis 10y ago
    Only three Google accounts for me, but otherwise that sounds consistent with my experience— running on macOS, I need to restart Chrome typically once every day or two. Otherwise everything just eventually crawls to a halt.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  How much memory is on your machine? I can have 50 tabs open without a problem on my MacBook Pro with an i5 and 16GB of RAM, but on older hardware I can't have more than a handful of tabs without starting to run out of resources.
  - blakesterz 10y ago
    Yeah, good point, though the new macbook is just the standard Air RAM, and it seems fine.
  - scholia 10y ago
    With Firefox, I got to over 600 tabs on my 2011 Dell desktop (Core i5-2500) with 4GB of RAM. Because of "lazy loading", I'd guess that only about 40 or 50 were actually loaded. RAM use varies from about 1GB to 2.5GB. It slows down above that, which you can only solve by restarting the browser. I bought another 8GB so I reckon my 2011 machine will be good for another few years. It should last a decade, really.
- detaro 10y ago
  Do you use an Adblocker? Those make a massive difference. I have uBlock with quite strict settings, and normally I can keep 100+ tabs open without issues. But a single misbehaving site can disrupt that (heck, a long-running tab can load hundreds of MB of ads if nothing stops it), and occasionally parts of the browser just hang. Turn off uBlock and everything goes the hell immediately.
  - blakesterz 10y ago
    Oh, good point, yes, privacybadger and ublockorigin
  - krylon 10y ago
    Browsing the web without an adblocker is kind of like driving a car without wearing a seat belt or riding a bicycle without wearing a helmet. At least it feels like that to me.
    - johnchristopher 10y ago
      You are treading in dangerous waters by bringing up the helmet bike subject in this house. :)
      - krylon 10y ago
        Well, I am not going to force anyone to wear a helmet. I think it is a good idea to do so, and I personally do when riding a bicycle, but I have to admit I only started doing so after two people I know had pretty bad biking accidents resulting in injuries that most likely would have been prevented by a helmet. But I still like the analogy in the sense that lots of people are riding bicycles without helmets, and lots of people are browsing the web without adblockers. In both cases, my personal opinion is that this is not a good idea, but I won't try to force my personal opinion on others.
        BuckRogers 10y ago
        Oh OK. Kids need to be told what to do sometimes until 18 because they're not mature enough to make the decision. Telling them to not get in a car with a stranger and wearing a helmet are good examples. The parent comment was talking about his household.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Gmail often uses over 1GB. Some google sheets do too after being open for some time. With 10 windows and a handful of tabs each, I'm close to using up 16GB of ram and sometimes run out.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    My Gmail is at 240MB with Chrome 57 with 50 emails per page. With 100 emails it's 380MB.
    - aninteger 10y ago
      How much memory is it with mutt, or Alpine.. or let's be fair, Thunderbird?
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        Thunderbird with a huge mail archive open: 1.5 G total, 500 M resident.
        kalleboo 10y ago
        Does Thunderbird mmap it's mail archive or something? Because 1.5 GB sounds insane. Apple's Mail.app is only using 130 MB for a 1.8 GB mailbox. Might be an unfair comparison if Mail.app is leaning on the system for indexing/search (then again mds+mds_stores is using around 200 MB)
        jcranmer 10y ago
        The metadata database for open folders is entirely resident in memory.
      - 1wd 10y ago
        My mail box is currently 700 MB on disk and Thunderbird uses less than 100 MB of memory.
    - 10y ago
- smkellat 10y ago
  Boss, 'News doesn't even ping uBlock Origin as having anything truly objectionable. You run a wonderful website that I have been privileged to contribute to. In contrast, some of the other places on the web I've visited that have auto-playing ads & auto-playing rich media have made my browser explode due to my rural broadband which you've heard me whine about. I pretty much have had to have uBlock Origin installed lately to keep four or more tabs open even on my Xubuntu 16.04 box.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  18 tabs spread over two browsers is a minimal load on almost any machine.
- tolmasky 10y ago
  I think a good approach would be to have web browsers limit the amount of memory ads can use on a given page. This would hopefully align incentives: we understand that ads are necessary for the web, but ad makers have to work on efficiency to increase revenue. This would theoretically be like "AMP for ads". If you use too much memory, your ads drop because you keep crashing on the page (just the ad of course). If you wanted to be perverse, you could have a limit on TOTAL memory all ads could use on a page, so you end up creating group pressure on any individual that's not playing nice (they might start demanding not to be served on the same page as those ads etc). But maybe this is too much. Just limiting the total amount of "memory usage" is a good start. The important thing here is that it hopefully leads to the world we actually want: REASONABLE ads that don't require crazy measures that end up hurting the sites we love. Browsers COULD ship this by default without hurting the ecosystem.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    Mozilla is looking to use Firefox's Tracking Protection list to lower the priority of ads' HTTP requests and more aggressively throttle them when they are not visible. But setting a fixed ad budget per page, as you suggest, or maybe forcing all ads from all tabs to share one process could be interesting.
  - superflyguy 10y ago
    >I think a good approach would be to have web browsers limit the amount of memory ads can use on a given page. This assumes you can identify ads, or that they identify themselves.
    - scarhill 10y ago
      Ad-blockers seem to be able to identify them pretty reliably.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    have web browsers limit the amount of memory ads can use on a given page That's easily done by installing an adblocker! Can't beat memory limit = 0. we understand that ads are necessary for the web Well, hold on now. The web existed before ads did, and it was pretty cool. If ads disappeared, we'd still have a web - lots of its most annoying parts would disappear, and we'd have a lot of readjusting to do, but what we'd end up with would keep all the best parts of what we have now, because the best parts of the web aren't based on ads.
- dflock 10y ago
  I have over 100 tabs open in chrome on my phone right now. Lord only knows how many I have open across desktop browsers. This is why.
- a3n 10y ago
  I did a fresh linux install a few months ago. Installed Firefox, no addons, went to the New York Times. My underpowered laptop screamed while it waited for the page and all its beautiful javascript to load, and then whined annoyingly, opened another page somewhere else, more screaming and whining; the browser was essentially unusable. Closed the pages, installed uBlockOrigin, and I had my browser back. Sorry NYT, but if you ever want me to see an ad again (I'm not opposed to them), you're going to have to do something about your pages, and you're going to have to police your ad networks for my privacy and protection. (But, I suppose it's specifically my privacy that you're selling, so I guess the wait will be long.)
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Been using Noscript for pretty much the same reason.
- krylon 10y ago
  The trouble begins when you have something like 30-40 tabs open, I think. Firefox is among the first programs I open after logging in, and I usually leave it running until I either shutdown/reboot or a browser update makes me restart it. And I tend to only reboot my computers (both at home and at work) when system updates make it necessary. Often I will open a page and then just leave the tab open for "later" (which might be hours or days later). It's not uncommon for Firefox to grow to 1-1.5 GB in size. Personally, I consider that an acceptable tradeoff, given its usefulness, but it is a rather heavyweight program. (On lower-end machines I prefer either dillo or w3m. Pages with layouts that can be even remotely considered "fancy" will look kind of strange in dillo, but it is incredibly fast, and I have never seen it use more than 150MB of RAM.)
  - hashhar 10y ago
    Hah, you've never seen what would happen to Chrome on similar workloads. But yes, your RAM usage is spectacularly high compared to mine beacause I have 326 tabs open right now (90 something loaded in memory) and FF is using 1.1 GB (750+180+170+40 MB) of RAM.
- snovv_crash 10y ago
  At least on Ubuntu 16.04, the "Ubuntu integration" add-on that is auto-installed prevents e10s from running, so you get a choppy, single-threaded UI. I'm sure a fair amount of the plugins people install are actually what lead to the large memory consumption. That, and the hundreds of tabs they leave open. I feel like tabs have become the new bookmark. Maybe what we really need is some sort of ephemeral bookmark system?
- nialv7 10y ago
  I have 103 tabs open. Guess that's the difference..
  - superflyguy 10y ago
    Given that you can only read from one tab at a time, why not have 103 (or more) bookmarks but only, say, 1 to 5 tabs open. What's the workflow? It seems obvious to me that if each page is a few megs in size and might have CPU taxing JavaScript etc that it's going to tie up a bunch of resources. Why not just open them when you need them?
    - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
      > What's the workflow? Tabs are my 'pending reading queue'. 1) Start investigating a topic. MMB the first few google results that look relevant/useful. 2) Ctrl+Tab. I'll be back to that google query in short order if they weren't. 3) Ctrl+W the first few results - they weren't useful. 4) Oh, hey, here's something. Read, scan down, and MMB 'future reading'. 5) Unread 'queue' (everything right of my current tab) is slowly growing. There will sometimes be duplicates. Read 'queue' that I want to keep open for reference / high level overview / branching off of (most things left of my current tab) also grows. 6) An hour later, I'm perhaps up to 50 tabs. Often less, but sometimes more. Oh, here's a high priority question/bug/problem/task from my valued coworkers. I recall relevant documentation, but not the exact keywords. I open a new window, and repeat the process. Oh, hey, lunchtime! Interesting discussion over lunch prompts me to investigate another related topic. I open a new window when I return to the office. Aha, results! A whirlwind of coding Oh, end of day already? Hmm, I have 5 chrome windows open... LET THE HARVEST OF BOOKMARKS COMMENCE! Hundreds of tabs becomes 0 as I do a quick glance kneejerk yay/nay on bookmarking every one of them and doing some kind of basic organization by topic. Other coworkers use browser extensions to save their tabs instead, instead of engaging in this organization ritual. The computers shut off. The lights go out. The sun has set, and silence descends, despite the open office floorplan. ...and then, some time later... a new day dawns... > Why not just open them when you need them? I don't want to wait for the webpage to finish loading when I switch to it. I don't have a clever way to rebind MMB to bookmarking new pages that I haven't even visited yet. I don't want my bookmarks cluttered with potentially useless tangent topics - I already have too many (thousands? tens of thousands?) I have 32GB of RAM. I can spare a few gigs for Chrome.
rosser 10y ago
Someone just tell me when my Gmail tab stops using over a gigabyte of RAM by itself. The rest, whatever; I'll worry about them after that's fixed.
- chrismorgan 10y ago
  When I used Gmail on Firefox for Windows or Linux I found its memory usage to generally be 80–200MB, generally on the lower side of that. Now I use FastMail (and am employed there too); its memory usage is 8–25MB (which is less than the vast majority of sites, simple static content websites included!). And it’s much faster too.
- infinityplus1 10y ago
  Gmail always used to slow down Firefox so much that I switched to an email client. Now Firefox runs much much better. I regret cursing Firefox for so many months.
  - rosser 10y ago
    Oh, I know it's Gmail, not the browser. But I have just a hair under 14,000 unread messages in my Gmail box (I use it primarily for mailing list subscriptions), so switching to a desktop client would be ... painful at this point.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Why is that? Any IMAP client should work fine.
      - hashhar 10y ago
        You'll be surprised how many people don't know that you can use IMAP with desktop clients. I'm not saying about the parent comment but just sharing an anecdote.
- nashashmi 10y ago
  Time to start using gmail lite without JavaScript
cauterized 10y ago
Now if FF could just avoid pegging the CPU on what should be reasonably performant web apps, we'd be getting somewhere. It's even worse with multiprocess.
cozzyd 10y ago
I'm surprised by the memory differences between OS's. Is that just a measurement artifact?
- beerbaron23 10y ago
  Well the OS's do manage memory differently and would expain the high OSX memory usage. OSX soaks up most of your ram at all times and will put programs in the background into a sleep state. When they are woken up everything is transitioned smoothly like it was already running as it's state is in ram. The OS will also free up ram if it's needed by a newly launched program. Hence when judging the available memory on OSX you look at "Memory Pressure" and not available ram.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
The test mentions he ran Firefox using 2, 4 and 8 content processes. Does this mean that Firefox does not use 1 process per tab like Chrome does?
- bombless 10y ago
  I don't understand the logic behind your statement, but yes ff doesn't use 1 process per tab atm. They plan to change this situation this year so that they can support wasm better.
- fabrice_d 10y ago
  Firefox can be configured to use N number of content processes, and will allocate tabs among these processes. In FirefoxOS we were giving a new process to each tab/app, using a pre-allocated process to speed up startup (a version of that has been re-implemented for Firefox). I'm not sure about the exact heuristics used by Chrome, but I think they do something like one process per origin.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    Yes, Chrome uses 1 process per domain. So I'm still not sure what would happen if Firefox is configured to use 4 content processes and 20 unique domain tabs are opened. Would the domains be distributed to these content processes? And what happens if 1 content process crashes? Would it also bring down all of the domains associated to it?
    - bzbarsky 10y ago
      The answers to your questions are yes and yes.
- bogas04 10y ago
  It does not. They are experimenting with different models and will probably use 4 processes for all tabs.
  - 10y ago
kbutler 10y ago
I picked up a little Dell 3000 laptop with 2GB RAM. Chrome rapidly gets unusable, but Firefox lets me keep a dozen tabs going. Linux (Mint 18.1) uses about 1/2 the memory of Windows 10, so I run Linux. Haven't set up swap (flash memory only), so when I do exceed the RAM limits, things just grind to a halt, usually requiring a reboot. Fun little portable system. :-)
yeukhon 10y ago
For those not familiar, internally (well also externally now) Mozilla runs a site called Are We Slim Yet? I used to walk by the big monitor at the old MV office by the Platform/JS team (because i sat right across them). Fun chart to look at.
bathyspheric 10y ago
> Edge was disqualified because it seemed to bypass the hosts file and wouldn’t load pages from unique domains. I can do measurements so I might revisit this, but it wouldn’t have been a fair comparison as-is. Is it surprising that Edge might bypass the hosts file? It surprises me, as I thought all outgoing requests were routed through `/etc/hosts` or equiv, but I don't spend too much time in Windows these days.
- hashhar 10y ago
  Huh, mine respects my hosts. That's how I set up adblocking before they brought extensions in.
krzyk 10y ago
I use Firefox exclusively (after a month of trying out Chrome - unusable because with 100+ tabs open it uses to much memory in comparison with Firefox), but when I tried to increase processCount to 8 (then 4 and 2) it looked like it was having a memory leak, started using more then twice the amount of RAM. I'm on Aurora (developer edition) maybe it was related to some recent bugs.
drdaeman 10y ago
Would be interesting to see comparison with uzbl and surf as well. Maybe also with Servo/browser.html, although it won't be really correct as (unlike the others) it's not yet stable.
charles-salvia 10y ago
The problem with Chrome/Chromium is it's basically just a huge ton of scaffolding designed to layer an IPC framework on top of more layers of scaffolding on top of more layers that wrap blink (i.e. WebKit) which still has lots of code going back to KDE from the 90s. The Chromium codebase has no less than 5 different string classes, is riddled with layers and layers of virtual function calls wrapping older interfaces, has an antiquated threading model that defines a "Main thread" because various ancient WebKit code scattered throughout the code base relies on global variables, etc. It's pretty surprising to me that it works as well as it does.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Pr process tabs seems to be the core reason why, as this allows the Chrome UI to be "responsive" even if one of the tab processes keep chugging the cycles like it a drunk during happy hour. This in turn because we now have 4+ cores that can do 2+ threads each in an effect to keep the marketing interpretation of Moore's law valid.

94 points by nachtigall 10y ago

I must use my browsers differently from others. I have Chrome and Firefox open on my main work machine here (Ubuntu 14) all day/night. Never have a problem with memory or anything else on either. When I travel I've had both Windows and OSX (two different Macbooks) and Also use Firefox and Chrome, also, never issues with memory. I currently have 12 open tabs in Chrome and 6 in firefox, just random websites, mail, youtube, github... no troubles. I see people complaining of memory issues in browsers all the time though, what causes these issues, and how is it I never see them?

jbhatab 10y ago
I regularly log in to 8 google accounts and have 4-12 tabs open on 3-6 separate windows. Issues come up on occasion that are fixed by closing chrome and reopening. Not sure exactly but that's my experience at least.
- tradersam 10y ago
  > 8 google accounts and have 4-12 tabs open on 3-6 separate windows. If you don't mind me asking, why do you do this? I can't think of a reason to need to be logged into that many Google accounts at one time.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    Whenever I get a new account I set it up to forward to my main account and setup my main account so it can properly send as that account. This way I only ever need one account open.
    - chillingeffect 10y ago
      How many phone #s do you register with?
      - dexterdog 10y ago
        Just one. I have an old gmail.com account from when they first started, but all of the newer accounts I get are google apps or gsuite or whatever they're calling it now. Those don't require a unique phone number.
  - BorisMelnik 10y ago
    lots of agencies have this need - social media agencies for instance need to be logged into all the gmail accounts of their clients at all times, so if they have 20 clients thats 20 logged in accounts.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Not sure what the number of accounts would have to do with resource usage. A logged in account is just a cookie.
  - rosser 10y ago
    > A logged in account is just a cookie. ...and the code, and all of the state from the objects that are, you know, "currently resident in main memory" while that logged in account is being accessed, and, and, and.
- mikepurvis 10y ago
  Only three Google accounts for me, but otherwise that sounds consistent with my experience— running on macOS, I need to restart Chrome typically once every day or two. Otherwise everything just eventually crawls to a halt.
nerdponx 10y ago
How much memory is on your machine? I can have 50 tabs open without a problem on my MacBook Pro with an i5 and 16GB of RAM, but on older hardware I can't have more than a handful of tabs without starting to run out of resources.
- blakesterz 10y ago
  Yeah, good point, though the new macbook is just the standard Air RAM, and it seems fine.
- scholia 10y ago
  With Firefox, I got to over 600 tabs on my 2011 Dell desktop (Core i5-2500) with 4GB of RAM. Because of "lazy loading", I'd guess that only about 40 or 50 were actually loaded. RAM use varies from about 1GB to 2.5GB. It slows down above that, which you can only solve by restarting the browser. I bought another 8GB so I reckon my 2011 machine will be good for another few years. It should last a decade, really.
detaro 10y ago
Do you use an Adblocker? Those make a massive difference. I have uBlock with quite strict settings, and normally I can keep 100+ tabs open without issues. But a single misbehaving site can disrupt that (heck, a long-running tab can load hundreds of MB of ads if nothing stops it), and occasionally parts of the browser just hang. Turn off uBlock and everything goes the hell immediately.
- blakesterz 10y ago
  Oh, good point, yes, privacybadger and ublockorigin
- krylon 10y ago
  Browsing the web without an adblocker is kind of like driving a car without wearing a seat belt or riding a bicycle without wearing a helmet. At least it feels like that to me.
  - johnchristopher 10y ago
    You are treading in dangerous waters by bringing up the helmet bike subject in this house. :)
    - krylon 10y ago
      Well, I am not going to force anyone to wear a helmet. I think it is a good idea to do so, and I personally do when riding a bicycle, but I have to admit I only started doing so after two people I know had pretty bad biking accidents resulting in injuries that most likely would have been prevented by a helmet. But I still like the analogy in the sense that lots of people are riding bicycles without helmets, and lots of people are browsing the web without adblockers. In both cases, my personal opinion is that this is not a good idea, but I won't try to force my personal opinion on others.
      - BuckRogers 10y ago
        Oh OK. Kids need to be told what to do sometimes until 18 because they're not mature enough to make the decision. Telling them to not get in a car with a stranger and wearing a helmet are good examples. The parent comment was talking about his household.
ikeboy 10y ago
Gmail often uses over 1GB. Some google sheets do too after being open for some time. With 10 windows and a handful of tabs each, I'm close to using up 16GB of ram and sometimes run out.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  My Gmail is at 240MB with Chrome 57 with 50 emails per page. With 100 emails it's 380MB.
  - aninteger 10y ago
    How much memory is it with mutt, or Alpine.. or let's be fair, Thunderbird?
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Thunderbird with a huge mail archive open: 1.5 G total, 500 M resident.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        Does Thunderbird mmap it's mail archive or something? Because 1.5 GB sounds insane. Apple's Mail.app is only using 130 MB for a 1.8 GB mailbox. Might be an unfair comparison if Mail.app is leaning on the system for indexing/search (then again mds+mds_stores is using around 200 MB)
        jcranmer 10y ago
        The metadata database for open folders is entirely resident in memory.
    - 1wd 10y ago
      My mail box is currently 700 MB on disk and Thunderbird uses less than 100 MB of memory.
  - 10y ago
smkellat 10y ago
Boss, 'News doesn't even ping uBlock Origin as having anything truly objectionable. You run a wonderful website that I have been privileged to contribute to. In contrast, some of the other places on the web I've visited that have auto-playing ads & auto-playing rich media have made my browser explode due to my rural broadband which you've heard me whine about. I pretty much have had to have uBlock Origin installed lately to keep four or more tabs open even on my Xubuntu 16.04 box.
dexterdog 10y ago
18 tabs spread over two browsers is a minimal load on almost any machine.
tolmasky 10y ago
I think a good approach would be to have web browsers limit the amount of memory ads can use on a given page. This would hopefully align incentives: we understand that ads are necessary for the web, but ad makers have to work on efficiency to increase revenue. This would theoretically be like "AMP for ads". If you use too much memory, your ads drop because you keep crashing on the page (just the ad of course). If you wanted to be perverse, you could have a limit on TOTAL memory all ads could use on a page, so you end up creating group pressure on any individual that's not playing nice (they might start demanding not to be served on the same page as those ads etc). But maybe this is too much. Just limiting the total amount of "memory usage" is a good start. The important thing here is that it hopefully leads to the world we actually want: REASONABLE ads that don't require crazy measures that end up hurting the sites we love. Browsers COULD ship this by default without hurting the ecosystem.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  Mozilla is looking to use Firefox's Tracking Protection list to lower the priority of ads' HTTP requests and more aggressively throttle them when they are not visible. But setting a fixed ad budget per page, as you suggest, or maybe forcing all ads from all tabs to share one process could be interesting.
- superflyguy 10y ago
  >I think a good approach would be to have web browsers limit the amount of memory ads can use on a given page. This assumes you can identify ads, or that they identify themselves.
  - scarhill 10y ago
    Ad-blockers seem to be able to identify them pretty reliably.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  have web browsers limit the amount of memory ads can use on a given page That's easily done by installing an adblocker! Can't beat memory limit = 0. we understand that ads are necessary for the web Well, hold on now. The web existed before ads did, and it was pretty cool. If ads disappeared, we'd still have a web - lots of its most annoying parts would disappear, and we'd have a lot of readjusting to do, but what we'd end up with would keep all the best parts of what we have now, because the best parts of the web aren't based on ads.
dflock 10y ago
I have over 100 tabs open in chrome on my phone right now. Lord only knows how many I have open across desktop browsers. This is why.
a3n 10y ago
I did a fresh linux install a few months ago. Installed Firefox, no addons, went to the New York Times. My underpowered laptop screamed while it waited for the page and all its beautiful javascript to load, and then whined annoyingly, opened another page somewhere else, more screaming and whining; the browser was essentially unusable. Closed the pages, installed uBlockOrigin, and I had my browser back. Sorry NYT, but if you ever want me to see an ad again (I'm not opposed to them), you're going to have to do something about your pages, and you're going to have to police your ad networks for my privacy and protection. (But, I suppose it's specifically my privacy that you're selling, so I guess the wait will be long.)
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Been using Noscript for pretty much the same reason.
krylon 10y ago
The trouble begins when you have something like 30-40 tabs open, I think. Firefox is among the first programs I open after logging in, and I usually leave it running until I either shutdown/reboot or a browser update makes me restart it. And I tend to only reboot my computers (both at home and at work) when system updates make it necessary. Often I will open a page and then just leave the tab open for "later" (which might be hours or days later). It's not uncommon for Firefox to grow to 1-1.5 GB in size. Personally, I consider that an acceptable tradeoff, given its usefulness, but it is a rather heavyweight program. (On lower-end machines I prefer either dillo or w3m. Pages with layouts that can be even remotely considered "fancy" will look kind of strange in dillo, but it is incredibly fast, and I have never seen it use more than 150MB of RAM.)
- hashhar 10y ago
  Hah, you've never seen what would happen to Chrome on similar workloads. But yes, your RAM usage is spectacularly high compared to mine beacause I have 326 tabs open right now (90 something loaded in memory) and FF is using 1.1 GB (750+180+170+40 MB) of RAM.
snovv_crash 10y ago
At least on Ubuntu 16.04, the "Ubuntu integration" add-on that is auto-installed prevents e10s from running, so you get a choppy, single-threaded UI. I'm sure a fair amount of the plugins people install are actually what lead to the large memory consumption. That, and the hundreds of tabs they leave open. I feel like tabs have become the new bookmark. Maybe what we really need is some sort of ephemeral bookmark system?
nialv7 10y ago
I have 103 tabs open. Guess that's the difference..
- superflyguy 10y ago
  Given that you can only read from one tab at a time, why not have 103 (or more) bookmarks but only, say, 1 to 5 tabs open. What's the workflow? It seems obvious to me that if each page is a few megs in size and might have CPU taxing JavaScript etc that it's going to tie up a bunch of resources. Why not just open them when you need them?
  - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
    > What's the workflow? Tabs are my 'pending reading queue'. 1) Start investigating a topic. MMB the first few google results that look relevant/useful. 2) Ctrl+Tab. I'll be back to that google query in short order if they weren't. 3) Ctrl+W the first few results - they weren't useful. 4) Oh, hey, here's something. Read, scan down, and MMB 'future reading'. 5) Unread 'queue' (everything right of my current tab) is slowly growing. There will sometimes be duplicates. Read 'queue' that I want to keep open for reference / high level overview / branching off of (most things left of my current tab) also grows. 6) An hour later, I'm perhaps up to 50 tabs. Often less, but sometimes more. Oh, here's a high priority question/bug/problem/task from my valued coworkers. I recall relevant documentation, but not the exact keywords. I open a new window, and repeat the process. Oh, hey, lunchtime! Interesting discussion over lunch prompts me to investigate another related topic. I open a new window when I return to the office. Aha, results! A whirlwind of coding Oh, end of day already? Hmm, I have 5 chrome windows open... LET THE HARVEST OF BOOKMARKS COMMENCE! Hundreds of tabs becomes 0 as I do a quick glance kneejerk yay/nay on bookmarking every one of them and doing some kind of basic organization by topic. Other coworkers use browser extensions to save their tabs instead, instead of engaging in this organization ritual. The computers shut off. The lights go out. The sun has set, and silence descends, despite the open office floorplan. ...and then, some time later... a new day dawns... > Why not just open them when you need them? I don't want to wait for the webpage to finish loading when I switch to it. I don't have a clever way to rebind MMB to bookmarking new pages that I haven't even visited yet. I don't want my bookmarks cluttered with potentially useless tangent topics - I already have too many (thousands? tens of thousands?) I have 32GB of RAM. I can spare a few gigs for Chrome.

rosser 10y ago

Someone just tell me when my Gmail tab stops using over a gigabyte of RAM by itself. The rest, whatever; I'll worry about them after that's fixed.

chrismorgan 10y ago
When I used Gmail on Firefox for Windows or Linux I found its memory usage to generally be 80–200MB, generally on the lower side of that. Now I use FastMail (and am employed there too); its memory usage is 8–25MB (which is less than the vast majority of sites, simple static content websites included!). And it’s much faster too.
infinityplus1 10y ago
Gmail always used to slow down Firefox so much that I switched to an email client. Now Firefox runs much much better. I regret cursing Firefox for so many months.
- rosser 10y ago
  Oh, I know it's Gmail, not the browser. But I have just a hair under 14,000 unread messages in my Gmail box (I use it primarily for mailing list subscriptions), so switching to a desktop client would be ... painful at this point.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Why is that? Any IMAP client should work fine.
    - hashhar 10y ago
      You'll be surprised how many people don't know that you can use IMAP with desktop clients. I'm not saying about the parent comment but just sharing an anecdote.
nashashmi 10y ago
Time to start using gmail lite without JavaScript

cauterized 10y ago

Now if FF could just avoid pegging the CPU on what should be reasonably performant web apps, we'd be getting somewhere. It's even worse with multiprocess.

cozzyd 10y ago

I'm surprised by the memory differences between OS's. Is that just a measurement artifact?

beerbaron23 10y ago
Well the OS's do manage memory differently and would expain the high OSX memory usage. OSX soaks up most of your ram at all times and will put programs in the background into a sleep state. When they are woken up everything is transitioned smoothly like it was already running as it's state is in ram. The OS will also free up ram if it's needed by a newly launched program. Hence when judging the available memory on OSX you look at "Memory Pressure" and not available ram.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

The test mentions he ran Firefox using 2, 4 and 8 content processes. Does this mean that Firefox does not use 1 process per tab like Chrome does?

bombless 10y ago
I don't understand the logic behind your statement, but yes ff doesn't use 1 process per tab atm. They plan to change this situation this year so that they can support wasm better.
fabrice_d 10y ago
Firefox can be configured to use N number of content processes, and will allocate tabs among these processes. In FirefoxOS we were giving a new process to each tab/app, using a pre-allocated process to speed up startup (a version of that has been re-implemented for Firefox). I'm not sure about the exact heuristics used by Chrome, but I think they do something like one process per origin.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Yes, Chrome uses 1 process per domain. So I'm still not sure what would happen if Firefox is configured to use 4 content processes and 20 unique domain tabs are opened. Would the domains be distributed to these content processes? And what happens if 1 content process crashes? Would it also bring down all of the domains associated to it?
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    The answers to your questions are yes and yes.
bogas04 10y ago
It does not. They are experimenting with different models and will probably use 4 processes for all tabs.
- 10y ago

kbutler 10y ago

I picked up a little Dell 3000 laptop with 2GB RAM. Chrome rapidly gets unusable, but Firefox lets me keep a dozen tabs going. Linux (Mint 18.1) uses about 1/2 the memory of Windows 10, so I run Linux. Haven't set up swap (flash memory only), so when I do exceed the RAM limits, things just grind to a halt, usually requiring a reboot. Fun little portable system. :-)

yeukhon 10y ago

For those not familiar, internally (well also externally now) Mozilla runs a site called Are We Slim Yet? I used to walk by the big monitor at the old MV office by the Platform/JS team (because i sat right across them). Fun chart to look at.

bathyspheric 10y ago

> Edge was disqualified because it seemed to bypass the hosts file and wouldn’t load pages from unique domains. I can do measurements so I might revisit this, but it wouldn’t have been a fair comparison as-is. Is it surprising that Edge might bypass the hosts file? It surprises me, as I thought all outgoing requests were routed through `/etc/hosts` or equiv, but I don't spend too much time in Windows these days.

hashhar 10y ago
Huh, mine respects my hosts. That's how I set up adblocking before they brought extensions in.

krzyk 10y ago

I use Firefox exclusively (after a month of trying out Chrome - unusable because with 100+ tabs open it uses to much memory in comparison with Firefox), but when I tried to increase processCount to 8 (then 4 and 2) it looked like it was having a memory leak, started using more then twice the amount of RAM. I'm on Aurora (developer edition) maybe it was related to some recent bugs.

drdaeman 10y ago

Would be interesting to see comparison with uzbl and surf as well. Maybe also with Servo/browser.html, although it won't be really correct as (unlike the others) it's not yet stable.

charles-salvia 10y ago

The problem with Chrome/Chromium is it's basically just a huge ton of scaffolding designed to layer an IPC framework on top of more layers of scaffolding on top of more layers that wrap blink (i.e. WebKit) which still has lots of code going back to KDE from the 90s. The Chromium codebase has no less than 5 different string classes, is riddled with layers and layers of virtual function calls wrapping older interfaces, has an antiquated threading model that defines a "Main thread" because various ancient WebKit code scattered throughout the code base relies on global variables, etc. It's pretty surprising to me that it works as well as it does.

digi_owl 10y ago
Pr process tabs seems to be the core reason why, as this allows the Chrome UI to be "responsive" even if one of the tab processes keep chugging the cycles like it a drunk during happy hour. This in turn because we now have 4+ cores that can do 2+ threads each in an effect to keep the marketing interpretation of Moore's law valid.