6 ms·

Chrome Used 10x More RAM Than Safari on macOS Big Sur in Recent Test

42 points by mgh2 6y ago

john-doe 6y ago
Would be nice to know if it's Chromium or Chrome specifically.
rvz 6y ago
On top of that with many tabs open, you probably have 20+ Electron apps open all competing for RAM on your Macbook. Complete waste of CPU, Memory and Disk space. A triple negative for all software. Might as well download more RAM, since Chrome and these Electron apps are having a huge RAM-eating feast on my computer. /s
- postalrat 6y ago
  Sounds like an opportunity for you to write better software to replace those bloated electron apps.
  - RedComet 6y ago
    What a stupid thing to say.
    - castis 6y ago
      It would be helpful to maybe elaborate on _why_ that is a stupid thing to say.
      - RedComet 6y ago
        I assumed it was self evident, but I just did so anyway.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - IncRnd 6y ago
        When my car used too much gas, I made myself a new car with some GMC parts I purchased online!
  - RedComet 6y ago
    "Heh, you think those 4-5 giant multi-million LOC programs you use in your busy life are burdensomely bloated? Good, rewrite them all by yourself in your free time. What, they're proprietary? Sounds like a business opportunity (even though you're already working two jobs and can't pay your mortgage)."
    - refulgentis 6y ago
      I'm left saddened by this dogpile on the person you're replying to: this is a site for programmers, if Electron/having multiple copies of V8 is awful, they genuinely have a market opportunity. Google and Microsoft are pitching in on Flutter, for example.
- dangus 6y ago
  "Electron sucks" is such repeated and dramatized trope, it's getting old. Nobody runs 20+ Electron apps. Really, nobody runs 20+ apps. The only people who need to buy a laptop with more than 8GB of RAM in 2021 have a specific workflow that they already know they need the RAM for - and that workflow never involves Electron, instead it involves something like video/photo editing, 3D graphics work, CAD, virtual machines and/or containers. Heck, even gamers get away with 8GB easily, with nearly zero games from the PS4 era hitting performance limitations at that level. And really, does your MacBook Air have the graphical capability to run anything that could take advantage of more? Slack using 300MB of RAM to send GIFs around isn't your problem, and end users don't stare at the Activity Monitor all day counting their bytes.
  - AmVess 6y ago
    I have an 8GB Macbook Air M1. I purchased the base model because there were long waits for 16GB versions. Honestly, for simple use it is fine. I use Affinity Photo and it is nearly as fast as my Ryzen 3700/32GB box, and is faster in some instances. For simple editing of home videos with Final Cut Pro taken with my DSLR, it is surprisingly useful. I wouldn't want to do big projects with it, but it is fine for what it is. I certainly couldn't say that about my Dell XPS that had 2x the ram and sounded like an industrial vacuum cleaner under any moderate load. It runs World of Warcraft fine, which takes a decent amount of GPU power to run even though it is an older game.
    - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
      M1 Air 8GB here too. Happily developing a cross platform app in XCode. Silently and fast.
    - smoldesu 6y ago
      >which takes a decent amount of GPU power to run even though it is an older game. I must be out of the loop on what constitutes as "decent GPU power", but my $600 desktop from 2014 plays WOW at max settings and 1440p without issue. Are there any other GPU benchmarks you've tried?
jsnell 6y ago
The original blog post was discussed a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179817
dangus 6y ago
While Safari seems to get better and better, it still lags behind Chrome and Firefox in a number of end-user usability factors that are much more subjective than "how much RAM I'm using." For example, try going to compass.com and using embedded Street View in Safari. It's nearly unusable. Sure, you might say Chrome is going to have a monopoly on "making things work nicely with Google Maps/Meet" but then you jump on Firefox and the experience is just fine. Safari's the only one with compatibility issues in my subjective experience. Microsoft Teams also has missing web functionality specifically in Safari, functionality that works perfectly fine in Firefox and Chrome. There are many more examples than just these two. Despite being an incredibly popular mobile browser, and being the default browser on macOS, I find that Safari is the only browser that I have to periodically switch away from temporarily in order to get some random website to work properly. If I'm doing critical work like taking an online exam I will always choose Chrome or Firefox because I know I can depend on it working and being properly tested. At the end of the day, casual users aren't staring at Activity Monitor all day, and for them RAM is "free." I have a Mac with 8 GB of RAM and I've never noticed any slowdown or issue from using Chrome, Firefox, and/or Safari all simultaneously along with many other open apps. I don't have to care about what my OS does to manage memory because it's 2021, not 1995. I think we all know, of course, that Chrome is Internet Explorer at this point. We are close to another monopoly situation that I'm not confident the US Government will properly address.
- myko 6y ago
  > I think we all know, of course, that Chrome is Internet Explorer at this point. Mobile Safari is extremely popular and seems closer to old IE
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    It's easy to be popular when the only platform you run on is popular and mandates that this be the only browser that can run on it. Oh, sure, you can get something called Firefox on iOS. But it's really just "crippled Safari", as 3rd party browser apps must use the system web view, which does not have feature parity with Safari.
  - 6y ago
whalesalad 6y ago
I have been daily driving Safari since about 2018 and have never looked back. I do some development in Firefox just because the dev tools are great there and it is nice to have a partition between the two browsers. I also use Safari on iPhone so having the strong sync there is great, too.
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
The problem with safari is that it's extremely buggy and doesn't support a number of basic web technologies, such as webrtc, very well. And unfortunately it's the only thing that anyone is allowed to use on iOS, so we all just have to deal with it. I'll happily pay for a little extra ram in my computer if I can just go to a website and know that it will work in my browser.
- acdha 6y ago
  It's been quite a while since I've run into a Safari bug. What's far more common are sites which either lock functionality to Chrome (most Google properties) or didn't implement it following the standards (e.g. GitLab's FIDO implementation checks for the first Chrome U2F API and they've been slacking on the standard version). To be honest, one of the best reasons for using Safari or Firefox is just to remind companies that “web” doesn't mean Chrome. The added performance is a rather nice bonus.
  - candiddevmike 6y ago
    As someone who has routinely ran into CSS quirks and unsupported features with Safari, I don't really see a problem with "the web" == Chromium, especially if the major web players (Apple, Firefox, Google, Microsoft) having an equal stake in the project.
    - olliej 6y ago
      ... So you are pro the IE4-6 era? Only google has a stake in chromium - if google wants a feature that feature becomes a "basic web feature". If chrome does something one way, anything else is buggy. That's literally what happened in the IE4-6 era.
    - acdha 6y ago
      I’ve also run into plenty of quirks or bugs in Chrome. That’s not a reason to give up on a browser unless the vendor gives up on it – and it’s especially important to see how many proposals started on Chrome but were substantially improved by working with other browser implementors. The Chrome team are quite good but they’re not perfect and the web benefits from multiple perspectives.
myko 6y ago
Probably explains why Chrome feels snappier though overall it makes my machine feel slower, if that makes sense
refulgentis 6y ago
The link has a disclaimer noting the stats are inaccurate. It links to the previous HN thread on this, in particular, a V8 dev noting the Safari stats didn't include _any_ of the rendering processes for _any_ tab, and their surprise that an informal benchmark with extremely surprising results wasn't checked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  As an extension to your comment, the disclaimer above the source [1] of the macrumors post, for context: This got a lot more attention than it deserves. As I'm pointing out below, it's likely the case that the system tool I used for measuring memory footprint isn't giving the full picture. It's also not a very indicative test in terms of every day use. However, I do think the reason this resonated with so many people is that most of us have heard the fans cool down when they exit Chrome. I'll see if I can find a better way to measure that. Stay tuned on @mortenjust So indeed, these statistics are unreliable at best and likely inaccurate or incomplete. They were recorded through psrecord[2] which doesn't record all the processes for Safari. [1]: https://www.flotato.com/post/memory-chrome-safari-flotato https://www.flotato.com/post/memory-chrome-safari-flotato [2]: https://github.com/astrofrog/psrecord https://github.com/astrofrog/psrecord
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Zardoz84 6y ago
Laughts in Firefox
gregoriol 6y ago
Right now Safari uses 9,85GB of RAM on my work machine. I guess I should be happy to not use Chrome because it would need 100GB of RAM?
jefftk 6y ago
This came up a month ago, and the test was faulty. They accidently measured the memory usage of child processes in Chrome, but not Safari: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114 (Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
- smoldesu 6y ago
  Thank you for summarizing this. I was going to have an aneurysm after seeing this make it to the front page of HN twice in a row.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  As an aside, if someone only runs a web browser on his machine (and maybe a few other programs that aren't resource intensive) then using as much RAM as possible sounds like the correct tradeoff since unlike CPU, RAM has the same power budget whether used or not (so it is worth it to cache results). The alternative would be to page to disk, but that would hurt responsiveness. If nothing else requests the RAM you are better off keeping tabs alive.
  - smoldesu 6y ago
    Sure, but ideally we should be writing software that erases technical debt, not shifting it. To my understanding, the system you're suggesting is actually how Chrome manages it's tabs: it will let you open whatever you want until memory is constrained, at which point it will kill/compress the biggest offenders to keep things snappy.
- freediver 6y ago
  Here is a test that measures all child processes: https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1375557440578539521 https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1375557440578539521 This brings it to 2x more RAM for Chrome, compared to Safari.
throwaway8581 6y ago
Please take this blatantly fake news off the front page.
olliej 6y ago
is this another version of "we added all the chrome tabs together but only measured the safari browser process" post?
smoldesu 6y ago
Great, every few weeks this gets posted, and every few weeks we need to have an honest-to-god sit down discussion about the issues with amateur profiling (particularly on MacOS). Last time this article got posted, it was quickly proven that each browser used about the same amount of memory in the end, but Safari just did a better job of spreading it across disparate (sometimes hidden) processes. Considering how MacOS manages memory, there very well could be more web-corpses in the closet that we can't even measure, caught in the limbo of freed memory and used memory. I'm tired of this sensationalist armchair administration. All of this goes without even mentioning that Safari still competes with Internet Explorer (not Edge, Explorer) for compatibility laurels. Sure, slow clap for supporting WebM, Apple. Really saved the farm with that one. It's horribly ironic that Apple simultaneously claims that the web is a viable platform for open distribution when their implementation of it is the most bare-bones, notoriously broken implementation we've ever seen. You wanna use a good browser? Start with one that doesn't hide things from you.
- voisin 6y ago
  I ran Chrome for years and then recently switched to Safari. To the best of my knowledge, my behaviour has not changed. I wasn’t too into extensions in Chrome nor am I now under Safari. I can unequivocally say that my entire system feels significantly faster since making the switch. Battery life is far better too. Just my own n=1 anecdata.
  - midrus 6y ago
    Same experience here. I like chrome for all the features it has and I'm totally dependent on the devtools for work. But certainly safari feels a lot faster and more lightweight. Also, the speedometer 2 (just discovered it a few days go, so not sure how reliable is this) shields a lot better results when using safari. https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
  - ksec 6y ago
    Safari has always been more efficient than Chrome and less resource hungry in the past. But the in the past 6 months ( with works that has been ongoing for a lot longer ) Chrome is now similar to Safari on Mac. And a little faster. That is both Chrome working and Safari gotten slower with Safari 13.x and 14.0 That is only on x86 though. It seems Apple is now running optimisation only on M1. Safari on M1 is still faster than Chrome.
imbnwa 6y ago
That insane memory leak for Safari in the new Reddit design is insane though, so I use Brave. You get up to 1GB+ RAM usage in just 5 - 8 minutes and it just keeps going from there. I don't prefer old.reddit.com because the left-aligned design is annnoying. If you're a Reddit engineer, what is the deal there?
- smoldesu 6y ago
  > If you're a Reddit engineer, what is the deal there? Maybe what you meant to say is, "if you're an Apple engineer, what's the deal here?" It sounds like it isn't an issue on other browsers, which means the issue likely falls squarely in Apple's camp. Especially considering that Safari makes memory management the kernel's problem, I fail to see a way in which a "Reddit engineer" could be responsible for not knowing how to work around an undocumented interface.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    > Maybe what you meant to say is, "if you're an Apple engineer, what's the deal here?" Perhaps, but this isn't a problem for old.reddit.com, so there's a business decision being made to not consider the value of the redesign/re-implementation if Apple's desktop brower is completely un-usable for the app. Moreover, if Reddit is aware of this, why isn't there a banner or an alert indicating "Hey, Apple's memory management in Safari is shit and they won't help, can you use a different browser for an optimal experience?", but that's not the case. Obviously they wouldn't word the banner like that but you get the idea. It's questionable that Reddit would lie the blame on Apple's feet but don't communicate this to users Either way you play it there's horrendous UX going on on Reddit's part
    - smoldesu 6y ago
      >It's questionable that Reddit would lie the blame on Apple's feet but don't communicate this to users The user doesn't care. Putting up a banner to tell people to switch browsers because of memory constraints is an even worse UX decision, so there's no straight path forwards here. For what it's worth, visiting Reddit on mobile will urge you to use the app instead, likely with performance issues in mind. >Either way you play it there's horrendous UX going on on Reddit's part Not... really? You'd have to do some pretty immense mental gymnastics to claim that it's Reddit's fault for making a site compatible with every browser but Apple's. Furthermore, I also have a hard time imagining how you'd blame Reddit for causing a memory leak that should be managed by the kernel in the first place. Best case scenario, this is an issue inherited from MacOS's BSD heritage, what with the lazy memory management and lack of virtualization. Worst case scenario, Apple is consciously ignoring their incompatibility, with hopes that WebKit will somehow become the new standard for web browisng. I won't cut and dry it for you, but I don't see a point on that spectrum where it's somehow Reddit's fault all of the sudden.
Jonovono 6y ago
I just got the new M1 Macbook air. Chrome worked pretty good on it, but I tried Safari and it was just so silky. So I decided to switch to Safari. I thought it was going to be a tough switch because I'm a heavy extension user but it was actually pretty seamless. Still lots of things don't work quite as nicely (Dashlane isn't as reliable, Hangouts you can't have backgrounds or share a select window, and other stuff too) but overall it's worth it I think.
- smoldesu 6y ago
  Have they started offering Ublock Origin again? I might start using my M1 Macbook Air again, if that's the case.
  - Jonovono 6y ago
    Unfortunately not. I am using one called SafeGuard on Safari I believe.
juancn 6y ago
The problem with Safari is extensions are nonexistent. I need a few I cannot live without (a rule based proxy switcher, an ad blocker, a GraphQL client).

42 points by mgh2 6y ago

Would be nice to know if it's Chromium or Chrome specifically.

rvz 6y ago

On top of that with many tabs open, you probably have 20+ Electron apps open all competing for RAM on your Macbook. Complete waste of CPU, Memory and Disk space. A triple negative for all software. Might as well download more RAM, since Chrome and these Electron apps are having a huge RAM-eating feast on my computer. /s

postalrat 6y ago
Sounds like an opportunity for you to write better software to replace those bloated electron apps.
- RedComet 6y ago
  What a stupid thing to say.
  - castis 6y ago
    It would be helpful to maybe elaborate on _why_ that is a stupid thing to say.
    - RedComet 6y ago
      I assumed it was self evident, but I just did so anyway.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      When my car used too much gas, I made myself a new car with some GMC parts I purchased online!
- RedComet 6y ago
  "Heh, you think those 4-5 giant multi-million LOC programs you use in your busy life are burdensomely bloated? Good, rewrite them all by yourself in your free time. What, they're proprietary? Sounds like a business opportunity (even though you're already working two jobs and can't pay your mortgage)."
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    I'm left saddened by this dogpile on the person you're replying to: this is a site for programmers, if Electron/having multiple copies of V8 is awful, they genuinely have a market opportunity. Google and Microsoft are pitching in on Flutter, for example.
dangus 6y ago
"Electron sucks" is such repeated and dramatized trope, it's getting old. Nobody runs 20+ Electron apps. Really, nobody runs 20+ apps. The only people who need to buy a laptop with more than 8GB of RAM in 2021 have a specific workflow that they already know they need the RAM for - and that workflow never involves Electron, instead it involves something like video/photo editing, 3D graphics work, CAD, virtual machines and/or containers. Heck, even gamers get away with 8GB easily, with nearly zero games from the PS4 era hitting performance limitations at that level. And really, does your MacBook Air have the graphical capability to run anything that could take advantage of more? Slack using 300MB of RAM to send GIFs around isn't your problem, and end users don't stare at the Activity Monitor all day counting their bytes.
- AmVess 6y ago
  I have an 8GB Macbook Air M1. I purchased the base model because there were long waits for 16GB versions. Honestly, for simple use it is fine. I use Affinity Photo and it is nearly as fast as my Ryzen 3700/32GB box, and is faster in some instances. For simple editing of home videos with Final Cut Pro taken with my DSLR, it is surprisingly useful. I wouldn't want to do big projects with it, but it is fine for what it is. I certainly couldn't say that about my Dell XPS that had 2x the ram and sounded like an industrial vacuum cleaner under any moderate load. It runs World of Warcraft fine, which takes a decent amount of GPU power to run even though it is an older game.
  - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
    M1 Air 8GB here too. Happily developing a cross platform app in XCode. Silently and fast.
  - smoldesu 6y ago
    >which takes a decent amount of GPU power to run even though it is an older game. I must be out of the loop on what constitutes as "decent GPU power", but my $600 desktop from 2014 plays WOW at max settings and 1440p without issue. Are there any other GPU benchmarks you've tried?

jsnell 6y ago

The original blog post was discussed a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179817

dangus 6y ago

While Safari seems to get better and better, it still lags behind Chrome and Firefox in a number of end-user usability factors that are much more subjective than "how much RAM I'm using." For example, try going to compass.com and using embedded Street View in Safari. It's nearly unusable. Sure, you might say Chrome is going to have a monopoly on "making things work nicely with Google Maps/Meet" but then you jump on Firefox and the experience is just fine. Safari's the only one with compatibility issues in my subjective experience. Microsoft Teams also has missing web functionality specifically in Safari, functionality that works perfectly fine in Firefox and Chrome. There are many more examples than just these two. Despite being an incredibly popular mobile browser, and being the default browser on macOS, I find that Safari is the only browser that I have to periodically switch away from temporarily in order to get some random website to work properly. If I'm doing critical work like taking an online exam I will always choose Chrome or Firefox because I know I can depend on it working and being properly tested. At the end of the day, casual users aren't staring at Activity Monitor all day, and for them RAM is "free." I have a Mac with 8 GB of RAM and I've never noticed any slowdown or issue from using Chrome, Firefox, and/or Safari all simultaneously along with many other open apps. I don't have to care about what my OS does to manage memory because it's 2021, not 1995. I think we all know, of course, that Chrome is Internet Explorer at this point. We are close to another monopoly situation that I'm not confident the US Government will properly address.

myko 6y ago
> I think we all know, of course, that Chrome is Internet Explorer at this point. Mobile Safari is extremely popular and seems closer to old IE
- moron4hire 6y ago
  It's easy to be popular when the only platform you run on is popular and mandates that this be the only browser that can run on it. Oh, sure, you can get something called Firefox on iOS. But it's really just "crippled Safari", as 3rd party browser apps must use the system web view, which does not have feature parity with Safari.
- 6y ago

whalesalad 6y ago

I have been daily driving Safari since about 2018 and have never looked back. I do some development in Firefox just because the dev tools are great there and it is nice to have a partition between the two browsers. I also use Safari on iPhone so having the strong sync there is great, too.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

The problem with safari is that it's extremely buggy and doesn't support a number of basic web technologies, such as webrtc, very well. And unfortunately it's the only thing that anyone is allowed to use on iOS, so we all just have to deal with it. I'll happily pay for a little extra ram in my computer if I can just go to a website and know that it will work in my browser.

acdha 6y ago
It's been quite a while since I've run into a Safari bug. What's far more common are sites which either lock functionality to Chrome (most Google properties) or didn't implement it following the standards (e.g. GitLab's FIDO implementation checks for the first Chrome U2F API and they've been slacking on the standard version). To be honest, one of the best reasons for using Safari or Firefox is just to remind companies that “web” doesn't mean Chrome. The added performance is a rather nice bonus.
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  As someone who has routinely ran into CSS quirks and unsupported features with Safari, I don't really see a problem with "the web" == Chromium, especially if the major web players (Apple, Firefox, Google, Microsoft) having an equal stake in the project.
  - olliej 6y ago
    ... So you are pro the IE4-6 era? Only google has a stake in chromium - if google wants a feature that feature becomes a "basic web feature". If chrome does something one way, anything else is buggy. That's literally what happened in the IE4-6 era.
  - acdha 6y ago
    I’ve also run into plenty of quirks or bugs in Chrome. That’s not a reason to give up on a browser unless the vendor gives up on it – and it’s especially important to see how many proposals started on Chrome but were substantially improved by working with other browser implementors. The Chrome team are quite good but they’re not perfect and the web benefits from multiple perspectives.

myko 6y ago

Probably explains why Chrome feels snappier though overall it makes my machine feel slower, if that makes sense

refulgentis 6y ago

The link has a disclaimer noting the stats are inaccurate. It links to the previous HN thread on this, in particular, a V8 dev noting the Safari stats didn't include _any_ of the rendering processes for _any_ tab, and their surprise that an informal benchmark with extremely surprising results wasn't checked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114

jeroenhd 6y ago
As an extension to your comment, the disclaimer above the source [1] of the macrumors post, for context: This got a lot more attention than it deserves. As I'm pointing out below, it's likely the case that the system tool I used for measuring memory footprint isn't giving the full picture. It's also not a very indicative test in terms of every day use. However, I do think the reason this resonated with so many people is that most of us have heard the fans cool down when they exit Chrome. I'll see if I can find a better way to measure that. Stay tuned on @mortenjust So indeed, these statistics are unreliable at best and likely inaccurate or incomplete. They were recorded through psrecord[2] which doesn't record all the processes for Safari. [1]: https://www.flotato.com/post/memory-chrome-safari-flotato https://www.flotato.com/post/memory-chrome-safari-flotato [2]: https://github.com/astrofrog/psrecord https://github.com/astrofrog/psrecord
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Zardoz84 6y ago

Laughts in Firefox

gregoriol 6y ago

Right now Safari uses 9,85GB of RAM on my work machine. I guess I should be happy to not use Chrome because it would need 100GB of RAM?

jefftk 6y ago

This came up a month ago, and the test was faulty. They accidently measured the memory usage of child processes in Chrome, but not Safari: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114 (Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

smoldesu 6y ago
Thank you for summarizing this. I was going to have an aneurysm after seeing this make it to the front page of HN twice in a row.
908B64B197 6y ago
As an aside, if someone only runs a web browser on his machine (and maybe a few other programs that aren't resource intensive) then using as much RAM as possible sounds like the correct tradeoff since unlike CPU, RAM has the same power budget whether used or not (so it is worth it to cache results). The alternative would be to page to disk, but that would hurt responsiveness. If nothing else requests the RAM you are better off keeping tabs alive.
- smoldesu 6y ago
  Sure, but ideally we should be writing software that erases technical debt, not shifting it. To my understanding, the system you're suggesting is actually how Chrome manages it's tabs: it will let you open whatever you want until memory is constrained, at which point it will kill/compress the biggest offenders to keep things snappy.
freediver 6y ago
Here is a test that measures all child processes: https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1375557440578539521 https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1375557440578539521 This brings it to 2x more RAM for Chrome, compared to Safari.

throwaway8581 6y ago

Please take this blatantly fake news off the front page.

olliej 6y ago

is this another version of "we added all the chrome tabs together but only measured the safari browser process" post?

smoldesu 6y ago

Great, every few weeks this gets posted, and every few weeks we need to have an honest-to-god sit down discussion about the issues with amateur profiling (particularly on MacOS). Last time this article got posted, it was quickly proven that each browser used about the same amount of memory in the end, but Safari just did a better job of spreading it across disparate (sometimes hidden) processes. Considering how MacOS manages memory, there very well could be more web-corpses in the closet that we can't even measure, caught in the limbo of freed memory and used memory. I'm tired of this sensationalist armchair administration. All of this goes without even mentioning that Safari still competes with Internet Explorer (not Edge, Explorer) for compatibility laurels. Sure, slow clap for supporting WebM, Apple. Really saved the farm with that one. It's horribly ironic that Apple simultaneously claims that the web is a viable platform for open distribution when their implementation of it is the most bare-bones, notoriously broken implementation we've ever seen. You wanna use a good browser? Start with one that doesn't hide things from you.

voisin 6y ago
I ran Chrome for years and then recently switched to Safari. To the best of my knowledge, my behaviour has not changed. I wasn’t too into extensions in Chrome nor am I now under Safari. I can unequivocally say that my entire system feels significantly faster since making the switch. Battery life is far better too. Just my own n=1 anecdata.
- midrus 6y ago
  Same experience here. I like chrome for all the features it has and I'm totally dependent on the devtools for work. But certainly safari feels a lot faster and more lightweight. Also, the speedometer 2 (just discovered it a few days go, so not sure how reliable is this) shields a lot better results when using safari. https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
- ksec 6y ago
  Safari has always been more efficient than Chrome and less resource hungry in the past. But the in the past 6 months ( with works that has been ongoing for a lot longer ) Chrome is now similar to Safari on Mac. And a little faster. That is both Chrome working and Safari gotten slower with Safari 13.x and 14.0 That is only on x86 though. It seems Apple is now running optimisation only on M1. Safari on M1 is still faster than Chrome.

imbnwa 6y ago

That insane memory leak for Safari in the new Reddit design is insane though, so I use Brave. You get up to 1GB+ RAM usage in just 5 - 8 minutes and it just keeps going from there. I don't prefer old.reddit.com because the left-aligned design is annnoying. If you're a Reddit engineer, what is the deal there?

smoldesu 6y ago
> If you're a Reddit engineer, what is the deal there? Maybe what you meant to say is, "if you're an Apple engineer, what's the deal here?" It sounds like it isn't an issue on other browsers, which means the issue likely falls squarely in Apple's camp. Especially considering that Safari makes memory management the kernel's problem, I fail to see a way in which a "Reddit engineer" could be responsible for not knowing how to work around an undocumented interface.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  > Maybe what you meant to say is, "if you're an Apple engineer, what's the deal here?" Perhaps, but this isn't a problem for old.reddit.com, so there's a business decision being made to not consider the value of the redesign/re-implementation if Apple's desktop brower is completely un-usable for the app. Moreover, if Reddit is aware of this, why isn't there a banner or an alert indicating "Hey, Apple's memory management in Safari is shit and they won't help, can you use a different browser for an optimal experience?", but that's not the case. Obviously they wouldn't word the banner like that but you get the idea. It's questionable that Reddit would lie the blame on Apple's feet but don't communicate this to users Either way you play it there's horrendous UX going on on Reddit's part
  - smoldesu 6y ago
    >It's questionable that Reddit would lie the blame on Apple's feet but don't communicate this to users The user doesn't care. Putting up a banner to tell people to switch browsers because of memory constraints is an even worse UX decision, so there's no straight path forwards here. For what it's worth, visiting Reddit on mobile will urge you to use the app instead, likely with performance issues in mind. >Either way you play it there's horrendous UX going on on Reddit's part Not... really? You'd have to do some pretty immense mental gymnastics to claim that it's Reddit's fault for making a site compatible with every browser but Apple's. Furthermore, I also have a hard time imagining how you'd blame Reddit for causing a memory leak that should be managed by the kernel in the first place. Best case scenario, this is an issue inherited from MacOS's BSD heritage, what with the lazy memory management and lack of virtualization. Worst case scenario, Apple is consciously ignoring their incompatibility, with hopes that WebKit will somehow become the new standard for web browisng. I won't cut and dry it for you, but I don't see a point on that spectrum where it's somehow Reddit's fault all of the sudden.

Jonovono 6y ago

I just got the new M1 Macbook air. Chrome worked pretty good on it, but I tried Safari and it was just so silky. So I decided to switch to Safari. I thought it was going to be a tough switch because I'm a heavy extension user but it was actually pretty seamless. Still lots of things don't work quite as nicely (Dashlane isn't as reliable, Hangouts you can't have backgrounds or share a select window, and other stuff too) but overall it's worth it I think.

smoldesu 6y ago
Have they started offering Ublock Origin again? I might start using my M1 Macbook Air again, if that's the case.
- Jonovono 6y ago
  Unfortunately not. I am using one called SafeGuard on Safari I believe.

juancn 6y ago

The problem with Safari is extensions are nonexistent. I need a few I cannot live without (a rule based proxy switcher, an ad blocker, a GraphQL client).