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My dream browser would have two engines -- a simple, very fast engine for "document-like" web pages and a more complex engine that can be loaded on demand using
by panic 5y ago
My dream browser would have two engines -- a simple, very fast engine for "document-like" web pages and a more complex engine that can be loaded on demand using a UI similar to NoScript.
- TomGullen 5y agoDo normal document like web pages render slowly in modern browsers for you?
- swiley 5y agoIME: most pages that are poorly controlled enough to include "tag managers" are unusable with javascript enabled.
- nicklecompte 5y agoSome disclaimers: I am not an expert on Chromium or even web development and this is all quite ignorant and subjective. But I have noticed that plain text is sometimes very slow to render in Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi) under heavy load. The issue may to be related to a process-per-browser-tab architecture: a bloated and fragmented block of memory attached to a tab/process can’t be easily freed / allocated. So if you’re on a tab that was previously loading lots of stateful JS, then switch to plain text, Chromium might get stuck in memory management for the tab instead of short-circuiting its architecture by allocating memory solely for the page. I am not at all an expert here and don’t know how Chromium works under the hood. I don’t think it’s literally one-process-per-tab, I just have a vague sketch of what the problem might be here. But I think “idiots like nicklecompte have 700 tabs open and complain that tab 361 doesn’t load plain text quickly” is a problem that’s very difficult to solve in general, even if a dedicated “simple” engine might offer a lot of case-specific fixes.