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> According to the Phoronix reader involved with the Le9 work, he's reportedly able to run Mozilla Firefox with 37 tabs as well as having Skype, Discord, two PD

> According to the Phoronix reader involved with the Le9 work, he's reportedly able to run Mozilla Firefox with 37 tabs as well as having Skype, Discord, two PDFs, and LibreOffice all running on an aging decade old system with just 2GB of RAM. I recall having more than 37 Netscape windows open on a system with 64MB, back in the 90s.

justinsaccount 5y ago
People like to forget that having 37 windows open with netscape was possible, but it would regularly crash and take all 37 windows with it. Also, all 37 tabs were likely displaying pages that looked like HN or lite.cnn.com Software isn't really that bloated, it's the content. In the 90s if you had a video on a website it was things like 320x240 at 15fps. If you had a jpeg it was probably 640x480, and there might have been one or two on a page. If I load https://flickr.com/ https://flickr.com/ it sends down a 2000x1333 background image that is almost 700K. On my dialup connection in the 90s that would have taken almost 5 minutes to load. The image likely takes 5MB of ram (or at least gpu memory?) to display. Looking at flickr snapshot from 2004, the entire page is 300K. https://web.archive.org/web/20040701020748/http://flickr.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040701020748/http://flickr.com... Sure, some JS stuff is bloated, but you can remove all the JS in the world and it won't change the fact that images are 10 times the size that they used to be. The one thing that likely uses more resources is the per-tab sandboxing browsers do now.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > People like to forget that having 37 windows open with netscape was possible, but it would regularly crash and take all 37 windows with it. Also, all 37 tabs were likely displaying pages that looked like HN or lite.cnn.com And that was close to paradise, in comparison with the modern web. > Software isn't really that bloated, it's the content. It doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both.
MR4D 5y ago
Ouch. Something tells me that in the future on our personal computers we will be running virtual windowing systems (KDE, GTK, etc), which will make this both better and worse. That GTK (and firefox) take so much more memory to run still amazes me. If I had the time, I'd love to run an old version of Firefox on a current Linux set up just to see what would happen. --------- EDIT - I have "GTK" above, because it covers not only Gnome, but also XFCE, etc.
- nvahalik 5y ago
  Netscape didn't have CSS2/3, WebGL, Canvas, native video (you had to use a plugin IIRC), plus the dozens (hundreds?) of W3C specs that didn't exist until the last 10-15 years ago.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    Given that things like WebGL/Canvas are privacy-destroying nightmares, maybe it's time to start using stripped down browsers that leave out most of these newer anti-features.
  - MR4D 5y ago
    True. Just curious how bloated everything has gotten. Also, you mentioned the video plugin. I hadn't thought of that one - I wonder how the old video plugin vs "native" video compares (ignoring file formats, probably similar, but the new video formats probably bloat the software significantly due to all the compression).

justinsaccount 5y ago

People like to forget that having 37 windows open with netscape was possible, but it would regularly crash and take all 37 windows with it. Also, all 37 tabs were likely displaying pages that looked like HN or lite.cnn.com Software isn't really that bloated, it's the content. In the 90s if you had a video on a website it was things like 320x240 at 15fps. If you had a jpeg it was probably 640x480, and there might have been one or two on a page. If I load https://flickr.com/ https://flickr.com/ it sends down a 2000x1333 background image that is almost 700K. On my dialup connection in the 90s that would have taken almost 5 minutes to load. The image likely takes 5MB of ram (or at least gpu memory?) to display. Looking at flickr snapshot from 2004, the entire page is 300K. https://web.archive.org/web/20040701020748/http://flickr.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040701020748/http://flickr.com... Sure, some JS stuff is bloated, but you can remove all the JS in the world and it won't change the fact that images are 10 times the size that they used to be. The one thing that likely uses more resources is the per-tab sandboxing browsers do now.

tablespoon 5y ago
> People like to forget that having 37 windows open with netscape was possible, but it would regularly crash and take all 37 windows with it. Also, all 37 tabs were likely displaying pages that looked like HN or lite.cnn.com And that was close to paradise, in comparison with the modern web. > Software isn't really that bloated, it's the content. It doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both.

MR4D 5y ago

Ouch. Something tells me that in the future on our personal computers we will be running virtual windowing systems (KDE, GTK, etc), which will make this both better and worse. That GTK (and firefox) take so much more memory to run still amazes me. If I had the time, I'd love to run an old version of Firefox on a current Linux set up just to see what would happen. --------- EDIT - I have "GTK" above, because it covers not only Gnome, but also XFCE, etc.

nvahalik 5y ago
Netscape didn't have CSS2/3, WebGL, Canvas, native video (you had to use a plugin IIRC), plus the dozens (hundreds?) of W3C specs that didn't exist until the last 10-15 years ago.
- mindslight 5y ago
  Given that things like WebGL/Canvas are privacy-destroying nightmares, maybe it's time to start using stripped down browsers that leave out most of these newer anti-features.
- MR4D 5y ago
  True. Just curious how bloated everything has gotten. Also, you mentioned the video plugin. I hadn't thought of that one - I wonder how the old video plugin vs "native" video compares (ignoring file formats, probably similar, but the new video formats probably bloat the software significantly due to all the compression).