4 ms·

Switching from FF to Chrome (this was like a decade ago, to be fair to FF) eliminated about 50% of my beachballs and other unresponsiveness system-wide, not jus

Switching from FF to Chrome (this was like a decade ago, to be fair to FF) eliminated about 50% of my beachballs and other unresponsiveness system-wide, not just when using FF. Switching from Chrome to Safari got rid of almost all the rest, and also made my battery life match Apple's claims. [EDIT] And when I do still run into trouble, it's almost always Electron chat apps. Slack, Teams, and Discord. All terrible at being respectful of system resources. Closing the program and restarting it usually temporarily fixes the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.

PuffinBlue 4y ago
A very unreasonable reason for me not switching to Safari is because the bookmarks dropdowns (when activating the bookmark bar) have two very annoying features. Firstly they only open when clicked, so if you click one and move your mouse to another, the other doesn't open, just the original stays there and you have to click off it to close it. Secondly there's some kind of delay to that click such that if you accidentally click the wrong folder of bookmarks, click off it to the correct folder and click again to open the correct folder, if you click too fast it'll do nothing - no opening the new folder, nothing. And it'll continue to do nothing if you continue to click 'inside' the timeout window. So you have this artifical delay built into bookmark navigation that just put me off. That and also ultra-wide tabs which change in size as you close them with a middle click, which is really annoying and you sometimes close the wrong tab. Close them with the cross and they stay the same size and neatly collapse, you can even then middle click to close the remainder and they stay the same size. Silly difference in behaviour IMO. It's the little things that put me off. Shame, as Passkey support is great.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
It's frustrating that efficiency and being a good desktop citizen is such an afterthought for most browsers. Support for all the fancy web features imaginable is isn't worth much to me if means keeping my system pegged and destroying its battery life.
- nijave 4y ago
  Afaik browsers are highly efficient and a lot of work goes into optimization. On the other hand, they're expected to run arbitrary code (JavaScript, Web Assembly) which can do all matter of terrible things. A couple years ago, it used to be Gmail/Google Voice websites would take nearly 1GB of RAM alone per tab and crash if you left them running a few days. A website could just run <download big json blob and append to array> in a tight loop and the browser has to try to make decisions on not hosing website performance if the user wants to actually use the crappy website while simultaneously not hosing battery/machine performance.
  - throwaway14356 4y ago
    things have improved a lot over time. I have one project involving json arrays that grew way out of hand. Sort of panicing about the need for a fast 80% rewrite while not having 10% time I tested a good number of devices. Crappy androids and low end iphones deal with the many thousands of objects incredibly fast. I still think its wrong I just have nothing to show for it. ff a decade ago would just randomly die on me within 2 days.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Blink and Gecko don’t fare as well as WebKit does when it comes to efficiency which would suggest they’re making tradeoffs favoring things other than battery life.

PuffinBlue 4y ago

A very unreasonable reason for me not switching to Safari is because the bookmarks dropdowns (when activating the bookmark bar) have two very annoying features. Firstly they only open when clicked, so if you click one and move your mouse to another, the other doesn't open, just the original stays there and you have to click off it to close it. Secondly there's some kind of delay to that click such that if you accidentally click the wrong folder of bookmarks, click off it to the correct folder and click again to open the correct folder, if you click too fast it'll do nothing - no opening the new folder, nothing. And it'll continue to do nothing if you continue to click 'inside' the timeout window. So you have this artifical delay built into bookmark navigation that just put me off. That and also ultra-wide tabs which change in size as you close them with a middle click, which is really annoying and you sometimes close the wrong tab. Close them with the cross and they stay the same size and neatly collapse, you can even then middle click to close the remainder and they stay the same size. Silly difference in behaviour IMO. It's the little things that put me off. Shame, as Passkey support is great.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

It's frustrating that efficiency and being a good desktop citizen is such an afterthought for most browsers. Support for all the fancy web features imaginable is isn't worth much to me if means keeping my system pegged and destroying its battery life.

nijave 4y ago
Afaik browsers are highly efficient and a lot of work goes into optimization. On the other hand, they're expected to run arbitrary code (JavaScript, Web Assembly) which can do all matter of terrible things. A couple years ago, it used to be Gmail/Google Voice websites would take nearly 1GB of RAM alone per tab and crash if you left them running a few days. A website could just run <download big json blob and append to array> in a tight loop and the browser has to try to make decisions on not hosing website performance if the user wants to actually use the crappy website while simultaneously not hosing battery/machine performance.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  things have improved a lot over time. I have one project involving json arrays that grew way out of hand. Sort of panicing about the need for a fast 80% rewrite while not having 10% time I tested a good number of devices. Crappy androids and low end iphones deal with the many thousands of objects incredibly fast. I still think its wrong I just have nothing to show for it. ff a decade ago would just randomly die on me within 2 days.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Blink and Gecko don’t fare as well as WebKit does when it comes to efficiency which would suggest they’re making tradeoffs favoring things other than battery life.