10 ms·

The first thing people complain about with browsers is probably memory usage. I doubt that many people actually understand what a browser actually does with tha

by neals 12y ago

The first thing people complain about with browsers is probably memory usage. I doubt that many people actually understand what a browser actually does with that memory. I sure don't. 100mb sounds like a lot of memory for a webpage. Where does all this memory go to?

insky 12y ago
Great question. Does that encompass the assets on the page? The recent cache, lookahead? I'm always staggered on the flip side that serving a web page using something like XYZ CMS can use a staggering 50MB or more for one page load without caching. Bizarre when you consider that you could get a small encyclopedias worth of text on a floppy disk. Too many websites are drowning polar bears...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
VLM 12y ago
"The first thing people complain about with browsers is ..." They changed the browser UI, either the browser devs or the site devs via stupid javascript tricks (messing with scrolling, etc). I got driveby download powned and my CC info stolen and five spam toolbars in the UI I can't get rid of. There are too many spammy ads. They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks to encourage the use of a search engine every single time you go to a site thus monetizing ad views. Typosquatters. "Journalism" sites with one line of the article per page of spam. Spam "answer" websites. Memory is way, way down the list.
- Nursie 12y ago
  Definitely. In a browser-on-pc setting, who even cares about memory any more? We have loads of it.
  - nnethercote 12y ago
    And who would want to use a browser anywhere other than a PC, right?
    - Nursie 12y ago
      We appear to be talking about ABP on desktop firefox, no?
      - nnethercote 12y ago
        It's true; my comment wasn't fair. Returning to your original point: I've been working on Firefox's memory consumption for about three years now. There are quite a few people who take your viewpoint. But there are also plenty of people who care very deeply about memory usage. Some of this makes sense, e.g. from people who are on low-end machines. But some of it is less rational... there is a subset of people for which memory consumption is almost a moral issue, and excessive usage indicates the general decay of western civilization, or something like that.
      - gcp 12y ago
        The problem surely applies just as well to ABP on mobile Firefox?
  - clarry 12y ago
    If you think everyone or even most people out there want to upgrade their computers every couple years, and go for models with lots of RAM in them.. I'm sorry, you're wrong. Some geeks might have 16G or 32G but that's it. Besides, whatever happened to Web browsing being a lightweight activity accessible for everyone even on his grandma's old PC?
    - Nursie 12y ago
      Even a chromebook has multiple GB of RAM now. Yes, a lightweight browser on old machines is desirable, but everything has had more than enough RAM for an extra 100MB for ABP for multiple years.
- mschuster91 12y ago
  > They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark. And both Chrome and FF have a pretty good auto-complete in the address bar (I just have to type "ne" to get Hacker News, "ma" for google mail, "youp" and "yout" for video streams, etc pp). People vastly underestimate the power of keyboard shortcuts. I work as a freelance consultant/support guy and everyone is surprised how fast I work with even the slowest computers. Most can't believe how much time one can save by knowing at least Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab.
  - GilbertErik 12y ago
    I use mostly the same functionality that you describe here, with the exception of "youp". What does that autocomplete to... Ohhhh, I see what ya did there. Two words for you: Incognito Mode
  - Curmudgel 12y ago
    > Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark. The Classic Theme Restorer add-on for FF allows you restore the star button to the address bar. On FF, Ctrl-D bookmarks the current page, while Ctrl-B opens a list of bookmarks.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      I don't get it; I'm on FF 29 without that addon, and I have a star button on the bar (not in the address text input, but on the same bar). What's the point of the addon?
      - 01Michael10 12y ago
        The point is the star button is not in a convenient location in FF 29... I find have to search for the star button now when need to bookmark something. I guess it made to much sense to have right in the address bar so they moved it... The Classic Theme Restorer may be in my near future. UPDATE: I used the Customize feature to move the star button just to the right of the address bar and that is good enough for me.
nnethercote 12y ago
Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. The most popular websites run quite amazing amounts of code, and JavaScript execution is usually the dominant consumer of memory. If you want a deeper understanding, visit about:memory in Firefox you'll get a detailed breakdown of how memory is used.
- bru 12y ago
  >and JavaScript execution is usually the dominant consumer of memory. That's forgetting the DOM, which is often the actual cause for slowness & memory consumption, but gets far less spotlight than JavaScript. This is also a reason why a framework like react.js is so interesting: it circumvents the real DOM when computing (on a virtual DOM), and only applies the end result.
  - nnethercote 12y ago
    In my experience, JS memory usage is nearly always much higher than DOM. For example, my current Firefox session has 16 tabs open and ABP enabled. JS memory usage is over 600 MiB, whereas DOM memory usage is only 120 MiB.
- nfoz 12y ago
  > That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. Maybe I just miss the 90s, but I would much rather have the simple content browser than a "full-fledged programming environment", especially since all of that content is coming from the random untrusted intarwebs. Anyone want to write a browser engine that skips all the modern BS and just does a good job delivering mostly-static webpages?
  - 12y ago
nextw33k 12y ago
I once read an explanation of memory usage. It boils down to images, if you think about it a PNG file is small but when you decompress that to a native bitmap for rendering to a screen, you've suddenly consumed a lot of space. A lot of applications render using the CPU and pass the data to the GPU to display. Now look at a typical page with images, flash (with images inside) all of the scroll and developers that don't optimise their images and then 100MB of data for a single page isn't really a lot. Plus memory usage is the wrong metric, I don't really care how much RAM my applications use, I care about how responsive they are. Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer.
- Omniusaspirer 12y ago
  It's pretty rare that I want an application to use less ram these days, if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer. if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it. If every single application behaved like it owned all the memory on your machine, you would have a pretty horrible experience as they'll be basically fighting over what's available and likely hitting the swapfile. On the contrary, I do wish developers would care more about the memory footprint of their applications since they are sharing with all the others. Looking at it this way, optimising performance by using more memory aggressively (and thus reducing the amount of memory other applications can use) seems like a horribly greedy and antisocial way to behave, and thus it makes sense to use as little as feasible to give good performance. (I'm assuming that the use case here is a browser that you have open along with other applications; if you only have a browser running, then it doesn't matter as much.)
    - iopq 12y ago
      I have 16 gigs of RAM. I'd love to see every program use as much RAM usefully as possible. I don't want programs to write temp files to the drive. I want things to be done in RAM as much as possible to avoid wearing out the SSD. In fact, every application DOES behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory.
twistedpair 12y ago
This the is most cogent breakdown of what really happens in a browser. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

by neals 12y ago

insky 12y ago

Great question. Does that encompass the assets on the page? The recent cache, lookahead? I'm always staggered on the flip side that serving a web page using something like XYZ CMS can use a staggering 50MB or more for one page load without caching. Bizarre when you consider that you could get a small encyclopedias worth of text on a floppy disk. Too many websites are drowning polar bears...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

VLM 12y ago

"The first thing people complain about with browsers is ..." They changed the browser UI, either the browser devs or the site devs via stupid javascript tricks (messing with scrolling, etc). I got driveby download powned and my CC info stolen and five spam toolbars in the UI I can't get rid of. There are too many spammy ads. They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks to encourage the use of a search engine every single time you go to a site thus monetizing ad views. Typosquatters. "Journalism" sites with one line of the article per page of spam. Spam "answer" websites. Memory is way, way down the list.

Nursie 12y ago
Definitely. In a browser-on-pc setting, who even cares about memory any more? We have loads of it.
- nnethercote 12y ago
  And who would want to use a browser anywhere other than a PC, right?
  - Nursie 12y ago
    We appear to be talking about ABP on desktop firefox, no?
    - nnethercote 12y ago
      It's true; my comment wasn't fair. Returning to your original point: I've been working on Firefox's memory consumption for about three years now. There are quite a few people who take your viewpoint. But there are also plenty of people who care very deeply about memory usage. Some of this makes sense, e.g. from people who are on low-end machines. But some of it is less rational... there is a subset of people for which memory consumption is almost a moral issue, and excessive usage indicates the general decay of western civilization, or something like that.
    - gcp 12y ago
      The problem surely applies just as well to ABP on mobile Firefox?
- clarry 12y ago
  If you think everyone or even most people out there want to upgrade their computers every couple years, and go for models with lots of RAM in them.. I'm sorry, you're wrong. Some geeks might have 16G or 32G but that's it. Besides, whatever happened to Web browsing being a lightweight activity accessible for everyone even on his grandma's old PC?
  - Nursie 12y ago
    Even a chromebook has multiple GB of RAM now. Yes, a lightweight browser on old machines is desirable, but everything has had more than enough RAM for an extra 100MB for ABP for multiple years.
mschuster91 12y ago
> They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark. And both Chrome and FF have a pretty good auto-complete in the address bar (I just have to type "ne" to get Hacker News, "ma" for google mail, "youp" and "yout" for video streams, etc pp). People vastly underestimate the power of keyboard shortcuts. I work as a freelance consultant/support guy and everyone is surprised how fast I work with even the slowest computers. Most can't believe how much time one can save by knowing at least Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab.
- GilbertErik 12y ago
  I use mostly the same functionality that you describe here, with the exception of "youp". What does that autocomplete to... Ohhhh, I see what ya did there. Two words for you: Incognito Mode
- Curmudgel 12y ago
  > Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark. The Classic Theme Restorer add-on for FF allows you restore the star button to the address bar. On FF, Ctrl-D bookmarks the current page, while Ctrl-B opens a list of bookmarks.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I don't get it; I'm on FF 29 without that addon, and I have a star button on the bar (not in the address text input, but on the same bar). What's the point of the addon?
    - 01Michael10 12y ago
      The point is the star button is not in a convenient location in FF 29... I find have to search for the star button now when need to bookmark something. I guess it made to much sense to have right in the address bar so they moved it... The Classic Theme Restorer may be in my near future. UPDATE: I used the Customize feature to move the star button just to the right of the address bar and that is good enough for me.

nnethercote 12y ago

Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. The most popular websites run quite amazing amounts of code, and JavaScript execution is usually the dominant consumer of memory. If you want a deeper understanding, visit about:memory in Firefox you'll get a detailed breakdown of how memory is used.

bru 12y ago
>and JavaScript execution is usually the dominant consumer of memory. That's forgetting the DOM, which is often the actual cause for slowness & memory consumption, but gets far less spotlight than JavaScript. This is also a reason why a framework like react.js is so interesting: it circumvents the real DOM when computing (on a virtual DOM), and only applies the end result.
- nnethercote 12y ago
  In my experience, JS memory usage is nearly always much higher than DOM. For example, my current Firefox session has 16 tabs open and ABP enabled. JS memory usage is over 600 MiB, whereas DOM memory usage is only 120 MiB.
nfoz 12y ago
> That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. Maybe I just miss the 90s, but I would much rather have the simple content browser than a "full-fledged programming environment", especially since all of that content is coming from the random untrusted intarwebs. Anyone want to write a browser engine that skips all the modern BS and just does a good job delivering mostly-static webpages?
- 12y ago

nextw33k 12y ago

I once read an explanation of memory usage. It boils down to images, if you think about it a PNG file is small but when you decompress that to a native bitmap for rendering to a screen, you've suddenly consumed a lot of space. A lot of applications render using the CPU and pass the data to the GPU to display. Now look at a typical page with images, flash (with images inside) all of the scroll and developers that don't optimise their images and then 100MB of data for a single page isn't really a lot. Plus memory usage is the wrong metric, I don't really care how much RAM my applications use, I care about how responsive they are. Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer.

Omniusaspirer 12y ago
It's pretty rare that I want an application to use less ram these days, if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.
- userbinator 12y ago
  Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer. if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it. If every single application behaved like it owned all the memory on your machine, you would have a pretty horrible experience as they'll be basically fighting over what's available and likely hitting the swapfile. On the contrary, I do wish developers would care more about the memory footprint of their applications since they are sharing with all the others. Looking at it this way, optimising performance by using more memory aggressively (and thus reducing the amount of memory other applications can use) seems like a horribly greedy and antisocial way to behave, and thus it makes sense to use as little as feasible to give good performance. (I'm assuming that the use case here is a browser that you have open along with other applications; if you only have a browser running, then it doesn't matter as much.)
  - iopq 12y ago
    I have 16 gigs of RAM. I'd love to see every program use as much RAM usefully as possible. I don't want programs to write temp files to the drive. I want things to be done in RAM as much as possible to avoid wearing out the SSD. In fact, every application DOES behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory.

twistedpair 12y ago

This the is most cogent breakdown of what really happens in a browser. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]