4 ms·

I have some serious issues with Chrome (the permaloading, it's new download blocking 'feature', poor startup time), but I did not find Firefox remotely an impro

by jarcane 12y ago

I have some serious issues with Chrome (the permaloading, it's new download blocking 'feature', poor startup time), but I did not find Firefox remotely an improvement. On my system it is half as fast, twice as buggy, and even more memory hungry than Chrome is. I think people overstate Chrome's memory usage as a factor of performance; IME it's still less than FF in total most times, and largely that memory cost doesn't seem to come with the performance impact of FF's because of the way Chrome handles processes. On my Win8.1 system at the moment, Chrome uses about 400mb of RAM. Firefox routinely ballooned up to a full 1GB or more. Even on FreeBSD, it was not at all unheard of to glance at top and find FF consuming as much as 1.4GB. The idea of switching back to FF because of Chrome's memory consumption seems frankly laughable to me. FF's memory leakage is infamous, and literally goes clear back to FF Beta, and still hasn't been fixed a decade on. And since Opera is a joke now, and Safari a toy, and there being zero real viable alternatives, that means Chrome, for good or ill. I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop telling me what I'm allowed to download though. At least they disabled the autodelete function.

vor_ 12y ago
What makes Safari a toy?
- jarcane 12y ago
  Safari on Windows has always been a toy. Now it's an unsupported toy to boot.
  - Greenisus 12y ago
    So it's a toy because it's a toy?
- lucian1900 12y ago
  It's not cross-platform.
  - chipotle_coyote 12y ago
    That doesn't make it a toy. It makes it a bad choice if you need a browser to be cross-platform, but not everyone has that as a prerequisite. Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, but never mind) and switched to Firefox 36 for a few weeks. On both machines I used it on it would just... get slower over time, and not a lot of time to boot: about 24-48 hours. And I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open at once, and that's on the high end. If I was going to knock Safari for anything -- other than the JS issues -- it's that it's got much weaker extension support than Chrome or Firefox. But the only extensions I really use are Instapaper and 1Password. (I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Adblock Plus; instead, I've just uninstalled Flash, and if I want to use a web site that absolutely requires it I'll hop into Chrome for that.) I like the way it handles tabs, most versions are pretty stable, and the linked list sidebar -- where it pulls out links from your Twitter feed -- can be surprisingly useful.
    - jarcane 12y ago
      It's always been a toy on Windows. I absolutely agree that on MacOS, it's a solid option. The OS X version is a very good browser, and not to be dismissed. The Windows version however was always an also ran, a weird proof-of-concept release more than anything. It was never seriously marketed, it made ludicrous design decisions, wouldn't play ball with the OS, and has since been more or less completely abandoned. You have to go digging just to find it, and it hasn't been updated since Snow Leopard.
    - manish_gill 12y ago
      Very much agreed. A few months ago, I, very much like the person who wrote the article, gave up on Chrome because of huge memory issues (and more importantly, eating up my Air's battery). I converted to Firefox, but on OSX, it is absolutely abysmal. Finally tried Safari and have not looked back. It is a breeze to use, and I in particular love the shortcut to read articles later. Memory footprint is much lighter, and even with 10+ tabs, I've noticed it doesn't eat a lot of battery. Also agreed with your point about the extensions. I have the usual suspects like Adblock and Ghostery installed, along with LastPass, but Safari's extensions leave a lot to be desired.
- octatone2 12y ago
  dev tools rarely work, just having the console open slows down the entire process by several magnitudes of order, the UI for safari devtools is horrible - I can never find what I am looking for when I need it, there is no public bug tracker for safari proper, web apis for database access are magnitudes slower than both firefox and chrome I could go on ...
rockdoe 12y ago
I'm not sure how you get Firefox to use more memory than Chrome. Like literally, I wouldn't manage it even if I tried. (Cheating by installing extensions notwithstanding) I left Chrome open overnight and by the time I came back it was pegging the CPU at 100%. No extensions, no nothing. Seriously Google?
falcolas 12y ago
How long since you last tried Firefox? This is almost completely opposite my experience with Firefox vs. Chrome. Chrome for 4 tabs consumes about 600MB, Firefox for those same 4 plus 8 more consumes 400MB. I also haven't seen any significant memory leaks in the last year or two. Sad to say, but 1.4 G is not uncommmon (or even unreasonable) for any browser these days, mostly due not to the browser itself, but the resources consumed by the individual web sites.
- Navarr 12y ago
  You might want to check your extensions. I know AdBlock+ is a very popular, common, RAM-hungry extension
  - falcolas 12y ago
    I moved to a hosts file based ad blocking solution, which has worked well for me thus far. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ But when you have youtube, gmail, and other web applications open, memory usage tends to go nuts. I've been told that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
    - Navarr 12y ago
      Whomever said that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak is a liar. I wrote a slightly-more-than-basic Angular.js app and it leaks like crazy up to the point that the Chrome tab will crash. If you're having serious ram problems in Chrome though, Shift-ESC is your friend. Shows you what exactly is consuming RAM (in the event you didn't already know)
- jarcane 12y ago
  How long since you last tried Firefox? Within the last three months.
xrstf 12y ago
I'm having high hopes for Vivaldi. Chromium with less bloatware but with real Operawesomeness.
- jarcane 12y ago
  The tech preview was very promising. It's definitely something I'd like to keep an eye on.
mccr8 12y ago
I'm sorry that your experience with Firefox has been so poor. Web browsers are a complex application platform, and individual experiences can vary wildly. You may use some web page that does well on Chrome but poorly on Firefox, while others may experience the opposite. Individual browsing habits, in terms of the number of tabs that are open at once, or how long the browser is left open, also vary greatly, and can affect performance on one browser compared to another.

by jarcane 12y ago

vor_ 12y ago

What makes Safari a toy?

jarcane 12y ago
Safari on Windows has always been a toy. Now it's an unsupported toy to boot.
- Greenisus 12y ago
  So it's a toy because it's a toy?
lucian1900 12y ago
It's not cross-platform.
- chipotle_coyote 12y ago
  That doesn't make it a toy. It makes it a bad choice if you need a browser to be cross-platform, but not everyone has that as a prerequisite. Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, but never mind) and switched to Firefox 36 for a few weeks. On both machines I used it on it would just... get slower over time, and not a lot of time to boot: about 24-48 hours. And I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open at once, and that's on the high end. If I was going to knock Safari for anything -- other than the JS issues -- it's that it's got much weaker extension support than Chrome or Firefox. But the only extensions I really use are Instapaper and 1Password. (I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Adblock Plus; instead, I've just uninstalled Flash, and if I want to use a web site that absolutely requires it I'll hop into Chrome for that.) I like the way it handles tabs, most versions are pretty stable, and the linked list sidebar -- where it pulls out links from your Twitter feed -- can be surprisingly useful.
  - jarcane 12y ago
    It's always been a toy on Windows. I absolutely agree that on MacOS, it's a solid option. The OS X version is a very good browser, and not to be dismissed. The Windows version however was always an also ran, a weird proof-of-concept release more than anything. It was never seriously marketed, it made ludicrous design decisions, wouldn't play ball with the OS, and has since been more or less completely abandoned. You have to go digging just to find it, and it hasn't been updated since Snow Leopard.
  - manish_gill 12y ago
    Very much agreed. A few months ago, I, very much like the person who wrote the article, gave up on Chrome because of huge memory issues (and more importantly, eating up my Air's battery). I converted to Firefox, but on OSX, it is absolutely abysmal. Finally tried Safari and have not looked back. It is a breeze to use, and I in particular love the shortcut to read articles later. Memory footprint is much lighter, and even with 10+ tabs, I've noticed it doesn't eat a lot of battery. Also agreed with your point about the extensions. I have the usual suspects like Adblock and Ghostery installed, along with LastPass, but Safari's extensions leave a lot to be desired.
octatone2 12y ago
dev tools rarely work, just having the console open slows down the entire process by several magnitudes of order, the UI for safari devtools is horrible - I can never find what I am looking for when I need it, there is no public bug tracker for safari proper, web apis for database access are magnitudes slower than both firefox and chrome I could go on ...

rockdoe 12y ago

I'm not sure how you get Firefox to use more memory than Chrome. Like literally, I wouldn't manage it even if I tried. (Cheating by installing extensions notwithstanding) I left Chrome open overnight and by the time I came back it was pegging the CPU at 100%. No extensions, no nothing. Seriously Google?

falcolas 12y ago

How long since you last tried Firefox? This is almost completely opposite my experience with Firefox vs. Chrome. Chrome for 4 tabs consumes about 600MB, Firefox for those same 4 plus 8 more consumes 400MB. I also haven't seen any significant memory leaks in the last year or two. Sad to say, but 1.4 G is not uncommmon (or even unreasonable) for any browser these days, mostly due not to the browser itself, but the resources consumed by the individual web sites.

Navarr 12y ago
You might want to check your extensions. I know AdBlock+ is a very popular, common, RAM-hungry extension
- falcolas 12y ago
  I moved to a hosts file based ad blocking solution, which has worked well for me thus far. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ But when you have youtube, gmail, and other web applications open, memory usage tends to go nuts. I've been told that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
  - Navarr 12y ago
    Whomever said that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak is a liar. I wrote a slightly-more-than-basic Angular.js app and it leaks like crazy up to the point that the Chrome tab will crash. If you're having serious ram problems in Chrome though, Shift-ESC is your friend. Shows you what exactly is consuming RAM (in the event you didn't already know)
jarcane 12y ago
How long since you last tried Firefox? Within the last three months.

xrstf 12y ago

I'm having high hopes for Vivaldi. Chromium with less bloatware but with real Operawesomeness.

jarcane 12y ago
The tech preview was very promising. It's definitely something I'd like to keep an eye on.

mccr8 12y ago

I'm sorry that your experience with Firefox has been so poor. Web browsers are a complex application platform, and individual experiences can vary wildly. You may use some web page that does well on Chrome but poorly on Firefox, while others may experience the opposite. Individual browsing habits, in terms of the number of tabs that are open at once, or how long the browser is left open, also vary greatly, and can affect performance on one browser compared to another.