8 cores and 32 GB of RAM is a seriously big computer. That's close to maxed-out for any off-the-shelf laptop or desktop, especially considering it's using a recent CPU architecture and chipset.
Edit: as of Feb 18, 2021, you can't even buy a 13-inch MBP with 32 GB of RAM. The 16-inch model with 32 GB of RAM and all other specs set to their minimum/default comes out to $2800 on the Apple online store. That is far, far outside the range of what most people have access to.
>From browser tab to magic Mac app.
>Break free from the browser and add web pages to your Mac dock. How about a mac app for Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and literally millions more?
From their help page,
> Dig in to making real Mac apps from websites with Flotato.
Looks like you can create apps of your websites. And it looks like it does it using Safari's engine.
For anyone curious, the GNOME Epiphany browser on Linux has this feature as well. Incidentally, it's also based on Webkit2-Gtk internally (Webkit is the Safari browser engine).
It’s a pretty nifty app: you download it and you have “Flotato.app”. If you want a “Gmail” app, you copy Flotato.app, rename that copy to “Gmail.app” and open it. It will open Gmail, and the app icon changes to the Gmail logo.
So far this has worked consistently for more or less every site I tried.
You absolutely can allocate memory without using up any backing resources. On Linux (which is where I have experience, but I assume macos works similarly), even after mapping some memory, it won't be backed by any physical memory (e.g. RAM) until you actually write there. And you can mmap files into your address space, meaning you can place a huge file you can access through memory, but it's not actually taking any RAM, the kernel is just doing the reading of each "chunk" of the file as you access them, unloading the old bits once you stop using them for a while.
Yup! Processes see/use virtual memory, not the literal physical RAM address spaces. The kernel maintains mappings between virtual-physical and will allocate/free physical memory as needed. All of this is invisible to the process.
And that doesn't even get into decommitting and related things, where you mark memory that you have used as no longer needed but still "there" in a variety of different senses. Not to mention the extra fun on OSX where you can mark something as unused, but OSX makes you pinkie-promise to let it know before you start using it again. If you don't, it works, but the accounting becomes inaccurate. "Fun".
In fact, this is the entire premise of virtual memory! More memory is/can be allocated than physical memory exists. Each process has its own isolated address space with (from the process perspective) "unlimited" size.
Off topic: a bit hard to read on iOS Safari because left margin is 0 (or close to).
Back to the subject at hand: Chrome is a memory hog and there’s nothing new here, but nice to see the comparison with Safari. Too bad Firefox wasn’t part of the test.
Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better.
Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm going to guess Safari doesn't really use 1/10th the memory of everyone else - maybe I'm just not familiar though!
I use a MacBook Pro 2016 everyday. Safari is easily the best browser memory and systems wise, but I still mainly use chrome because it’s better at addblocking and synchronises with my non-Mac devices.
Chrome is fine though, as long as you don’t open 20+ tabs. Beyond that it’s not fine.
I replaced Firefox with Chrome because it kept ranging from a great to terrible user experience with various updates.
This is all anecdotal and based on personal experience.
On iOS I mostly use Safari even though that is kind of against my synchronised argument, but it works alright as I have found that I use my phone for very different web things.
Anecdata: I find browser RAM usage varies enormously depending on which specific websites you use.
The Flotato test uses Twitter and Gmail (for the first set; it doesn't specify the sites used for the 2nd set). Both Twitter and Gmail are large, complex, slow webapps which likely do some sort of advanced active memory management (extensive use of service workers, local storage, etc.). They also load mainly (exclusively?) 1st party resources.
The Brave tests use a large varied set of sites[0], which seem to be a combination of simple news & ecommerce sites. There are no complex webapps in the list. Modern news sites do have a reputation for being slow and heavy, but this will mostly be due to 3rd-party resources from ad companies; the sites themselves are simple and lightweight in terms of 1st-party content.
So they seem to be comparing very different browser usage patterns.
Given that, and looking again at the Brave tests: Safari does actually have lower memory usage than Chrome for most of their graphs. It just creeps slightly ahead of Chrome in the later tests.
As a side note, GMail memory usage has improved vastly (probably because it was monstruous to begin with). Years ago my GMail tab consumed almost 500 Mb, but nowadays it uses less than 100, with my same usage patterns.
300MB onload, dropped to 240MB after idling for few minutes. Are you sure it's using less than 100MB? in comparison with the post, it takes about 500MB ram, which is weird for such simple webpage. This HN page takes 40MB.
Oh sorry, I measured it on Firefox. Chrome on Linux started at 160 Mb, and it settled around 150. I've disabled Hangouts, and the right sidebar, so that might account for the differences.
Funny how Firefox reports a third of that, although IDK if Chrome and Firefox task managers are directly comparable.
Four years ago, I found Gmail to tend to use 80–200MB in Firefox, mostly in the lower half of that range. Certainly I found the figures in this test utterly unbelievable for this reason; Safari ain’t lighter on memory than Firefox, let alone that much.
But also for reference, it’s not like something of Gmail’s complexity has to use that much memory. Fastmail provides equivalent functionality minus chat in a 10–15MB budget, and you can add calendars and contacts (which are separate in Google land) and still keep it to 16–25MB.
Gmail specifically has massively improved recently for me, but I feel it tends to be more of a spikey graph than a steady trendline over time. Memory usage went through the roof when they first rolled out their current redesign, despite already being far too high before. I assume Gmail will get worse again at some stage.
Similarly, Google Docs & Sheets are abysmal currently; not really sure if they were ever significantly better or worse in the past.
In terms of webapps, Google's approach has always seemed to be to make things that are powerful, sometimes usable, but with no focus on performance, cross-browser compat, or general industry best practice at all from a frontend engineering perspective. Any engineering quality in Google products has never in my experience lived in client-side code. This is exacerbated by the fact that "code quality" drives in other companies are often sneaked onto managerial priority lists under the guise of SEO requirements, something Google have never needed to meet.
The linked blog post doesn’t state it explicitly, but I suspect that the non-Brave browsers were not equipped with any kind of adblocking for the test. Brave has built in adblocking, so if my suspicions are true the test is rather disingenuous. At minimum Firefox and Chrome should have uBlock Origin installed and Safari should have Wipr or 1blocker installed to make it fair.
I’d suppose some of it relates to sites with heavy ads. Safari with no extensions will likely require more resources which makes the comparison a little skewed vs Safari with some ad blocker support added via extensions.
It looks like their test includes plenty of ad heavy sites like news articles which seems to confirm that the results are cherry picked.
I don't have stats handy, but this has been published lots of times by many different authors. As others have said, comparing browsers fairly is difficult.
But Chrome is simply not an efficient browser on Macs. Anecdotally, it uses more memory and measurably consumes more energy. The Mac's fan will run more when using Chrome, and you will need to charge more often. If you use a lot of tabs, your entire computer will slow down.
There's market validation for this assertion. There is a YC-backed company currently working on tech to offload Chrome tabs to the cloud so the browser uses fewer resources. This is not something that would be identifiable as a problem in Safari.
If you have access to a Mac, you don't need to take anyone's word for it. Just use Chrome for a few days and then use Safari for a few days. The difference is pronounced. If you use your browser heavily, you will notice.
Since password managers are in the news, Safari also syncs passwords to iOS devices (password sync also works in native apps). It's free.
Chrome does use a lot of memory, but I’m extremely skeptical of this blog post’s methodology and results. Does it seem realistic to have 54 different real web pages open that total under 1GB? (If they’re opening tiny fake pages, this test is misleading and useless.) Most real web sites transfer several megabytes on load. CNN.com loaded 4.2MB for me. Amazon.com loaded 4.3 MB. That’s just the data transfer of compressed assets. The images and content have to be uncompressed and rendered, which takes a lot more memory.
I’m playing on a Mac right now and see nothing like what is reported here. When I open cnn.com in Safari, that tab alone takes 1GB. Chrome reports far less usage than that.
Also “Real Memory” is not the same as active memory in RAM, it’s not necessarily giving a complete picture. Memory can allocated but unused or compressed or paged out.
Chrome doing caching and therefore taking some RAM is correct behavior.
What's not being measured is if and how much the chrome memory policy is adaptative to system memory contention, i.e
If I open another app that make the RAM full, will chrome adapt by doing less future caching, by freeing some of the existing caches, by tuning the JIT to reduce throughout for reduced memory consumption, etc
Any multi-process browser is going to be an extreme RAM hog. Any JS-engine priority browser is going to be a CPU hog. Modern web browsers are not browsers, they are bloated virtual machines with a bit of browser tacked on.
If you want a browser for the web instead of a JS virtual machine you have to look backwards, not forwards.
Going to the moon was a government project. We need the extra 1023 MB of RAM to store all the advertisements and user tracking scripts required for a company to do anything under capitalism.
I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver cpu activity.
Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the chrome developer tools are so damn good i can‘t get rid of it for development.
I use Firefox as my main browser (and always have -- just to give some context about where I'm coming from). But Firefox's developer tools are just not as good as Chrome's. Again, I use Firefox. But every couple months or so, I stumble upon some annoying instance where its developer tools are either inadequate or are just buggy (whether it's the element inspector not working, or pausing on a debugger statement and not giving me a source view, or applied CSS rules not showing up, or some weird behavior in the console, or...), and I have to resort to using Chrome's developer tools to get the issue resolved. This easily accounts for 90+% of my Chrome usage (i.e. more than the number of times I've had to resort to opening a website in Chrome because the developers didn't test it in Firefox).
I stumbled on this site last week and anecdotally I can confirm that disabling Keystone helps. I was driven to find answers after no longer being able to hear people on Zoom calls because of the fan noise from my 16" MBP. I got sick of having to wear noise cancelling headphones when Chrome and Zoom turn my laptop into a space heater.
The Keystone thing though, it's not a panacea. It seems to fix the issue with WindowServer running away with the CPU, but Chrome is still pretty terrible. I decided to just deal with the switching cost and stopped using Chrome altogether. It has made all the difference. Switched to Firefox and I'm not looking back.
UX is quite good as long as you don’t have to edit the settings. Most buggy sites work on it, which is no longer true for Firefox. It’s also very stable and secure.
But it does get slower and slower with each update.
Sure that's counting all processes? My Safari process stays the same size no matter how many tabs, but I'll get a bunch of web content processes. Although that would apply to Chrome, too, of course.
Chrome is a pig for sure, but most attempts I see at measuring memory consumption are wrong. The two main ways they're typically wrong is either by misunderstanding how memory works (which is to be expected, it's subtle![1]) or by doing the measurement wrong (e.g. confusing CPU usage for RAM, or looking at the wrong process, or using a memory consuming extension in one setting but not the other). I think this post does both.
(Disclaimer: I worked on Chrome. I believe the conclusion "uses a lot of RAM" is correct, but it doesn't mean the reasoning that led to there is right.)
> I reached a point where I could barely hear the podcast I was trying to listen to. That's how loud the fan was.
> focuses mainly on memory usage
I mean I get it, Chrome is not the most efficient browser out there and Safari is more efficient in terms of memory and power usage. I'd probably use Safari as my daily browser if I didn't depend on Chrome's dev tools.
What's the tradeoff though? Usually you sacrifice memory to spare the CPU, and vice versa.
Chrome takes this to an extreme. It has a process per site instance rather than a process per site. You can toggle this by feeding it —-process-per-site as a command line argument.
Safari provides slightly less security in exchange for less resource usage, since some websites allow multiple user accounts to be logged in at the same time and Chrome will protect users data better in those scenarios.
I use Safari because it's best by a mile on macOS for power consumption, but if you ever use a memory hungry site like Facebook for more than a few minutes it throws up a memory usage warning and everything becomes extremely slow and you get astronomical scroll jank. I'm guessing that's because it throws a hard cap on tab memory usage and if you go over that it thrashes wildly. So it respects your system, but in doing so is harder on the user for some of the most commonly used websites and might be whacking your drive.
The bigger problem is that Macbook fans are incredibly noisy. Fan noise is a non-issue on most other laptops. I do agree that chrome is highly unoptimized. Sometimes I wonder if the Chrome team themselves use it as their main browser or not.
Chromes multiprocess model and arena memory allocators have a massive impact on memory use... But they are also a big security win.
Any browser with a small memory footprint you should ask yourself "if someone manages to find a buffer overflow in this thing, will my bank password be sitting adjacent in memory because the memory allocator is trying to save RAM rather than being security conscious"?
By making sure each type of C++ object is allocated in an arena, then many memory safety issues (use after free, buffer overflow) can only impact objects in the same arena. In Chromium land, they're called Partitions.
That means an attacker has to find some memory safety issue and some code execution issue in the same object. They can't corrupt memory using one flaw and then get code execution by forcing another type of object to be allocated at the same place.
Let’s please remember it’s a trade of space and time... memory vs cpu... I see safari using a lot more cpu then chrome and also being much less responsive when using complex sites... both engines are mature these are trade offs
Oh, there's much more processes than just tab.
You also have a separate process for the network stack, the JS engine, the password manager, audio, etc...
You can also have one process per extension.
The whole browser situation at the moment is so incredibly frustrating. I will NOT browse the internet without a fully-fledged adblocker - no pihole is not enough.
This means pretty much only using Firefox - but I have about 10 tabs open at the moment, each using over 500mb of ram while idle. What on earth they are doing I don't know... and I find it very sluggish when playing video.
Chrome is my daily browser, even after they limited the number of rules that ublock origin can use. But it grinds to a halt on my top of the range macbook pro and uses 100% cpu if I open a couple of twitch streams and 20-30 other tabs.
Safari is a joy to use, much better on battery but webextension implementation means ublock origin is not possible.
I went to check my Firefox memory usage on Windows 10 (two tabs, extensions include ublock, facebook, bitwarden, contrast and multi-account containers) but I saw something unexpected.
Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must be extensions in sure, but then what is the primary process with 4 sub-processes when I only have two tabs?
Without extensions, it looks like the browser is using about 280MB.
I don't think you can compare Windows Vs Mac when it comes to FF. There have been countless complaints about FF mac performance over the years - even after they supposedly fixed it all.
I don’t know anything about Firefox’s specifics, but forking an already initialized process typically is faster than launching a new process, so if I were to write a multi-process browser, I might have an empty, initialized, process hanging around of every type that can be forked and then sent a message to load a page or extension.
Alternatively, Firefox could keep processes running on the decent chance that you will want to open a new tab soon.
If you go to about:memory and click on "Measure" you can get some information about what is in memory. In addition to web pages, Firefox uses child processes for things like the new tab page, extensions, talking to the GPU, and some other things. It also uses a preallocated process like another commenter suggested, to speed up opening a new page.
No, ads are a big problem too, let's not pretend they aren't a horrible blight. With that said, it is a bit ridiculous that webpages load MBs of JS (SPA-related or not), and that browsers load hundreds of MBs to JIT said Javascript...
In Firefox reddit (new version) will sit at about 50% of a core on my laptop. Simple mouse hover effects on the page lag about half a second behind my actual mouse cursor. YouTube (while not playing a video) will use about 15% of my cpu, even when idle in a background tab.
I’m not sure if the bug is in Firefox or in the sites, but it’s awful. I don’t understand how these issues don’t get fixed immediately. I thought for sure after the new reddit redesign landed that they’d iron out the performance issues in a month or two but I swear if anything it’s gotten worse.
New Reddit is almost unusable for me in Safari as well, it amazes me how they are so popular when the experience in the browser is so bad. (old.reddit.com kinda works, but lots of embedded things like slideshows or videos are a really bad experience)
I have the exact same issues you’re describing - but only on my third monitor that’s attached to its own GPU. - I’m still investigating, but I think it’s a PCIe issue.
It's all worth it because Javascript is such a fantastic evolution in programming language technology, productivity, security, scalability, and consistency.
Sigh. That's sarcasm if it wasn't apparent. And no I don't care if Typescript / ECMASCript v-latest "fixes everything".
The V8 devs are certainly doing yeoman's work, but at the same time that hard work enables all the JS insanity to get worse and worse, to say nothing of the advertising sociopaths, tracking cookies, and browser profiling.
I 100% agree that it should be a required feature of web browsers to limit RAM, disk, and CPU usage. Yes you can prompt for more resources, no you can't ask for unlimited.
Cue every website asking for that along with cookies, and not working otherwise. And of course, notifications.
I'd appeal to google to start enforcing good behavior, and maybe Apple, but that would be counterproductive
Who are these people? No contact information whatsoever on their website. Twitter account inactive since last October. Undated blog posts (this particular one may be several months old).
I'd love to use their product but this doesn't incite confidence.
Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as well?
Yep, was thinking of the same thing when I read it. I have 2 gmail tabs in Safari, each taking over 1GB. One twitter that's about 1GB, one Slack that's over 1GB. Some of this is shared memory.
Is it that they don't realize Safari is a multi-process architecture, and they're only measuring Safari's main process?
I’ve tested Safari many times before comparing it to other browsers (and correctly including child processes) and it has always beaten every other browser by using varying degrees of resources less than its competitors. Sometimes a surprisingly large number, sometimes not too much.
But there’s something people need to take into account as well: there’s only so much browser developers can do to optimize the browser. Website developers need to do their part as well. And Google is by far the worst offender in this regard. Facebook isn’t much better.
Most Google-owned webpages you visit are going to use at least 500MB on Safari or 800MB on Chrome. This is nonsense! If they were to develop a native app with exactly the same features it would take at most 250MB of RAM for the largest pages (such as large spreadsheets) and it would be a lot faster.
Compare Google and Facebook webpages to almost any other webpage and you will see they use too much RAM. People are unfortunately getting used to thinking “oh, I have 8 tabs open, that’s too many” when in fact it shouldn’t be.
I know I’m a tab hoarder, I don’t deny that. But using Safari currently have over 13 windows open, each with at least 25 tabs, not to mention plenty of native software running and still have a very fast and functional Mac. It’s not like I have 2TB of RAM either: 16GB of RAM is more than enough to do that. About a year ago (before I upgraded) I did pretty much the same thing with a 8GB RAM 2013 Mac and still didn’t have issues.
The only tabs Safari ever tells me it has reloaded because it’s using too many resources are Google-owned websites. This doesn’t happen with any other website at all from the hundreds of tabs I have open.
Had the misfortune of having to do a FB messenger video call with Chrome yesterday. Chrome and Facebook with one window open brought my 2020 Intel MacBook to its knees.
Activity Monitor showed windowserver at about 50% CPU usage, Chrome at another 40%.
I thought Teams was enough of a hog, but clearly FB is worse.
170 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadNice specs (32GB RAM) but perhaps not representative of the norm.
HN audience wouldn't be too bad.
Edit: as of Feb 18, 2021, you can't even buy a 13-inch MBP with 32 GB of RAM. The 16-inch model with 32 GB of RAM and all other specs set to their minimum/default comes out to $2800 on the Apple online store. That is far, far outside the range of what most people have access to.
From homepage,
>From browser tab to magic Mac app. >Break free from the browser and add web pages to your Mac dock. How about a mac app for Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and literally millions more?
From their help page,
> Dig in to making real Mac apps from websites with Flotato.
Looks like you can create apps of your websites. And it looks like it does it using Safari's engine.
I am not sure what this product really achieves.
So far this has worked consistently for more or less every site I tried.
Measuring memory usage is hard.
Pretty neat huh?
Back to the subject at hand: Chrome is a memory hog and there’s nothing new here, but nice to see the comparison with Safari. Too bad Firefox wasn’t part of the test.
Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm going to guess Safari doesn't really use 1/10th the memory of everyone else - maybe I'm just not familiar though!
Chrome is fine though, as long as you don’t open 20+ tabs. Beyond that it’s not fine.
I replaced Firefox with Chrome because it kept ranging from a great to terrible user experience with various updates.
This is all anecdotal and based on personal experience.
On iOS I mostly use Safari even though that is kind of against my synchronised argument, but it works alright as I have found that I use my phone for very different web things.
(In case you're interested…)
iCloud for Windows now does bookmarks and passwords sync. https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-for-windows-ov...
For ad blocking, I really like 1Blocker. NextDNS is great as well.
The Flotato test uses Twitter and Gmail (for the first set; it doesn't specify the sites used for the 2nd set). Both Twitter and Gmail are large, complex, slow webapps which likely do some sort of advanced active memory management (extensive use of service workers, local storage, etc.). They also load mainly (exclusively?) 1st party resources.
The Brave tests use a large varied set of sites[0], which seem to be a combination of simple news & ecommerce sites. There are no complex webapps in the list. Modern news sites do have a reputation for being slow and heavy, but this will mostly be due to 3rd-party resources from ad companies; the sites themselves are simple and lightweight in terms of 1st-party content.
So they seem to be comparing very different browser usage patterns.
Given that, and looking again at the Brave tests: Safari does actually have lower memory usage than Chrome for most of their graphs. It just creeps slightly ahead of Chrome in the later tests.
[0] https://github.com/brave-experiments/browser-comparison-tool...
Funny how Firefox reports a third of that, although IDK if Chrome and Firefox task managers are directly comparable.
But also for reference, it’s not like something of Gmail’s complexity has to use that much memory. Fastmail provides equivalent functionality minus chat in a 10–15MB budget, and you can add calendars and contacts (which are separate in Google land) and still keep it to 16–25MB.
Similarly, Google Docs & Sheets are abysmal currently; not really sure if they were ever significantly better or worse in the past.
In terms of webapps, Google's approach has always seemed to be to make things that are powerful, sometimes usable, but with no focus on performance, cross-browser compat, or general industry best practice at all from a frontend engineering perspective. Any engineering quality in Google products has never in my experience lived in client-side code. This is exacerbated by the fact that "code quality" drives in other companies are often sneaked onto managerial priority lists under the guise of SEO requirements, something Google have never needed to meet.
It looks like their test includes plenty of ad heavy sites like news articles which seems to confirm that the results are cherry picked.
But Chrome is simply not an efficient browser on Macs. Anecdotally, it uses more memory and measurably consumes more energy. The Mac's fan will run more when using Chrome, and you will need to charge more often. If you use a lot of tabs, your entire computer will slow down.
There's market validation for this assertion. There is a YC-backed company currently working on tech to offload Chrome tabs to the cloud so the browser uses fewer resources. This is not something that would be identifiable as a problem in Safari.
If you have access to a Mac, you don't need to take anyone's word for it. Just use Chrome for a few days and then use Safari for a few days. The difference is pronounced. If you use your browser heavily, you will notice.
Since password managers are in the news, Safari also syncs passwords to iOS devices (password sync also works in native apps). It's free.
I’m playing on a Mac right now and see nothing like what is reported here. When I open cnn.com in Safari, that tab alone takes 1GB. Chrome reports far less usage than that.
Also “Real Memory” is not the same as active memory in RAM, it’s not necessarily giving a complete picture. Memory can allocated but unused or compressed or paged out.
Any reason to trust the ram usage for Safari nowadays?
If you want a browser for the web instead of a JS virtual machine you have to look backwards, not forwards.
And chrome's UI is much more fancy, displays way more data, and has way more functionality, than the UI that was powered by the 4kb of ram.
It's a cute comparison, but ultimately, it's meaningless.
I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver cpu activity.
Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the chrome developer tools are so damn good i can‘t get rid of it for development.
The Keystone thing though, it's not a panacea. It seems to fix the issue with WindowServer running away with the CPU, but Chrome is still pretty terrible. I decided to just deal with the switching cost and stopped using Chrome altogether. It has made all the difference. Switched to Firefox and I'm not looking back.
But it does get slower and slower with each update.
(Disclaimer: I worked on Chrome. I believe the conclusion "uses a lot of RAM" is correct, but it doesn't mean the reasoning that led to there is right.)
[1] http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2011/05/memory.html
> focuses mainly on memory usage
I mean I get it, Chrome is not the most efficient browser out there and Safari is more efficient in terms of memory and power usage. I'd probably use Safari as my daily browser if I didn't depend on Chrome's dev tools.
What's the tradeoff though? Usually you sacrifice memory to spare the CPU, and vice versa.
Safari provides slightly less security in exchange for less resource usage, since some websites allow multiple user accounts to be logged in at the same time and Chrome will protect users data better in those scenarios.
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process...
Now if only there was a way to calm Twitter down...
I built an extension to do it: https://secretkeys.io/oldr/
I redirect all twitter links to nitter. For me nitter loads much faster.
But Facebook surprises me with removing Messaging functionality from mobile sites. So i must use desktop site. Within 5 minutes fans starts howling...
No need to load all of facebook.com
So the power consumption thing is quite the myth as well.
Any browser with a small memory footprint you should ask yourself "if someone manages to find a buffer overflow in this thing, will my bank password be sitting adjacent in memory because the memory allocator is trying to save RAM rather than being security conscious"?
That means an attacker has to find some memory safety issue and some code execution issue in the same object. They can't corrupt memory using one flaw and then get code execution by forcing another type of object to be allocated at the same place.
Learn more here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/dcc13470a/t...
This means pretty much only using Firefox - but I have about 10 tabs open at the moment, each using over 500mb of ram while idle. What on earth they are doing I don't know... and I find it very sluggish when playing video.
Chrome is my daily browser, even after they limited the number of rules that ublock origin can use. But it grinds to a halt on my top of the range macbook pro and uses 100% cpu if I open a couple of twitch streams and 20-30 other tabs.
Safari is a joy to use, much better on battery but webextension implementation means ublock origin is not possible.
https://imgur.com/a/UJnV7ak
Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must be extensions in sure, but then what is the primary process with 4 sub-processes when I only have two tabs?
Without extensions, it looks like the browser is using about 280MB.
15 FF tabs open currently: https://ibb.co/MRkJjwY
- 1 outlook email tab - 1-2 custom web apps for dev work - the rest are jira and gitlab
I don’t know anything about Firefox’s specifics, but forking an already initialized process typically is faster than launching a new process, so if I were to write a multi-process browser, I might have an empty, initialized, process hanging around of every type that can be forked and then sent a message to load a page or extension.
Alternatively, Firefox could keep processes running on the decent chance that you will want to open a new tab soon.
I’m not sure if the bug is in Firefox or in the sites, but it’s awful. I don’t understand how these issues don’t get fixed immediately. I thought for sure after the new reddit redesign landed that they’d iron out the performance issues in a month or two but I swear if anything it’s gotten worse.
Lately been using teddit.net for browsing reddit and it’s been great.
Also, do you have an NVMe or Optane SSD attached?
I use Firefox on windows and Ubuntu and yds it eats ram but I don't really experience any sluggishness or issues from this.
Sigh. That's sarcasm if it wasn't apparent. And no I don't care if Typescript / ECMASCript v-latest "fixes everything".
The V8 devs are certainly doing yeoman's work, but at the same time that hard work enables all the JS insanity to get worse and worse, to say nothing of the advertising sociopaths, tracking cookies, and browser profiling.
I 100% agree that it should be a required feature of web browsers to limit RAM, disk, and CPU usage. Yes you can prompt for more resources, no you can't ask for unlimited.
Cue every website asking for that along with cookies, and not working otherwise. And of course, notifications.
I'd appeal to google to start enforcing good behavior, and maybe Apple, but that would be counterproductive
No matter how much I like Safari optimization, taking advantage of OS, eye candy, etc. - this is all SECONDARY to a full functional ublock origin.
This is non-negotiable.
I'd love to use their product but this doesn't incite confidence.
Is it that they don't realize Safari is a multi-process architecture, and they're only measuring Safari's main process?
But there’s something people need to take into account as well: there’s only so much browser developers can do to optimize the browser. Website developers need to do their part as well. And Google is by far the worst offender in this regard. Facebook isn’t much better.
Most Google-owned webpages you visit are going to use at least 500MB on Safari or 800MB on Chrome. This is nonsense! If they were to develop a native app with exactly the same features it would take at most 250MB of RAM for the largest pages (such as large spreadsheets) and it would be a lot faster.
Compare Google and Facebook webpages to almost any other webpage and you will see they use too much RAM. People are unfortunately getting used to thinking “oh, I have 8 tabs open, that’s too many” when in fact it shouldn’t be.
I know I’m a tab hoarder, I don’t deny that. But using Safari currently have over 13 windows open, each with at least 25 tabs, not to mention plenty of native software running and still have a very fast and functional Mac. It’s not like I have 2TB of RAM either: 16GB of RAM is more than enough to do that. About a year ago (before I upgraded) I did pretty much the same thing with a 8GB RAM 2013 Mac and still didn’t have issues.
The only tabs Safari ever tells me it has reloaded because it’s using too many resources are Google-owned websites. This doesn’t happen with any other website at all from the hundreds of tabs I have open.
Activity Monitor showed windowserver at about 50% CPU usage, Chrome at another 40%.
I thought Teams was enough of a hog, but clearly FB is worse.