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Ask HN: Best alternative to Chrome for power-user?

2 points by mrkramer ↗ HN
I'm sick and tired of Chrome eating my RAM while I struggle to manage my 100+ tabs. As we speak Chrome eats gigabytes of my 8GB RAM and my laptop gets slower significantly....My only option is to either get more RAM or to find better browser but my options are bleak. Every other browser is muti-process browser written primarily in C++ and C++ sucks too[0]. I have 100+ tabs in my mobile Chrome and my mobile Firefox so there's something fundamentally wrong with multi-process C++ desktop browsers. Yea I can use memory saver on Chrome and various extensions to manage my tabs but I want a browser that is written with performance in mind. Any suggestions for a PC internet power-user?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14734171

7 comments

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Grimeton
There are bookmarks. Google it.
mrkramer
I have thousands of bookmarks....I keep my tabs open so that I can jump back in when I'm back to my PC.
42lux
Hilarious. Have you tried downloading more RAM on your C++ multi-process desktop? Jokes aside you can do a lot of memory management in Chrome or Firefox for chrome the memory saver they added in December might be a good start or countless extensions on Firefox...(They don't work on iOS sadly).
mrkramer
I use memory saver on Chrome and it helps substantially but Chrome just doesn't feel right. It might be the most secure browser out there but performance is lacking. Modern software should be more efficient than this. There is open-source Rust browser engine in the making called Servo (https://servo.org/), I hope they eventually come up with more efficient browser.
cuu508
What types of pages do you keep permanently open in tabs?

I have 3 tabs always open, for 3 email accounts. If I used Slack or Discord, I would probably have a couple more, but luckily I don't have to use them. All other tabs are ephemeral – when I'm not "in the middle of something" and notice there are many tabs open, I close them all except the three.

mrkramer
>What types of pages do you keep permanently open in tabs?

Sometimes blog posts and sometimes youtube videos. There are tabs that are like 300MB of memory. Some websites are badly optimized or full of ads and trackers and that's also something to take into account. For example when I play games, I need to close my Chrome browser because my 8GB RAM laptop can't handle dozens of Chrome tabs plus RAM heavy video game.

cuu508
I see – everyone's browsing habits are different, and that's OK, but FWIW I would just close them. Need to reference a blog post or a video again – open it again from a bookmark or from a web search.