

How Come All My Browsers Suddenly Suck? - darklighter3
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/09/how-come-all-my-browsers-suddenly-suck/62480/

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jrockway
Because they're all written in C/C++, and it's impossible to write reliable
software in C++ without a QA team that's 10x bigger than the development team.

But hey, at least it runs really fast sometimes!

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Tangurena
I found that uninstalling flash stops my tabbed browsing sessions from
crashing. With 2-6 flash ads per page, a typical session could have 20-50 tabs
open, so that there is usually well over 100 flash adverts running. All it
takes is a single advert to crash flash, then flash takes down the browser
application.

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chaosmachine
Because people stopped writing web pages and started writing javascript
applications.

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LongLiveZed
Also because the major browsers have stepped up their rate of innovation. So
they now either have:

a) Shorter release cycles and test phases b) More changes made in a release
cycle without a corresponding increase in the number of testers.

It reminds me of the Internet Explorer / Netscape wars (around the time of
Netscape 4).

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nhebb
I wonder whether she would have the same problem if she blocked Flash.

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CoryMathews
I almost always have under 10-20+ tabs open.

I tried to use chrome but it always cries "Oh snap.." and all the tabs crap
out (so much for individual). Firefox slows to a crawl, Safari and IE on
windows both aren't even worth opening 1 tab in. So I stick with opera. It
does the best overall job for lots of tabs. Although it takes quite a bit of
memory..

With that said I really notice a lot of slowness on sites that use embedded
fonts, more so then anything else. Next is flash, if I block flash from
running my browser really speeds up. However Javascript has been replacing
EVERYTHING. Even when it shouldn't it does, and is required by many sites, so
I cannot turn it off, and some sites use a lot of resources for this mostly
pointless js.

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thejash
I definitely feel this too. I routinely have around 50 to 100 tabs open. This
USED to be perfectly fine--no crashes, everything was snappy. Now firefox is
crashing sometimes more than once per day on me.

I use noscript to prevent anything from running that is not strictly
necessary, but still, regular crashes.

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trafficlight
What can you possibly do with 100 tabs that 5 or 6 tabs can't accomplish?

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jsiarto
I agree, I didn't even think you could open that many tabs. I don't know how
anyone expects a browser to run optimally with that many resources open.

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LongLiveZed
I thing chaosmachine was right when he said it is partly because of
increasingly dynamic web content.

When pages were (mostly) static you could have 100 tabs on a slow machine and
it wouldn't matter because they were mostly in the swap file. The more pages
try and become active without a mechanism for the browser to "pause" them the
bigger the problem lots of tabs becomes.

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jsiarto
50 - 100 tabs open at one time!? Why would anyone need that many windows open?
I'm not saying that these issues aren't prevalent--but I have to imagine that
this is an edge case. Just thinking about ever having more than 5 or 6 tabs
open at any given time just makes my head hurt...

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DisposaBoy
Why would anyone need more than 640k?

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jsiarto
Ok... Not really the same argument--but I still hold that this is an edge
case. I can't even wrap my head around the UI FUBAR of what a window with 100
tabs open looks like. Someone please explain to me how you work within that
system?

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chronomex
I have my tabs all down the left side of my window, so they stack nicely. I
use a compact theme and a large monitor so I can get 30-50 tabs per window.
And I have multiple browser windows (about three) open for different tasks.
I've got one for general browsing, and one for each concurrent project.

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BrandonM
In a moment of delicious irony, Firefox completely froze up when I used the
Back button to return to Hacker News after reading that article.

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sabat
HTML 5 maybe? I kind of know what she's talking about. Chrome used to seem
lightning-fast for me; seems to be slowing. Could just be perception.

