
Why are browsers so slow? - kojoru
http://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/why-are-browsers-so-slow/
======
21echoes
> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I
> could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly
> fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a
> sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well,
> Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working
> with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier back then than working with ten
> in today’s Safari or Chrome. But that’s a whole different story. What would
> you do today if you opened a link and saw a long article which you don’t
> have time to read right now, but want to read later? You would save a link
> and close the tab. But when your browser is fast, you just don’t tend to
> close tabs which you haven’t dealt with. In Opera, I would let tabs stay
> open for months without having any impact on my machine’s performance.

This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's
sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous.
And it doesn't reload every page when I quit and restart my browser -- it only
loads a tab when I click into that tab. And it has tab groups so that my
current group has only about 8 tabs in it, and the other groups are sorted by
topic. And on and on.

I find it frustrating when people post these articles as if everyone has this
problem, and don't provide enough details as to their setup so that people can
help them fix it. I promise you -- if everyone around the world right now had
the problem the author was having, it would have been solved. No one would
stand for it. Rather than assume everyone is suffering just like you, assume
that other people either a) don't behave the way you do, or b) have found a
way to fix the problem.

~~~
owaislone
> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's
> sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous.

Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any
special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs.
Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the
memory consumption among multiple processes.

I don't remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the
magic land.

~~~
jholman
400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of
Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS.

Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except
AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB
of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping
through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does layout on fifty
tabs at once, but who cares, I don't do that. I do find that I need to restart
my browser every few hundred tab open/close cycles, which takes under 30
seconds (just did the restart, that dropped RAM use to 1.3GB, but it'll get
back up to 1.9 pretty soon). Restarts used to be a lot less frequent, and a
lot faster, before work required me to keep two slack clients open. Running
multiple YouTube windows at once seems to be bad for uptime.

Regarding OP's complaints, opening a new tab take imperceptible time, a new
window is about half a second (only marginally slower than notepad), and
switching tabs can be done several times per second.

I have put ZERO effort into make Firefox run faster, unless you count running
AdBlock. I haven't even bothered to figure out which is the best adblocker.

Why do people use Chrome, again?

(edit to add a few details)

~~~
mapcars
>400 tabs >like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the
godawful work LMS. >under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM

Any proofs? Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do
literally anything else on your computer at that time.

~~~
bzbarsky
> Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs

about:tabs (see [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
stats/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stats/) ) is
showing me "151 tabs" and "57 tabs have been loaded" for my current session.
The other 90-some I haven't looked at this session, so they're left unloaded.
I can post a screenshot, but I could fake that just as easily as I could fake
my claims above, so it's not any more "proof".

I'm certainly doing other things right now (e.g. compiling).

It _really_ depends on what you have in your 100 tabs. If you have 100 copies
of gmail, you're more likely to have a bad time than if you have 100 sane
pages. ;)

------
anaisbetts
I didn't see the correct answer yet, so I'll just tell you, tabs have a delay
to create because in almost all modern browsers you have to wait for a process
to be created and for everything to be paged in, _then_ wait for a bunch of
IPC calls to complete.

Old browsers didn't do this, so creating tabs was so fast! But they were also
much easier to compromise. Tradeoffs.

Source: Electron maintainer

~~~
alexbecker
Commenting just to add visibility to the only plausible answer I've seen to
the question as posed. Thanks for not getting sidetracked into arguments about
adblock/JS engines/layout/fonts/etc.

------
alkonaut
Wow this tab madness... I want one row of tabs, and I want to see the page
title on the tabs. I get an itch when I get enough tabs that they just become
little favicons so I can't see what the tab is doing (By that time there is a
99% chance it's garbage and I don't need it- but now I don't know!).

I wish there was some system of grouping tabs, e.g. if I visit a newpaper site
and Ctrl+Click 3 article links it would keep those tabs "under" the main site
tab, and the tab would only display "nytimes.com (4)". As long as I'm viewing
one of them, the tabs of that particular domain would expand and other sites
would collapse.

Is there a browser or chrome plugin that does this?

~~~
josteink
> I wish there was some system of grouping tabs

Like Tab Groups? FireFox has had them since forever, but since "nobody" used
them, it was removed. You now need an extension to regain that functionality:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-
pa...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-
panorama/?src=search)

You also have tree-style tabs, which organizes tabs based on their parent tabs
(those they were opened from):

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
tab/?src=search)

You have several options. Unless of course you use Chrome, in which case
Google has said "fuck you" to actual power-users and choice ;)

~~~
dvdgsng
> Unless of course you use Chrome,

... then you could try Vivaldi, which has nice features when it comes to tabs
(stacking, tiling, vertical tab list). No tree-style, though.

------
khedoros1
I'm not sure what the author is talking about. After my recent tab clean-up,
I've got 35 tabs open. Opening a new one is near-instantaneous, and I can say
the same thing about bringing up any other tab I have open, as long as it has
been loaded since the last time I restarted my browser.

I've got an Atom-based 2014 laptop at home. That one might take a second to
open a new tab if I'm doing anything else on it at the time.

Modern browsers handle a higher load than older ones did; a more complex web
means a greater amount of more complex data, and that means more complex data
management. The overhead is higher (there's a lower floor), but it allows the
browser to scale better (higher ceiling).

~~~
NotOscarWilde
I have a Intel Atom 1.6 GHz/2GB of RAM netbook afrom 2009 with Linux on it,
and Firefox/Chrome is the only unusable app on it; other Linux applications
seem to be fairly responsive on the hardware.

I really feel the slowness on that one. Tab switching takes seconds, other
interactions take seconds (especially on sites with javascript), Facebook.com
is unreadable (script takes too long).

It is just an anecdote, but at least on Linux the browser is what makes older
computers obsolete.

PS: Interestingly, some minimalist WebKit-based web browsers seem to work fine
on there (like uzbl), of course that comes with a huge downside of no sync,
practically no addons, and so forth.

~~~
khedoros1
I've also got a similar machine (Lenovo S10-2), which I used as my primary
laptop for a few years. Using the web on it was painful even 5 years ago.
Almost as bad as the 2003 IBM laptop sitting next to it in my closet.

The author was talking about a 2014 iMac, 5 years newer than your netbook and
likely 3-4x the price. They're running a modern OS with a browser (Safari)
claimed to be 1.4x - 7x faster (by Apple's numbers on their Safari page) than
the Firefox browser that I use. So that's what I'm wondering about. By the
author's description, their premium 2014 computer isn't running a browser as
well as my super-budget refurb 2014 computer.

------
zzzcpan
Yeah, Opera with Presto engine was amazing. It was the only browser that
focused on UX, really fast and responsive UX. It also had real keyboard
navigation, going through the links was easier, than using a mouse,
temporarily enabling javascript or cookies in a tab was couple of keypresses
away. Good times.

Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by
mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. And they are big and so deep in the
government, that no one seem to be able to do anything about it.

~~~
bitmapbrother
I just installed Opera 12.17 to verify your claims. I was very disappointed.
This reminds me of people that say their old Nokia phones were better than the
smartphones of today. Funny how time distorts things.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
You probably just don't appreciate the extra features Opera gives. Which, of
course, is fine, but for many of us they are a dealbreaker. I'm still looking
for another browser giving me real MDI with "click tab to minimize"
functionality... Otter Browser kind of does but falls short in other respects.
Vivaldi doesn't even try (they haven't even made the menubar native...)

By the way, if you are referring to speed rather than features, you need to
take into account that when you try Opera 12.17 right now, you are trying a
browser that has been frozen in time for years while the JavaScript on
websites evolved. For this reason, it's now very slow (if not incompatible) in
JavaScript-heavy websites like Facebook, Gmail, etc... but I can attest as a
long-time user that it was indeed the fastest browser in its time.

------
dirkg
Chrome is the culprit. For as much as they helped with V8 innovations, they've
also done harm

\- ignores usability basics: horrible UI with > 10 tabs, reloads all tabs,
many other issues - all of these are things people have complained about
forever, they refuse to fix

\- memory hog: Chrome uses more memory than almost any other browser

\- Google forces Chrome upon you since Hangouts etc will not work with other
browsers

\- for reasons passing understanding, the Chrome UI has been copied by every
browser

Firefox is better at every single thing and has a far better extension model,
which sadly they will deprecate again to copy Chrome. I find it very sad that
its popularity and market share has fallen as the world has collectively
dumbed down the browser UI.

~~~
wanda
Chrome is quite clearly targeted at the regular user, rather than the power
user or developer/tinkerer. News flash: the regular user does not open 270
tabs, or even 10 tabs. You can tell me this claim is anecdotal, but since you
have provided no evidence to substantiate your claims, I'd say the burden of
proof falls on you first.

> "Firefox is better at every single thing" Ouch. I mean, your post is
> littered with unsubstantiated claims, but that has to be the biggest and
> least substantiated of them. For starters, I think Chrome is a good deal
> further down the line in terms of ES6/ES7 and WebGl. Chrome is certainly
> ahead in the implementation of Web Platform features like Web Components and
> a large number of CSS properties.

I see a lot of websites which advise non-Chrome users to switch to Chrome to
view the website in question -- which is horrible, but one could hardly say
Firefox is therefore better at WebGl, for example.

I've also used Firefox/Firefox Web Developer Edition/Firefox Nightly many
times of the years and I have generally preferred Chrome's dev tools. The
ability to simulate slow network connections and to drag and reorder DOM nodes
is nice in Chrome, and in general I find the dev tools to be more reliable
when I'm messing with CSS properties.

The reality is that I have to use both browsers in my line of work anyway, but
just wanted to say that. Obviously your retort will be that Firebug is the
best, but that's kind of my point: I do not think you can say of Firefox that
it is better at 'every single thing' if it must first be augmented by add-ons.
Firebug will be discontinued eventually anyway when multi-process lands in
stable Firefox.

So, I wouldn't say Firefox is better at every single thing. Maybe Firefox with
a dozen add-ons is better than Chrome at some things, but that's the point.
Regular users, and even busy developers/tinkerers, do not want to waste time
configuring and setting up their browser. They just want something that will
work. Chrome works better out of the box for the regular user.

\-----------

Regarding Chrome's UI, I think it caught on for a reason: just like websites
have become flat and streamlined, the browser has also become more minimal in
its UI, and Chrome very much led the charge there. Of course, Firefox is to be
applauded for allowing the user to pick and choose which bits of the UI are
visible and which are in the menu -- that's a great feature, I wish I could
configure/style Chrome.

But before Chrome, this option did not exist (unless there was an add-on, it's
been so long I forget), and the FF user interface had a dozen buttons, two
text fields (address & search), a bottom status bar and so on. It was too much
clutter. Chrome streamlined the browser UI and put things in a more logical
order: tabs, then search/address, then web content. It was and is well-
designed from a UI/looks perspective for the regular user.

Clearly, you are a power user and possibly a developer, so you will perhaps be
more prone to having hundreds of tabs open and more inclined to spend time
making everything about your browser _just so_. I can appreciate that. I've
poured hours into browsers, tiling window managers, etc. I just don't think
I'd advocate dwm/xmonad/awesome-wm to a regular user, and neither would I say
a window manager represents a superior product to a desktop environment. A
product isn't superior if you have to assemble/mod it yourself. This is a
cornerstone of Apple's success, and VLC Media Player's success, and Google
Search's success, and so on: to provide something that _just works_ , rather
than something which needs to be modded.

\-----------

No one can deny that Google has far greater reach and clout when pushing its
browser down people's throats, but many developers prefer Chrome now, and not
just 'rockstars', but older developers too. I do not believe they are
'casuals', I think they genuinely prefer the way Chrome works, and I think its
market share is not testament only to Google's marketing power, but also to
the fact that it is a successful and effective web browser.

Google Search maintains dominance today in search because of its marketing and
its huge lead in terms of data, but it only reached its current level because
it ultimately worked better than its competitor products. I think the same is
true of Chrome -- when it started out, it represented a fast and sleek new
browser product, and while it has gotten overweight as time has progressed, it
still beats the competition out of the box.

\----------

PS: I am not a Chrome salesman. I have many complaints about the product,
(especially on mobile, where I think it is spectacularly weak, but that's
another story). I just found your claims a little too rash. Even 'polemic'
isn't adequate to describe it.

~~~
josteink
> Chrome is quite clearly targeted at the regular user, rather than the power
> user or developer/tinkerer. News flash: the regular user does not open 270
> tabs, or even 10 tabs

If that is your impression, I got news for you.

Regular users don't even know tabs exist, and every single tab opened goes
unclosed.

My wife had some 200 on her iPad. Every time she opens a tab and can't click
"back" she says the internet is broken again.

(And ofcourse she can't find her previous tab in that mess of unmanaged tabs)

Regular users have a lot of tabs too, but for completely different reasons.

------
unwiredben
If you're in a recent Firefox, open a new tab to the URL "about:performance"
\-- it will show you a report on how your add-ins and tabs are affecting the
browser. One of my coworkers used it to find that a tab from a IoT device
controller page was slowing down the whole browser by doing lots of
unnecessary page refreshes.

~~~
euwwpieupbui
"about:performance may currently be slowing down Firefox"

~~~
nachtigall
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199987](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199987)

------
Sanddancer
I don't have this problem, blank pages don't take "seconds" to load, even on
my little atom-based tablet. The big question I have for people noticing this
behavior is how many add-ons do they have. How many times is your "blank page"
parsed by an enormous amount of code written in a language not known for its
performance?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
If your browser is designed from the ground up to support add-ons, but can't
handle a couple of them without slowing to a crawl, your browser sucks. Don't
blame the user for a problem with the software.

~~~
khedoros1
> your browser sucks

Why not all three? The browser implementation, user's choices, and the
implementations of each individual add-on suck.

The browser didn't limit the resource use of greedy add-ons (or inform the
user of conflicts between them), the add-ons were coded either to do too much,
or to perform their function with suboptimal code, and the user is the one
that chose that set of software to use together.

------
iMerNibor
> modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart
> them.

firefox does not do this.

~~~
delecti
Additionally, it's debateable whether that's a bad default to begin with.

~~~
vacri
"load all tabs" on restart is a terrible default for people who like to have
dozens of tabs. I can't see any reasonable argument for it, for those users.

~~~
iopq
I actually want this to happen in all of my tabs because I want them to
UPDATE. This is why I keep them open in the first place.

~~~
zeveb
I think that the mechanism I suggested elsewhere would handle this best: each
tab's complete state (DOM, JavaScript &c.) should be marshalled to disk at
quit (and checkpointed periodically, in case of crashes); on startup, all tabs
are loaded and their DOM & JavaScript contexts restored. If a tab's context
had it set to update periodically, then that periodic-update context would be
restored; if not, then the remote server would never be contacted until and
unless the user hits reload.

This seems so obviously correct to me that I wonder what I'm missing.

~~~
kuschku
> This seems so obviously correct to me that I wonder what I'm missing.

You are missing that

> should be marshalled to disk at quit

is not easily doable.

~~~
zeveb
Why not? The DOM is, ultimately, just HTML. The VM state is just data in RAM,
which should be eminently serialisable.

I'd think it's the sort of thing which ought to be child's play.

~~~
kuschku
The VM state isn't that easy when you remember that JS can keep open sockets
to other things, can launch processes, etc.

Sure, you could find a way to serialize it, but that'd be a lot harder — you
can't hust go back to halfway the middle of receiving something through a
socket.

~~~
zeveb
One could just close open connexions — after all, a network connexion can
always die anyway.

I really hope that JavaScript in a browser can't launch processes!

------
laumars
All of these anecdotal benchmarks people are doing are silly because you're
overlooking so much detail:

* SSD or slow spinning disk (makes a massive difference if your computer is swapping out tabs to cache).

* Have the tabs been loaded or not (a new browser session will open placeholders for the tabs without loading the site, but an older session will likely have dozens -if not more- of those sites loaded)

* Frontend code. Are we talking low footprint sites like HN or dozens of JS and CSS heavy sites like Facebook, Office 365, etc)

* Similarly to the above, media content. Streaming videos? Flash? etc.

I bet you a 100 active tabs of MS Excel Online would perform crap in any set
up while 100 inactive HN tabs would stand a better chance of not crippling
your whole system.

~~~
partycoder
If you have 100 tabs doubtfully all of them are relevant. That's more like a
user problem.

~~~
laumars
It's an easy habit to make though. Like why some people have lots of stuff
saved to their Windows desktop, or messy desks with paperwork from a dozen
different projects arranged in a way that only the person sat at that desk
could understand. I doubt many people set out to work that way, it's more a
symptom of the "I'll leave that there and come back to it when I get more
time" mindset. Except unfortunately one never finds the time.

I can't really blame people for doing that given our hectic modern lives.

~~~
partycoder
"Leave it there and come back when i got more time" = Bookmarks :)

If it is a dynamic website, most of them have sessions that expire.

~~~
laumars
> _" Leave it there and come back when i got more time" = Bookmarks :)_

Let me reiterate the first part of that sentence you've quoted: "I doubt many
people set out to work that way, it's more a symptom of the "I'll leave that
there and come back to it when I get more time" mindset."

> _If it is a dynamic website, most of them have sessions that expire._

That depends entirely on how long the session cookies are set for, whether the
user browses to other pages on that site since (thus potentially renewing
their session cookie) and whether one even needs to have an active session to
use that specific dynamic website. Suffice to say there's more exceptions your
point than there are examples of it. eg message boards, youtube (and other
similar video streaming services), imgur (and similar), etc. And even in
instances where the session only manages access to that page, it's not a great
chore to log in again.

To be honest I don't really understand why you're trying to lecture HN readers
about sensible browsing habits. We're all tech-savvy enough to know how to use
a browser. If we chose to adopt a workflow that's less CPU / system memory
performant then we do so fully understanding the problems that might arise.
The problem is many of us - myself included - grew up in an era when websites
were a document rather than an pseudo-desktop application so often our ranting
stems from a frustration at how bloated the web has become.

~~~
partycoder
Some of the websites you mentioned keep you logged in. So bookmarks work fine.

I don't understand what is so upsetting about mentioning a feature designed
for that use case.

Then, not all HN readers are tech-savvy, being enthusiastic about technology
is not the same as being tech-savvy.

Then, if you don't like having your point refuted, don't engage into a
conversation by refuting others' point of view in the first place.

~~~
laumars
> _Some of the websites you mentioned keep you logged in._

Indeed. Which was the point I literally just made after you argued about
sessions timing out.

> _Then, not all HN readers are tech-savvy, being enthusiastic about
> technology is not the same as being tech-savvy._

It sounds very much like you believe you're educating people here. I'd be
surprised if anyone reading this thread was unaware of the existence of
bookmarks, or confused by the revelation that more tabs mean their "computer
thingies" have to do more "thinking". But I can't prove that any more than you
can prove most HNers are as technologically inept as you repeatedly suggest.

> _Then, if you don 't like having your point refuted, don't engage into a
> conversation by refuting others' point of view in the first place._

You're not refuting my point though because my point was never that tabs are
better than bookmarks. I just commented on why people often end up working
that way despite knowing better. It was an insight not a recommendation.

~~~
partycoder
Lots of accusations there. The only thing I suggested is to use bookmarks, and
imply that it's highly unlikely that in an audience as diverse as HN ALL of
them, or the majority of readers are tech-savvy... Run a survey if you want.

I made a reasonable suggestion without an intention to offend people. Hacker
News is about sharing information. I am sharing information.

You want to start your Monty Python argument clinic in the Hacker News comment
section? I am not interested. Take your unreasonable accusations elsewhere.

~~~
laumars
With the greatest of respect, I think you're reading subtext in comments where
there was none:

1stly I said "tech-savvy _enough to run a browser_ ". The context here is
critical (hence my emphasis) because I'm not talking about our level of
technical competence but rather the basics of using a browser (ie using tabs
and bookmarks). You may disagree and think some on here are unaware of
bookmarks but I think that's extremely unlikely. However I think taking proper
context of my point into account, you likely don't disagree me. Which is why
your rebuttals always crop out the context I included.

2ndly I was never offended by your suggestion to use bookmarks. In fact I
didn't even disagree with you. I wrote about why some people don't use
bookmarks and how I don't blame them for their arguably bad practices. It
seemed that you misinterpreted that as an argument in favour of tabs and thus
constructed arguments around disproving that point. That wasn't necessary as
there wasn't ever a disagreement there. Maybe I should have been more clear
early on?

Lastly I've not made any accusations about you. Let alone unreasonable ones. I
may have disagreed on a few specific points but I think the "accusations" term
is a tad exaggerative. If you feel I have said things that could be taken
personally then I apologise, that was never my intention. :)

Couple the above points with your reiterating my counterargument about login
sessions and hopefully you can see why I was a little frustrated at the weird
direction this discussion took. At every turn you seemed hell bent on
disagreeing with me even when we were agreeing. If you don't mind me asking,
maybe your initial comment getting downvoted (wasn't me by the way!) left you
feeling you needed to prove your point? I've never agreed with negative rep
but that's a whole other tangent.

Anyway, since we never actually disagreed on the crux of the argument I think
we should just chalk this down to a misunderstanding and get on with our lives
:)

------
bootload
I wrote a simple bit of code to calculate the size of index pages with
includes (js, css, images) and here's what I get:

    
    
      page	  resource	total   url
      (b)	   (b)		(Kb)
      ----------------------------------------------
      33857	   143		34.0	news.ycombinator.com
      62690	   55975	118.7	arstechnica.com
      11844	   223862	235.7	seldomlogical.com
      218837   765943	984.8	newyorktimes.com
      l592771  545304	1138.1  guardian.co.uk
    

The one thing I notice watching the index page being broken down, is the sheer
number of resources requested. Didn't bother with JS/browser interaction which
you can check with browser dev tools.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Would enjoy seeing the source.

~~~
bootload
read away ~
[https://github.com/peterrenshaw/pageglut](https://github.com/peterrenshaw/pageglut)

~~~
mixmastamyk
Thanks!

~~~
bootload
and write-up why ~ [http://seldomlogical.com/2016/JAN/27/measure-that-
page/](http://seldomlogical.com/2016/JAN/27/measure-that-page/)

------
rorygreen
I'm very surprised to see that nobody has mentioned OneTab.[1] With my use of
Chrome, it performs fine with hundreds of tabs open until I attempt to reopen
them after a restart, at which point I'll be waiting for about 5 minutes until
I can do anything. Firefox seems better for this as it only loads tabs when I
actively select them IIRC.

Regardless of performance, with that many tabs open I just find browsers
unpleasant to use because you can't see the title of each tab and switching
between them is a mess. OneTab is fantastic - I have it as a pinned tab on all
my browser windows and I send it all the tabs I'm not actively using. For me
it also doubles as a short-term bookmarking system so I don't clog up my
pinboard.in bookmarks with articles I have not yet read etc.

[1]: [http://www.one-tab.com/](http://www.one-tab.com/)

~~~
j_s
Somewhat similarly, "The Great Suspender" for Chrome and similar extensions
unload unused tabs after a configurable timeout, requiring a click to reload
them.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en-US)

------
michaelbuckbee
Something I've found very useful for Chrome is "The Great Suspender"
extension.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

It frees up lots of memory but still lets me keep lots of tabs around without
having to be militant and killing them off as I stop using them.

~~~
olejorgenb
Firefox also have extensions like that. I'm using
[http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en](http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en)
/ [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-
tab/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/)

It's marked as experimental, but I haven't had any trouble so far.

------
jayflux
Surely there's a trade off, as we add more and more features to browsers, w3C
specifications, add ons, JavaScript updates etc, a browser will inevitably get
slower. Yes older browsers were fast, but they did little in comparison to
today's virtual machines.

The fact that you can do this
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo)
in a browser should tell you we've come a long way from them just being
Document readers.

------
garaetjjte
>Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs
when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs. Opera
was sane: it did not reload a tab unless you asked for it. It just reopened
everything from cache.

Firefox also loads suspended tabs from cache. It reloads them(on first switch
to tab), but no data is downloaded from server.

~~~
jakub_g
Not fully true. If you open a large session and have a network sniffer on,
you'd see likely at least dozens of requests for favicon.ico from half of
internet :)

------
janci
Browsers are slow, but I can cope with it. But what I hate is that browsers
are nondeterministic.

Try Ctrl+C,Ctrl+T,Ctrl+v,Enter combo. In opera it worked flawlessly everytime.
In Firefox, it sometimes works, sometime it opens new tab without URL,
sometime it pastes half of URL (?!) and navigatest there.

In chrome you never know what sugesstion will the address bar give to you. In
opera, you were 100% sure that your bookmarks will be there, so you could do
Ctrl+T, type first few letters and press Enter without looking.

~~~
tgb
I do that in Chrome all the time. I hardly ever go to any sites except by
typing the first ~three letters of the URL and mashing enter.

------
sambe
As usual, this is simply not true in general. If your system is doing 10 other
things and is memory/CPU constrained then, sure, you probably know why it's
taking so long.

If you have 100 tabs open of which 10 are rather badly-behaved, maybe the
browser cannot do enough to mitigate it. But again, although this is a common
power-user setup, it's not standard.

If none of the above, it's likely due to an extension. I was starting to blame
Safari for slow tab opening and page loading recently and then I uninstalled
an extension and everything became lightning fast again. I have around 100
tabs open across 4 windows. All major browsers are very fast for normal
browsing in the default configuration.

------
rocky1138
"Why are browsers so slow?"

Site downloads almost 500KB of fonts.

~~~
seibelj
THIS. If you want a fast website, remove all JS and make everything simple.
For maximum performance put the static site on a CDN. It isn't hard.

~~~
prewett
And, obviously, websites apparently don't want a fast website. Empirically,
they want the slow, JavaScript frameworky, image heavy, ad heavy, social media
link-ful they have. Unfortunately, as a user, I want their website to be the
opposite of what they want their website to be.

~~~
marssaxman
Reader mode is such a relief. I wish there were a way to enable it by default.

~~~
NoGravitas
There are extensions that enable reader mode by default, for example
[Automatic Reader View][0].

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-
rea...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-
view/?src=api)

~~~
marssaxman
Thank you! I had never heard of this, and I'm installing it now.

------
jsz0
Your problem might be disk IO speed related. How fast is your storage? Most
browsers still do trash a lot of disk IO even if you have plenty of memory
available. For whatever reason it seems like OSX is way more prone to having
performance problems due to slow disk IO. I have plenty of RAM, CPU and GPU so
whenever I see a performance hiccup I know it's time to clear some space off
my SSD. Performance of my (several year old, third party) SSD goes off a cliff
when it has less than 15% or so free space available. If I get it back to 20%
free space it's back to smooth sailing again.

------
shortformblog
I downloaded the latest version of Opera this weekend after a lot of
frustration with Chrome's drain on my Mac's battery life. Man was I shocked.
It uses the same engine as Chrome (Blink) but somehow manages to double the
amount of battery life on my machine. I could never get more than three hours
on my Retina MBP before I tried it.

And it supports Chrome extensions, to boot.

~~~
technojunkie
If only Opera had built-in Flash, I would consider this more. Too many sites
require Flash still sadly.

------
cpt1138
Installing Ghostery, Privacy Badger and adblocker makes a world of difference
in terms of how fast page loads are for me. Ads are not just annoying, they
slow the web down considerably and make the mobile experience terrible.

~~~
hau
Why would you use adblocker/ublock and 2 other extensions which are no more
than a filter lists for adblocker/ublock?

~~~
elktea
Privacy badger is a little different, afaik it doesn't use lists.

~~~
hau
It says in the FAQ section of the official site that the main difference
between it and other blocking extensions is ease of use aka lack of setup. It
also claims it's based on adblock code. So it's just adblock with lists
preset? Indeed a little difference if you're able to setup adblock-like
extension. And if we're discussing performance, you don't want an extension
for every list out there.

------
darklajid
So, incidentally I noticed a couple days ago that Firefox on Android handles >
99 tabs with a special icon.

I found that quite amusing..

[http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo](http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo)

~~~
jakub_g
On Chrome it's ':D' \- I guess due to UI constraints

------
ksec
It was the same thing i posted about Apps made with Web Tech.

Opera 1x, managed to be a email client, RSS reader and Browser while keeping
the size below 12MB. Chrome/Blink or Firefox all takes 40-50MB Download.

I really wish they could Open Sources the old Opera.

P.S- I am not sure if these Tab Problem is nerd only. Basically people are
trying to gob too much information. But i have yet to see a Sane UI to fix
this.

~~~
cyberpunk
Yeah and QNX booted you into a graphical environment from a 1.44mb floppy..

I never really understand comments like these, what are you saying? You want
smaller binaries? Less features?

Don't you have a spare 50MB on your 512GB SSD?

------
pawelmi
(disclaimer: I work for Opera) This year Opera has had a lot of focus on
performance tuning under the umbrella of Power Saving Mode that was shipped in
Opera 39. It was many small optimizations like for example reducing timer
frequency in unused tabs or UI animation fixes as well quite advanced memory
compaction that is now being upstreamed
([https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-
dev/oZw5F3fO-aU)). Recent Opera 42 features a small but nice update to startup
p/restart behaviour - it schedules only the most important/recently used tabs
for reload right away - which is quite useful for people like me who normally
have dozens of tabs open all the time.

------
SeanDav
> _" You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would
> you even manage that? "_

I currently have nearly 400 tabs open, across 7 browser windows (Firefox).

The main reason for this is context switching. I have tried several context
switching type addons but not found one yet that is reliable, simple and fast.
Right now if I am programming, I have 2 browser windows I use for that. For
news and related articles of interest, 1 browser window. For games and
related, 1 window, etc, etc.

Firefox and Tabmix plus makes this easy and relatively painless. Chrome would
have about 12 million processes and use 4.7 petabytes of memory for same use
case (I exaggerate a smidgen)

------
Tomis02
Browsers are slow because objective metrics of quality (e.g. performance,
usability) are irrelevant to the common user, despite what individuals may
claim. People are very susceptible to branding and growing trends, and it's a
hard pill to swallow.

Back in the day when I was writing on the forums "guys, forget Firefox and use
Opera, it's fast it's usable you have everything you might want in a browser
with undeniable proof", the reply would eventually be "yes but Firefox has
_this_ webdev extension and I can't do without it". So Firefox would get
installed in their families' and friends' PCs, because that's what the web
developer used. Also, the "safer faster better" marketing campaign, although
that slogan would have been much more appropriate to Opera than Firefox. Fast
forward a few years. Google Chrome comes out and everyone stops caring about
those damn extensions; suddenly performance becomes a huge decision factor
(nevermind Chrome was a resource hog compared to Opera, nevermind the horrible
lack of features, nevermind the bad usability). I could go on, but you get the
drift.

There's no incentive for large market share browsers to significantly improve
because the (mediocrity+marketing=success) recipe is proven to work, over and
over. What would it take for Chrome to lose market share? A new hot hip
popular company with lots of money thrown in advertising, like (extremely
unlikely example) Tesla, with a new cute interface. Because people like new
and shiny trinkets.

------
ovao
I only notice the kind of "tabs are slow to open" behavior pretty randomly,
and without knowing the state of the rest of my machine at those moments (is
there something else pegging a few of my cores for some reason?) I can't
confidently place any blame on the browser itself.

For what they are, I consider modern web browsers to be exceptionally fast and
reliable, and they tend to put a lot of other applications to absolute shame.
They are imperfect, but still very, very good.

------
Freaky
I just counted my open tabs in Opera 42, and quit it so I could see the memory
use.

799 open tabs. 8.5GB. Restarted in around 10 seconds and it's currently using
around 2GB. "Delay loading of background tabs" is checked, which I believe is
the default now.

Not had any serious responsiveness problems. The browser extension I use to
give me a list of tabs on my sidebar is a little slow when opening a new
window, that's about it.

------
comex
> Safari may take a second or two just to open a new blank tab on a 2014 iMac

Is "blank" actually blank? If you have new tabs set to show Top Sites (the
default setting), there's a notable lag that doesn't occur if you set it to
Empty Page. Of course, changing it is a reduction in functionality, and it's
silly that loading a simple grid of screenshots is so slow. Chrome, for its
part, is even slower (on my machine) to actually load the new tab page, but it
loads it asynchronously with the address bar responding instantaneously,
whereas Safari lags out the whole UI.

I still use Safari myself, with new tabs set to Empty Page, because I don't
really care about the screenshot-grid functionality (in either browser), and
Safari has better performance in other respects, as well as lower power
consumption. But it irks me that the default macOS experience makes you wait
to open a new tab; it's a terrible UX for something that shouldn't be hard to
optimize.

------
mgkimsal
Fascinating and frustrating at the same time, reading people going back and
forth on their browser experiences.

"I've got 450 tabs open, in any browser, ever, and I experience 0 lag - in
fact, it tends to finish rendering before my eyes even focus! And I've only
got 6 gigs on some old 386!"

vs

"I can't even move my mouse in FF/Chrome/Safari without massive memory spikes
and random reboots!"

At least some of the reports have to be expectations - I've sat next to
someone and they thought I was "moving so fast" in my browser, and I was - at
the same time - cursing how slow everything was running.

Someone reporting "no lag" might actually be experiencing what someone else
reports as lag. Is there any way to adjust for our vague descriptions? Videos,
perhaps, of what someone considers "fast" or "no lag" on a browser with 100s
of tabs open?

~~~
cyberpunk
Doubt it.

Before the "Not me! I use w3m on a p3!" replies pile in, accept this as a
generalisation warning..

I think most of us in this thread though generally use reasonably recent gear
(our machines are the tools of our trade, personally I upgrade each year) and
that we use our browsers extensively enough that even small issues around perf
become quite noticeable...

I can't remember the last time I couldn't scroll smoothly or a tab didn't open
instantly...

Maybe the difference here is those in the church of noscript and those
without? After the initial pain white listing the various things you need,
I've found the performance of Firefox on Linux to be brilliant. (currently
around 100 tabs, some of which are sat on prime video etc, arch Linux, 16G,
50.1.0).

A lot of the extensions listed in this thread are doing quite a lot of work
also, and sometimes on every request which probably doesn't help..

Disk caching could also be a problem for those of us without shiny new NVMe's
in their laptops (pull the trigger on that one, it's worth it!).

The only downside of all the blocking stuff for me though is when you book a
flight or something and the noscript/ublock combo prevents me from getting
past the callback from your payment provider... I need some kind of giant
banner that says turn off noscript and ublock when using britishairways
installed somewhere :}

Or I'll just send them yet another snarky feedback message the next time I
fuck it up (seriously, it calls t.co and doubleclick in serial!)

------
shmerl
Fully parallelized browser using something like Servo and Vulkan for rendering
graphics is your friend.

------
ksec
The same could be said about Computer, OS, or any Apps.

We have SSD, CPU, Memory and Network 100 to 10000x faster then what had 20
years ago, and yet Apps didn't get 100x faster. It is still not instantaneous.

In someways i think it is because we have created far too much abstraction
/layers.

~~~
antisthenes
Some things are near instantaneous, though.

I've discontinued use of optical media circa 2009 and replaced my OS drives
with SSDs in 2010.

Eliminating spin-up times and random seek times for multiple small files has
probably been the biggest performance boost in my user-side computing
experience.

------
lwhi
Browsers need to translate instructions using a current formal spec, whilst
being forgiving to human error and allowing backward compatibility with past
specs / browser quirks. They also need to evolve quickly to meet future
potential spec requirements.

I'm no expert in the development of browsers; but I'd hazard a guess that the
problem isn't as straightforward as it seems… and performance will suffer as a
result, especially since all this has to occur at runtime.

------
vizzah
As a Firefox user since v1 on Linux I have witnessed how slow some parts of
the browser has become. For instance, textarea text typing can be so painfully
slow with a visible lag between keystrokes.. that's not just on a certain
websites and with spell-checking enabled, but with all options off on a blank
page with single textarea element.. I guess there is no way to get rid of all
the bloat of the ages..

------
agumonkey
Not dillo. It's also space efficient. 30M for many tabs. Also No Script is
embedded by a formal technique called pure js devoidness.

------
maxgashkov
Oh, do I miss the days of debugging problems caused by Opera's overagressive
caching of _everything_. NOT.

~~~
iopq
Just Ctrl-F5 then. That overaggressive caching made it faster than other
browsers.

------
nanis
I tried to avoid both "real" and "fake" news sites like the plague. Firefox
performs admirably.

[https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400](https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400)

------
pascalxus
I know the article mentions openning new tabs.

But When it comes to clicking on links and opening a new page, Browsers aren't
slow. The software that runs on them is slow: all those applications loading
too many libraries, widgets, videos, video ads, Angular and lots of code
that's not needed.

------
d08ble
Why for view HTML/1.0 1990 specification
([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945))
modern browser needs about:config 3000 variables for show it?

Too many modules in this "Bot Machine".

------
jakub_g
I am one of the tab hoarders and I think the general attitude of browser
vendors/developers towards us is "you're doing it wrong" (they might be
right). FYI Having huge amount of RAM helps (a bit) and on Windows, Firefox
works quite well with up to 100-200 tabs.

------
juskrey
It is not browsers. Take ay of them back to 2005 and they'll be lighting fast.

------
jheriko
Maybe the question should be "Why don't I spend time optimising browsers?"

Certainly that's my problem - I don't even try. Enough people with that
attitude and browsers never get optimised...

------
throwaw12ay
A technical question. Does using other format like XML or XHTML make rendering
faster given the same amount of nodes + styles in the page? Can it help make
browsers render a page faster?

~~~
minitech
No. It might make parsing faster if you optimized for it, but I don’t see any
reason for the choice of text representation to affect rendering speed.

------
zbuf
What happened to the performance of the 'back' button?

Pressing 'back' used to be quick, on the modern web its rather sluggish, like
it re-loads the old page from scratch.

I can forgive sites that are implemented as single page with their own 'fake'
URLs (though that is still annoying). But even static content.

Given the emphasis on browsers handling lots of tabs I'm surprised 'back'
isn't implemented by, effectively, keeping the old page around for a bit and
pausing its Javascript, then just picking up where you left off.

~~~
laumars
That's an issue with the site not having the correct caching headers. If it's
static content with the correct caching headers defined then the browser
should just load it from cache.

------
RandyRanderson
Agreed, I have about 8GB of pages open right now not doing anything. Many
computers don't have that much total ram. I think it's time to have per tab
resource throttling. For example if a page uses over a certain amount of

. compute resources, the cpu cycles allowed in the next epoch are halved

. RAM it's memory accesses per second are halved in the next epoch

. network traffic it's kB/s are halved in the next epoch

This would allow all pages to still work but the resource intensive ones would
be flagged quickly by users and developers.

~~~
warfangle
And immediately any webGL visualizations / games / necessarily resource
intensive webapps are rendered useless as they're automatically throttled back
by the browser.

~~~
RandyRanderson
It would be pretty easy to add a conspicuous button to "unlock" resources iff
they were throttled.

Being generous, I think the average user might actually push this btn once a
month?

------
xylon
I just don't know what this guy's complaining about. My PC is ancient and
FireFox is responsive with dosens of tabs open.

------
Aoyagi
I wouldn't say browers are slow, it's just that sites are bloated to no end.

Then again, as is Chrome.

------
lukaa
On Android you should check Polarity browser.It's faster than any other
browser.

~~~
TwoBit
Every time I try one of those third party browsers, it's fast but can't render
many pages right. It's as if they are taking some shortcut that works only 80%
of the time.

~~~
alexbecker
Rather than any one shortcut, they're probably implementing 20% of the W3C
specs that together cover 80% of their test pages. Unsurprisingly, this is
both much easier and much faster.

------
mrmondo
Everything seemed to get slower and slower as JavaScript became more prevalent
IMO.

------
bhaavan
Unimaginative, non-technical rant. Please find the bottlenecks, and provide a
technical solution. The code is open source for you to read, and your patch
will be constructive and helpful. Your idealist blog-post, not really that
helpful.

~~~
fortytw2
the bottlenecks here are systemic, part of the wider "web development"
mentality, rather than technical parts of browsers.

build and use sites that template html, without js / huge styling, like HN or
pinboard, and I promise you everything will be lightning fast

------
legodt
My Firefox instance has recently picked up the nasty habit of every time I
move to a different tab, the web area is white save for a spinning grey
loading icon in the center for a good half second. I've never seen anything
like this before recently and it's a real bummer on speed

~~~
bzbarsky
The spinner means the UI process has switched tabs but the content process
hasn't painted the tab content yet. Possibly because it's doing something else
(like running script).

Is there a particular site that causes this to happen when you have it loaded?
If you're willing to spend some time troubleshooting or profiling this, please
let me know and I'll walk you through some ways to do that...

~~~
legodt
Sure, I'd be more than happy to try breaking this down, I'm going to try a
nightly build now as other users have suggested and see how it feels

~~~
bzbarsky
Excellent, thanks!

If you're using a nightly, you should be able to use
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Profiling_with_the_Built-in_Profiler) to profile
it, because nightlies have useful symbols. Might be worth capturing a profile
at the point when the spinner stops and the page is finally shown.

~~~
legodt
The issue appears to have resolved itself with a fresh install. I could not
replicate the behavior in the nightly, and when I reinstalled the main release
it did not manifest again either. Sorry to not be a better help, I'm trying to
wrap my head around it...

~~~
bzbarsky
All good. It's frustrating when problems come and go like this, but not much
we can do about it.

If this starts happening again and you get any more data on it, please email
me: bzbarsky at mit dot edu.

------
nimchimpsky
Has the author tried [https://vivaldi.com/](https://vivaldi.com/) (started
from the remnants of original opera I believe)

~~~
milankragujevic
It's literally just Chrome, with a different chrome (UI) and some new features
in the UI. You're not going to get anything faster than Chrome if it uses the
same engine (Blink).

~~~
elktea
The post is not about the performance of rendering pages, it's about the UI.
So recommending a browser that uses a different UI seems reasonable.

~~~
bwat48
vivaldi's ui is web based and even slower than chrome's though

------
caub
network is slow, not browser

------
edem
Why do we still have non-centered content on a website?

------
alexnewman
We got some new rocking fast www.brave.com versions out that should be wayyy
fast.

