

Ask HN: Am I expecting too much from modern day web browsers? - ffffruit

Allow me to explain myself.<p>I have the habit of opening things in tabs and then leaving them sort of hang around if I know I am going to need them in the next hour, day or week or so. I usually have around 50 tabs open at any given time. The problem is that this makes working with Chrome very painful. My definition of painful is: very slow to load pages, very slow to click to existing tabs, insane memory usage, unresponsive at some points.<p>In my limited knowledge of modern browser internals, I would assume that in the current age and technology, this would not be an issue. I know that Chrome for example compartmentalizes tabs as individual processes and thus the crashing of one tab does not affect the other.<p>I would also like to point out that when I state 50 tabs, I do not mean 50 tabs of animated flash smileys but just your normal average day to day working material. Flash is usually the culprit and requires killing from time to time on the Chrome task manager. That being said, they have a healthy mix of Flash, js etc. I have 8GB of ram and run Mac OS X 10.6.4
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jbrennan
Imagine heading to your Applications directory, selecting all, and pressing
CMD+O to open them all. Even if you're a typical user, and your apps are
mostly just run-of-the-mill light Cocoa apps, having 50 running concurrently
_will_ take its toll on the system.

Chrome's tabs are each running in their own process, it's very similar to
running 50 copies of the same app. Modern websites are hefty even for just one
tab (this is why Safari on iOS struggles to keep more than a few tabs in
memory at a time).

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niels_olson
I suppose you could experiment with no flash at all using an extension and see
if that changes things. Certainly flash has it's own memory cache and Apple is
none too pleased with it.

Personally, using a Cr48 with 2GB memory, I don't see much performance
difference between that and chrome my 27" iMac with 8 gb or winxp at work with
4gb.

