
I’m sick of Chrome eating all my RAM - hrathore
https://www.techradar.com/in/news/im-sick-of-chrome-eating-all-my-ram-its-time-for-me-to-ditch-it-for-firefox-or-even-edge
======
weq
I have an old, slow, 2006 laptop. Still works, use it as a media PC. At first,
i went from IE -> chrome. It picked up 5 years of life. Recently thought i
would have to finally decommision the box.

Installed firefox, runs like i did -5 years ago. Same websites, same tab
consumption, more performance, no intermittant hangs, less ram consumption..

TDLR; install firefox if your having memory issues with chrome. all that
tracking, google services and integration has a LARGE cost, not just to your
privacy!

~~~
mukti
I almost made the switch to chrome a few years ago when firefox was seeming
slow... but never brought myself to it. At the office I've always used chrome
because there was something weird about Firefox for some internal pages, and
because I was stuck on some older version (I didn't have admin rights to my
desktop when I first got hired and was stuck on the version the helpdesk would
push). Today, I'm way happier with Firefox, and I'm glad I didn't make the
switch at home. I'm currently in the process of trying Firefox again at work
(now that I can install the latest version...), and will probably ditch chrome
entirely. It hogs too many resources, and I don't really get any noticeable
benefits from using it.

I also downloaded Firefox for Android recently to try it out... but I get the
impression that chrome will always be king in the android space.

~~~
tdewitt
Try Firefox Preview. It's not feature rich but I've been very happy with it.
It is simple and fast.

------
dijit
I feel like the comments here reflect a weird mindset. (“Switch to Firefox!!”
and “Firefox is just as bad!!”).

I’d like to offer a different; probably controversial perspective:

Rendering is a difficult and complex problem to solve. I remember back when I
was younger, rendering a PDF was quite CPU intensive and consumed a decent
amount of ram (for the time), and that does just a tiny minute subset of what
a modern browser can do (and, in fact, many can render pdfs too!).

Modern web browsers are the epitome of a product that has bloated to far
beyond it’s initial parameters, and it’s absolutely amazing that they perform
as well as they do. But I don’t think the web should be used as an application
delivery platform, having the features embedded in to be able to do that turns
a modern web browser into a huge monolithic runtime, renderer and templating
engine all churning together constantly. I mostly lament the availability of a
general purpose language too, which makes it too easy for developers to grab
and use it as soon as they have a minor problem, but that’s not the real issue
to be honest.

If you put your computer science hat on: imagine how you would implement a
fully functional web browser from scratch. I’ll bet good money it would
require a lot of cpu time or a lot of memory (or, both).

~~~
blablabla123
At some point there was a critical mass of people believing Web Apps are super
awesome. (Although I'm not sure if this was ever the majority ;))

Speaking of myself, I was always frustrated that on Linux apps/games were
missing. The situation was even worse when I tried other Operating Systems.
Web Apps seemed to be the ultimate solution for that.

But yes, RAM and CPU usage is insane. (For now the only solution is to buy
computers with a lot of RAM and Swap space I think ;))

------
prike
> I’m lucky enough to have a PC that boasts 32GB of the stuff. Now, that
> amount of RAM is – to be honest – overkill for most things I use my PC for.

You should not care about how much ram chrome consume if you have 32gb,
however i think you should switch to firefox if you care about your privacy
and the future of the web.

~~~
tdewitt
You shouldn't _have_ to care but the reality is, if you use your systems and
chrome eats 4GB+, then you do care. Chrome regularly consumes a major
percentage of my available RAM and I have 32GB.

~~~
basch
isnt that why you have ram? to use it?

~~~
tdewitt
Yes but not for google apps, slack and a browser full of bloat. I have all
this RAM for the actual engineering I do.

------
mmerlin
The Great Suspender extension [0] is a handy RAM saver for tabs you want to
keep open but don't need to use right now.

Pair that with Tabs Outliner extension [1] as a kind of visual bookmarker for
related groups of pages, and Chrome RAM is manageable again.

Another benefit of Tabs Outliner is desktop organizing a dump of all Chrome
pages that were open on my phone's browser (via Chrome sync, then on desktop
Chrome view History, other device, open all, organize in Tabs Outliner and
close tree for later, then close all tabs in mobile Chrome to free up phone
RAM)

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

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-
outliner/eggk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-
outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl?hl=en)

~~~
TMWNN
I prefer The Great Discarder [1]; saves more memory, and Chrome starts very
quickly even with thousands (really) of tabs open. To put another way, Chrome
becomes usable almost immediately, with much less time elapsed than needed to
shut down.

Tabs Outliner looks interesting. Is this a replacement for the "vertical tabs"
extension I've seen others rave about for Firefox?

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
discarde...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
discarder/jlipbpadkjcklpeiajndiijbeieicbdh)

~~~
hs86
It is like Tree Style Tabs but with better keyboard shortcuts, handles a tree
of the entire browsing session and not just for a single window and it can act
as a session manager where you can close entire (sub-)trees without losing
their tree hierarchy. It also can (periodically) upload the tree to GDrive and
allows you to restore the hierarchy on different devices.

The drawbacks are that some features are paid only, it is closed source and
afaik, it doesn't even work on other Chrome-based browsers because it relies
heavily on the Google account login.

~~~
TMWNN
Tabs Outliner looked interesting. Four things I noticed in a cursory tryout:

* I did not see a way to search tabs. * I like how the sidebar auto-updates based on the selected window, but it does not do so to the point of always making the current tab visible in the sidebar * The sidebar window interferes with CLUT,[1] my "Alt-Tab between tabs" extension of choice. * Most seriously, I notice a slight but perceptible slowdown when opening new tabs and moving between tabs.

Since tab-navigation speed is important, and I need to search for tabs much
more often than an always-visible vertical list, I've gone back to Tab Manager
Plus;[2] before that I used
TooManyTabs.[3][https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for-
ch...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for-
chrome/amigcgbheognjmfkaieeeadojiibgbdp)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clut-cycle-last-
us...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clut-cycle-last-used-
tabs/cobieddmkhhnbeldhncnfcgcaccmehgn)

[2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-
plus-f...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-for-
chro/cnkdjjdmfiffagllbiiilooaoofcoeff)

[3] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for-
ch...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for-
chrome/amigcgbheognjmfkaieeeadojiibgbdp)

------
tgsovlerkhgsel
> Plus, Microsoft’s increasingly desperate pleas to stick with Edge that pop
> up in Windows when you search for and download Chrome simply made me even
> more determined to stay away.

I think the aversion to being forced/pressured to do something is pretty
universal, and I'm wondering whether I'm wrong, or whether companies are going
to realize it at some point. I think this also contributed to the failure of
Google+: The harder Google tried to ram it down people's throats, the more
repulsed people were by it.

Of course there is a benefit to advertising/pushing a product, but overdo it,
and you might achieve the opposite: People not just disinterested, but
actively hating your product, forever, just due to the way how they were
pushed to use it.

------
cityzen
Pro tip: you can use chrome extensions in Firefox! I am not sure if I used
this but a little googling will light your path:
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/346981/how-
to...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/346981/how-to-install-
any-chrome-extension-in-firefox/amp/)

Also: Tab wrangler is a great extension for Chrome (can be used on Firefox) to
automatically close unused tabs with rules. May help some of the people that
have memory issues with Chrome.

------
ymolodtsov
Well maybe don't open hundreds of tabs in it since it's inefficient anyway? I
have an MBP with 8Gb of RAM and I never experienced issues because of Chrome.

------
asadkn
If you're a tab hoarder, Chrome does seem to have gotten worse in the last
year.

Usually the GPU process. Even if your tabs are all inactive, killed by
something like Great Discarder, the GPU process continues to use a lot of RAM
(2GB in my case, at times) and CPU.

I am not sure if it's a Mac-specific issue though.

~~~
klingonopera
Honest question to tab hoarders, why not use bookmarks? It saves bandwidth,
system resources, makes you less prone to tracking and cross-site scripting,
at the cost of some elevated organizational/management work and slightly less
convenience?

~~~
imtringued
Because bookmarks are a pain in the ass. I have 174 bookmarks for sites that I
have only visited once and will never visit again and finding whatever I want
takes minutes.

I literally cannot comprehend why anyone would use bookmarks when the friction
is multiple orders of magnitude higher.

99% of my tabs do not live longer than 10 minutes so why should I want to
persist them in a messy non hierarchical list that is neither organized by
context nor by time? If you somehow make bookmarks as frictionless as tabs by
making the new tab button create a bookmark and then show that bookmark as a
tree structure on the sidebar then it wouldn't be any meaningfully different
from a tab other than the fact that it has to reload the entire page every
time you switch bookmarks.

~~~
klingonopera
Granted, that is a different use case. I've seen tab hoarders fire up their
browser, with the same 50 tabs open over and over again, and they usually only
need one.

AFAIK, Firefox has countered this by only loading the tabs when you activate
them after a cold start, so that's pretty much automated bookmarking.

I wouldn't know how to manage without bookmarks (well, yes, .url files
actually, but that's another issue). I'm guessing I have a few hundred of
them, and I find what I need easily, because you can organize them in folders.

------
haydn3
You're literally using a graphics rendering engine for a script someone wrote
to handle how it displays the pictures on your screen. You should be lucky
optimisation and operational benefits of web browsers have come as far as they
have. Web interfaces are nothing more than a miracle, and you're complaining
that the ad-hoc nature of putting up a website and having it render in a magic
box is too poor quality for you because of RAM numbers. Great.

------
naikrovek
I have never had this problem with Chrome on any computer, and I think that it
may be due to my usage patterns compared to those who do suffer this issue.

How many extensions do the afflicted users have? What are they? (They are not
all equal in terms of CPU or RAM usage.) How many tabs do the users have open,
and what are on those tabs? (Simple pages surely use much less RAM than full
browser applications.)

Lots of people complain about Chrome and Firefox RAM usage - I want to know
why I never see the same issue(s).

------
privacyonsec
switch to firefox you will be surprised :)

------
bureaucrat
Switched to Firefox a month ago. It was worse.

Since then I became more thankful of Chrome(Chromium to be exact).

~~~
jplayer01
I've never seen Firefox consume more memory than Chrome. And Chrome chokes way
too quickly on 100+ tabs where Firefox will work fine.

~~~
Stevvo
How can it "choke way too quickly with a 100+ tabs"??? Your brain will choke
way before the browser with that much open.

~~~
imtringued
Go on HN. Open 5 submissions you are interested in. Also don't forget to click
on the comments link. Bang you now have 10 tabs and this is just the start of
your browsing session. As you read those articles you will open more tabs.

------
kodyo
My CPU utilization jumps and maintains at around 25% when I got to techradar
using Chromium with no extensions. I see the same kind of thing with Firefox
with extensions.

But yeah, blame the browsers for the bloat, not the crappy web site you write
for.

------
onyva
Strange how organic content not contaminated by the AdBuddy company (twitter
flooded with their sponsor links and almost no real content) doesn’t even
consider Brave as an option.

~~~
bishalb
You mean the browser that replaces a website's ads with its own? Also it feels
laggy compared to chrome.

------
wademealing
I believe that the blame here is mostly misattributed.

Caching (a good thing) and also the remote sites being bloated. I'm not sure
if or should the browser be fixing that ?

~~~
drcongo
And yet the problem doesn't seem to affect Safari or Firefox. So, people only
visit bloated sites in Chrome?

~~~
dazilcher
No, but it sounds like Safari and FF are not caching as aggressively. After
all, unused ram is wasted ram.

------
jamesholden
Chrome, without any extensions is not that bad. It's when you add all the
extras to it that it starts to get more and more bloated.

------
asplake
Morning routine: kill all Chrome processes bigger than 300MB (Mac)

