🤍 Appeal to the Browser Goddesses 🤍

Can we please make it a thing where 32GB of RAM isn’t an insufficient amount for day to day web browser usage? Getting an OOM core dump for that reason is inexcusable.

  • Should the Zoom browser app really need 2GB on a single tab when it’s already downscaling a 1080p feed to 320p on an enterprise account?
  • Should Amazon’s website really need 1GB per tab just to view the cart or a ~800Mb for a single simple product page?
  • Please remind me how an MKdocs fully static page with a single 400k image and no datatables or fancy JS somehow require 242Mb?
  • Or perhaps shed some light on the requirement where Google’s main page with a single search form somehow needs ~500Mb

There are no “good reasons” for these inefficiencies. We don’t suddenly have better search fields or compressed jpegs now vs a decade ago with 1/10th of the system resources.

#developer #webdev #linux #browsers #chrome #firefox #ensh11n

  • Nazo
    1•1 day ago

    @[email protected] FWIW, for some reason turning off hardware acceleration seems to reduce overall memory usage. Somehow. Doesn’t make sense (it should only affect VRAM) but it helps.

    But your fundamental point stands. A simple page uses far far more RAM AND CPU than it should. I like to do a handful of things on a little mini PC I bought a long time ago (I use it sort of like an HTPC) but the processor it uses shoots up to 60+C just opening some sites. Simply opening the site. If I open two bad tabs at once it spikes to 70.

  • Doerk
    19•21 days ago

    @[email protected] Today’s browsers are monsters, designed to serve overloaded and bloated websites. Today’s websites and web-apps are designed to take everything just because it’s there. I miss the good old days of the internet, when it was mainly designed for sharing information in plain text format (that was the time even before annoying gifs showed up). But unfortunately these days will never come back.

  • @[email protected]
    12•21 days ago

    It’s not the browser but the websites.

    Two way video streaming will be always resource intensive.

    But for the other websites the choise is yours, you don’t have to use amazon or goog, there are alternatives.

    Also if you doesn’t have enough ram close the tabs. My 10 years old low end laptop with 8GB ram, I know I can’t have more than 6-8 tabs open at the same time.

  • Johan Halse
    2•20 days ago

    @[email protected] it’s usually not as bad as it looks though, browsers will use ALL THE RAM if it’s available because why not, you know? Better to use the memory and make everything fast rather than just leave it lying around! They’ll adjust their usage downwards if other apps need the memory.

    • @[email protected]
      4•20 days ago

      no, it doesn’t work that way. The os does that with caching because it can release the memory should another user program ask for it. The browser just takes all of that memory. As far as the system is concerned, that memory is in use, not available.

    • @rdri
      3•20 days ago

      They’ll adjust their usage downwards if other apps need the memory.

      If it really works that way (which I doubt) then I don’t want my apps to spend resources on constantly monitoring the RAM situation.