Firefox outperforms Chrome in speed for the first time according to a Speedometer assessment::undefined
I’ve loved Chrome (on windows) for many years but at this point when you open task manager it’s practically using up more resources than the operating system. Because it is. It’s essentially like running a second operating system…
Great idea, Google should do that and call it like… Chrome O-- ChromOS, yeah that’s it.
Exactly, should a web browser need to be a complete operating system, or can it just show you the damn internet? Feeling like a cranky old man here
A browser—any browser—does have to do most of what an operating system does. Every web page is an app and many of them are as complicated as desktop or mobile apps. Hell, a lot of them are full desktop apps—a lot of “native” desktop apps are just web apps running in a special browser window that lacks the usual browser UI.
There is this misconception of “using a lot of ram = bad”, but memory is not like cpu or gpu cycles.
Unused memory is wasted memory. Chrome will use available memory to improve responsiveness. Primarily the memory use comes from keeping all open tabs in memory, so they are in the same state as you left them.
When the system runs low on ram, chrome will start discarding old tabs and giving back memory to other processes. Firefox does the same thing.
Also windows task manager is very inconsistent when it comes to memory usage. Right now it’s telling me chromium is using 1.4gb for 47 tabs. And memory usage is a lot more complicated anyway.
Hmm…interesting. I didn’t know Chrome was smart enough to use less ram if the system is taxed. Figured it just always used a shit ton…which sucks if you’re editing videos or something and need to open a browser or something.
That’s because it isn’t as smart as it sounds. Like with everything in programming there’s a tradeoff being made. This behavior runs the risk of making the computer unresponsive while the garbage collector and the scheduler run after each other trying to clean house. “Unused memory is wasted memory” is kind of a fallacy. Overextending and requesting the OS for more memory than is available will always hurt performance. Ram operations aren’t free, however much software engineers like to pretend they are. Neither are scheduling tasks. They cost time and responsiveness and can add up fast.
One of the immediate consequences, for example, is that if the users wants to interact with one of the discarded tabs, now the browser has to re-download the page (internet IO is insanely slow compared to disk operations), reload it to memory from disk cache which can also be slow—specially if the disk is busy with other IO—discard other older tabs to make room (compounding the problem), be slapped in the wrist because the OS says “No, you can’t have DaVinci’s RAM!” scramble for some more ram from some other idle task, reestablish the page state which might’ve been lost. Etc. it becomes messy fast, and now the user is frustrated that “I was reading this page a minute ago, why is it taking so long to load again, is my OS frozen? Damn I lost the forms I had partially filled?” So no, ballooning memory until it’s all used up is not inherently always a good strategy. Nevermind that Chrome (and FF as well) have been found to have severe memory leaks that come and go.
Counter-point: Chrome brought multiple computers/laptops to a standstill, but Firefox doesn’t. I used Chrome for years and just put up with it… But the lagging/slowness literally stopped when I switched. So while I’m sure you’re right in theory, something about Google’s implementation sucked on all the computers I used it on…
Switched to Firefox years ago and never looked back.
It’s good to see this result replicated. The only thing I wish Firefox had natively was tab groups, they’re a really useful feature for various organizing things. Otherwise, they’re clearly one of not the best browser on the market.
Firefox not having tab groups is the only reason I haven’t switched over, once they do that I’ll probably never use a chromium browser again.
funny thing actually: Firefox had tab-groups built in. They then decided to remove it as an builtin feature and offer it as an extension instead, but not long after, when they switched the extension system, the extension was no longer supported
I’ve heard that. I wonder why they removed native functionality for tab groups, was there some problem with them?
It’s good to see this result replicated. The only thing I wish Firefox had natively was tab groups, they’re a really useful feature for various organizing things. Otherwise, they’re clearly one of not the best browser on the market.
Just use “Simple Tab Groups” extension. It’s pretty good. And on top of that you can use other extensions, so that for example all tabs within a group automatically get added to a container (isolating them from other tabs). Really useful when shopping for stuff so advertisers can’t track you around different shopping sites (or at least it makes it more difficult)
This is huge. I’m actually starting to get optimistic about the future of the internet.
Not surprising, considering how bloated Chrome is.
