Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54 | Hacker News Reader

Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

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385 pointsjotto217 comments

Wow. My normal session now leaves me with around 8gb free out of 16, compared to 1-2gb free previously. Gmail is using less than 1GB again. I might even disable The Great Suspender, and stop killing tabs that use up lots of memory.

Whoever worked on this, you deserve a raise. QOL improvements for so many people.

What is The Great Suspender?

Suspends tabs after a set period of disuse. Great for people who open a ton of tabs in Chrome.

(To add to the description, from their github readme)

> "The Great Suspender" is a free and open-source Google Chrome extension for people who find that chrome is consuming too much system resource or suffer from frequent chrome crashing. Once installed and enabled, this extension will automatically suspend tabs that have not been used for a while, freeing up memory and cpu that the tab was consuming.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender

Ah Ok I thought it might be an OS utility. Thanks for the tip. I also highly recommend session buddy for excessive tab folks.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...

chrome already has this behavior built in, start where I left off under settings.

Is this different?

Yep. You can save named sessions so that you can go back in time as needed.

Indeed. Chrome losing tabs after a crash and subsequent session restore is what led me to Session Buddy.

Chrome's session restore silently loses tabs when you have a lot open. It is completely unreliable in my experience. Sometimes a window will come back with half the tabs missing, which is obvious, but when it's only a couple missing, it's much harder to even know.

Also, Session Buddy lets you export sessions to back them up and move them between computers, etc.

If a tab goes missing and you can't tell, did it really matter?

But then you miss out on the new chance at life http://www.theonion.com/article/accidentally-closing-browser...

23? is that a lot? that's about normal for me, and i didn't think i was too bad. my office mate usually has a couple hundred tabs open.

Last time I restarted Firefox, I had over 350 tabs open. Which is ridiculous, of course, because I'm sure that I haven't looked at more than 100 of them today, but since that all fits into 1.2GB of memory (currently), what's the problem.

Meanwhile, I feel like a compulsive hoarder when there are more than 10 tabs open. :)

It's basically like Bartab Plus for Firefox ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/ ) but for Chrome

Are you using Classic Gmail or Google Inbox?

Classic. Can't handle inbox on a computer, only in the app.

Google inbox web app is painfully slow for me

Yep, me too, across all browsers. Really wish they'd streamline it a bit.

I've been using the cross-platform, open-source WMail [1] for a couple of weeks, and I find that it offers a faster and more streamlined experience than using Inbox in Chrome.

[1] http://thomas101.github.io/wmail/

For me the situation is perhaps not quite as clear cut. On the one hand I'm seeing nice improvements in the large memory hogging tabs. For example a typical reddit thread was reduced from 399 MB down to 295 MB.

On the other hand, it appears all extensions now have a >50MB memory usage floor. For example, the Authy extension was using 5MB under Chrome 54. It's now using 55MB on Chrome 55. Similarly the simple archive.is button extension went from 5MB to 55MB. That's a lot of RAM for spartan functionality.

For the record, I'm using the chrome://system/ page to compare before and after.

That said, it may be possible the additional memory usage for extensions may be a reporting change as opposed to an actual memory increase. Unsure either way.

Private versus shared memory from chrome://system. I suspect shared doesn't really matter.

I'm using shift+esc task manager, and top to see overall system free ram.

Good catch. All the quoted memory figures are for private memory.

The shared memory figures in the session test (10 tabs and 15 extensions) were all at 0 in both Chrome 55 and 54.

Oh it's the other way around for me. Shared are around 50mb for each extension.

I updated Chrome after checking the RAM usage, same tabs opened as before, this is the change:

Browser 324 MB private, 83 MB shared

Browser 226 MB private, 67 MB shared

Note that often RAM usage goes up as the browser is running longer. A good test would wait the same amount of time after opening the browser to check.

This might be a side-effect of --isolate-extensions (out of process iframes for extensions) being turned on in M55.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...

Actually, we decided to delay --isolate-extensions to M56 to get a few more features working for out-of-process iframes first. It's still on for 50% of beta users, but no Chrome Stable users yet. I'll send a clarification to that earlier PSA, but that means that it wouldn't explain an increase in extension memory usage on Chrome Stable.

I quite like OneTab instead of The Great Suspender, more predictable and really straightforward to use : https://www.one-tab.com/

For those who use OneTab I can highly recommend setting a keyboard shortcut for 1) seeing your OneTab list (although that can also be a bookmark), and more importantly, 2) sending the current tab to OneTab.

I had to rediscover how to do this, or OneTab changed in its behavior. You have to go to your extensions screen (Chrome), scroll way to the bottom, and set your shortcuts for extensions there.

Just FYI, as setting extension shortcuts in general wasn't intuitive to me.

Thanks for the info! I had no idea this functionality existed.

I used it way back when and the for about a year I thought the feature had been removed. Was very happy to rediscover it!

It is sad that I cant really tell if you are being sarcastic.

Sure memory is cheap vs. developer time, but still.

Cannot imagine him being sarcastic:

around 8gb free out of 16, compared to 1-2gb free previously.

1-2gb only left is something that greatly lowers the quality of developer time.

> Gmail is using less than 1GB again

Geez. If that's something we need to be happy about, we're doomed.

Chrome can't even begin to compare to Firefox when it comes to handling anything >10 tabs, which is I think what 99% of people max out at, so Chrome doesn't bother about the rest even though people have been begging for years.

- no multiple tab rows

- when you launch, it reloads every single tab vs loading only the active one (the only sane option), causing massive slowdown and network traffic

- as a result in Firefox you can have 100's of tabs, open the browser, work in a few and close, without affecting anything.

- Firefox had Tab groups, an awesome visual representation, before they made it optional due to everyone copying Chrome's limited feature set.

- Chrome still uses much more memory

- Firefox extensions are by design much more powerful. e.g. Session Manager. And things like Tree style tabs etc.

I have recently been running FF in parallel with Chrome. If I'm using non-Google properties, that don't use bad extensions, I quite like using FF. It's not quite as stable, but it "feels" faster and lighter.

Firefox easily handles upwards of 50 tabs while Chrome keeps crashing most of the times for me and takes up a lot of load time.

FF extensions are really great compared to Chrome (apart from some Chorome Apps). My only remaining gripe with Firefox is the tab spinning problem (it seems to improve after every new build. I'm on nightly.).

I typically have like 80 tabs open at any time with Firefox - I use them like temporary bookmarks.

Great news! A simple weather website, with about 1 MB worth of actual content (text, markup, images, layout) now only uses 250 MB of memory. And it only takes a few seconds to load on a 100Mbps+ connection whenever I click a menu item (that's with all ads and tracking blocked and most of the stuff already cached).

I'm sorry, I just don't see any reason to celebrate.

I personally just do a Google search for 'weather' if I want local weather. Otherwise, 'weather <location>'. Very fast and lightweight.

Exactly this. Even though it is not quite 1MB, but more like 5-10MB including all the images.

But requiring 250MB of memory, AND some doesn't even load 60fps smooth on latest machines. At times i wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with the Web Stack.

Console yourself by remembering that the vast majority of people creating these websites don't have computer science degreees. They learned their "trade" over a few weekends. Their "profession" is the equivalent of self-taught backyard abortionists.

Fun fact, even though it's downloaded as compressed format, the windows drawing api bitblt requires bmp format, so it's probably saved in memory as bmp. A 1024x768x24bpp bmp is multiple megabytes, even though the jpeg is 100kb.

(I think..)

But Chrome doesn't use bitblt afaik. It's GPU composited, which does support a number of tile-level compression formats.

YEs, but images 2,336 x 3,504 = 8,185,344 pixels @ 24bit color roughly equals to 24MB. That is lots of images even if you are on native resolution retina display. And doubling that gives you 48MB only. ( And someone has pointed out they are compressed differently within memory, so likely only consuming 1/2 to 1/3 memory size )

That leaves with 200MB memory gods knows what they are.

Not just the Windows drawing API, but essentially any drawing API requires that images be decompressed. Some sprite sheets are particularly egregious. I've seen sprite sheets with dozens of 32x32 sprites stacked above each other, and a single wide (let's say 1024x32) sprite at the bottom. This can give you a sprite sheet which is 1024x2048, decompressing to 8 MB, with literally 97% of the data being blank pixels. Fixing this on the browser side is very hard - it's a content problem.

The solution is to lay out sprite sheets to minimize blank space. Rearranging the sprites can easily get the number of blank pixels down to ~5-10%, thus saving ~7 MB, in essentially all browsers.

I think that web stack has its problems, but generally problem is developers (or their managers) who don't care about performance. It's possible to create awesome and performant websites with current web stack.

Come on man, you don't want to be that guy at HN that rains on everyone's parade. A 30% decrease in RAM usage for an app as complex as Chrome is really something to be celebrated.

Great work is done piece by piece.

He has a point. For me, most of my 'web' experience isn't doing anything I don't remember doing in 1995. The things websites are doing I usually don't want them to do.

I just want to see text, images, and video with light formatting and hyperlinks. This _doesn't_ require hundreds of megabytes of memory. It would involve restricting what the new web could do and those restrictions would make things better. We don't need the kitchen sink in every page.

That's about the reasoning behind amp...

Didn't downvote you but I think you fell for the marketing.

Did he? The original comment said "It would involve restricting what the new web could do and those restrictions would make things better. We don't need the kitchen sink in every page." which sounds exactly what AMP is doing.

Meh, I mean, it's in the neighborhood but philosophically unsatisfying.

I want to cut the fat, not add another layer of it on top.

Something like writing a simpler feature-clone (not how it does things but copies the big picture things it does) of postscript with hyperlinks and videos.

> It would involve restricting what the new web could do and those restrictions would make things better. We don't need the kitchen sink in every page

Sounds like you want to set a mobile user-agent string. Most sites will avoid serving you the whole 'kitchen sink'.

They mentioned that weather.com crashed their website. Their website is always extremely slow for me as well. It's ridiculous how poorly designed their website can be for such a simple service.

I use weather.gov instead for precisely this reason.

It doesn't even have sunrise/sunset? Or am I just missing it? (I use Weather Underground.)

You can run `curl wttr.in` to get your local weather and 3-day forecast.

Or just go to http://wttr.in/

tried that, how handy!

I love this webservice. Nothing else to add, just my love.

Awesome! Kudos. Now if they could sneak in an animated weather map...

you have changed my life

Can we get the temperature in degC?

http://wttr.in/?m

For other options see http://wttr.in/:help

Awesome, thanks! It's hard being a metric user in the US :P

It seems to do region detection, though. `curl wttr.in/dresden` gives me celsius scale and km/h wind speeds.

Yes, but I'm located in the US, so I get Fahrenheit.

Hmm. "Weather for City: Santa Rosa, Philippines"

That's the wrong Santa Rosa, in the wrong country. There's an interesting bug in there somewhere.

> Get city by IP address

> Search weather for city

It accepts airport codes, so you can use the one for Sonoma County Airport (assuming it's close by enough).

http://wttr.in/sts

TO THE DEVELOPER, FWIW: I'm also in California and it thinks I'm in the Philippines in a town with the same name as one a few miles from here. I assume you use IP to find town, country; throw away country; look up town in a list with country names in alphabetical order (Philippines < United States)

Note that even if you get the country right it won't be enough, because there is a "Springfield" in each of the 50 states. You'll have to get keep all of the location info you get from the IP lookup, not throw part of it away and attempt to recover it.

As a workaround, you can use your zip code instead. E.g. http://wttr.in/90401

Doesn’t work with German ZIP codes: http://wttr.in/24107 or ISO ZIP codes: http://wttr.in/D-24107

Why would it work with German zip codes? Zip codes are not universal...

Because there are people in Germany who want to get the weather?

I think his point is that there would be collisions with every other country so it could only concivably work with one countries zip codes.

Thank you.

Well, the country prefix solves the collision problem, after which it's just a data problem.

There are countries which don't have zip codes.

Turns out that when I'm in the US, I can't use my credit card to order takeaway food online, because they universally require zip code validation, and neither the postcode for my Swiss credit card (8047) or my UK credit card (IV548JS) (both codes modified to protect the guilty) pass the very simple minded zip code validation.

...and Ireland only had them at all since 2015.

Why would it work with USA zip codes? Zip codes are not universal...

Because it's programmed for US zip codes.

So, you can't just enter any zip code in there. There would be clashes since zip codes aren't unique across countries.

Just to be a pedant, that's not what was stated: "As a workaround, you can use your zip code instead.".

Your assumption is that zip code == "U.S zip code" which is a fair assumption if the site only supports the U.S. Other comments on the thread shows the site does support locations outside of the U.S. It is therefore also a fair assumption that it _might_ support similar functionality outside the U.S., kuschku simply tested said assumption and stated that it was incorrect so that other readers were aware.

For that use case there's the ISO standard for ZIP codes, as used in paper mail:

Short Country prefix (same as on international car ID plates), then a minus, then the ZIP code.

So, for Germany, D-24107 would be one such code.

Yet, it doesn't handle that either.

you can also use basic text search, which works internationally: http://wttr.in/santa%20rosa,%20ca

> Note that even if you get the country right it won't be enough, because there is a "Springfield" in each of the 50 states.

D'oh!

Yes, and here's another d'oh: I learned long ago, years before The Simpson's show existed, that there was a Springfield in every state. The show's creators may have heard the same urban legend back in those days before we had that oracle called Google. But, for the first time in all these years, I just went off to check out this claim for myself, and I'm wrong. There is no Springfield, Utah, or Alaska, or North Carolina, for example, and I find no evidence there ever was one in Utah (I didn't check the others), so it's not something that WAS true when I was a kid but no longer is. I don't think it was ever true.

D'oh! (All these years.... How many other things do I "know" that aren't true...?)

I can confirm that it does correctly give me Minneapolis, MN, not Minneapolis, KS, which is what the MacOS Dashboard weather widget would display around 10.5 or so if you entered "Minneapolis".

I'm definitely not in Santa Clara, Cuba...

I get the same thing: shows a city in a different country with the same name.

Thanks for the helpful link!

This is great. Hope the dev fixes location detection! Weather from the terminal, woot

Location detection is notoriously hard. For example, my auto-detected location is 500 km off because of the corporate HTTP proxy.

As mentioned above, you can explicitly specify cities and locations in multiple ways. Chances are, it uses the GMap api (or similar), so you can input pretty much anything resembling a location description. Not sure there is something to fix :)

neat, thanks for the tip.

weather.com uses drupal7 + apache2 + ubuntu + angularjs, not sure why it is that slow, I use weather.com once a while just fine though.

It is only because of AngularJS + Ads.

This is a slow down caused by browser rendering/parsing/JS execution. I'm not sure what the server operating system would have to do with it.

Drupal can be a real PITA to properly set up with caching. If you're running anything above 10 req/s your server is going to melt without. Oh, and it's always worth a try to swap the default search for Elasticsearch, Solr or any other external engine.

That AngularJS is a slow piece of ... is another part. I coded up a simple Twitter client using Cordova with Angular, scrapped and rebuilt it in jQuery with Cordova (was a test if one can actually build a backendless Twitter app). Such speed, many awesome.

I guess many of the "hipster" JS devs use the latest, max-spec macbook/iphone only and totally ignore the rest of ordinary PCs/average Android phone, or they wouldn't dare to touch Angular and friends even with a pole.

Source: operating a couple Drupal instances.

Drupal 8 pretty much killed my love for drupal, I'm now switching to wordpress, though I miss drupal's book module in particular.

1. Install uMatrix. 2. Allow *.mapbox.com on weather.com 3. Enjoy a fast and useful site.

Same trick works for many sites, particularly old media (TV, newspapers, content spam etc).

Also, there is https://weather.gov

It does not seem to support TLS, so: http://weather.gov

Heh, the cert includes their Zabbix instance, but not the bare domain.

https://www.weather.gov but mixed content

My bad then, nice catch!

Even better, weather.gov/ZIP e.g. http://weather.gov/55455

Try Weather Underground: Their graph is the most impressive, useful visualization of weather data around, IME. For example:

https://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast...

Note you can click the controls at the top right of the graph and add/remove elements. The graph is a bit heavy, but that may be necessary to generate the visualization.

What I didn't realize was that weather underground is now owned by the weather channel :(

Technically it's owned by The Weather Company which in turn is owned by IBM. The TV channel is now a separate entity. I still find their forecasts to be more reliable and the user weather station data is great

Weather Underground also has a lightweight telnet service. Telnet to rainmaker.wunderground.com and enjoy the super fast ascii text interface.

awesome news then, chrome really needs to improve memory usage, especially when I have lots of tabs open.

under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.

120 tabs?! What for?!

I do this. It's a curse. I don't know why.

I once had 1000 tabs open in firefox. I only found out when I accidentally clicked the x and it asked "are you sure you want to close 1000 tabs".

Tabs are the new bookmarks.

Sadly they aren't bookmarks and then people moan about memory usage, when they should get a reality check instead.

I don't know if you're familiar with the ins and outs of writing computer programs, but it's actually often practical to make a program that does one thing do another instead. So in this case one obvious thing that could be done is to have a dormant-type (exact terminology TBC) tab.

Such things would have an entry on the tab bar like a normal tab, but wouldn't actually have anything loaded until you clicked. Firefox already supports this sort of thing internally, it looks like, since when you reload a session that had a bunch of open tabs, it doesn't seem to load each tab's contents until you click on it.

(Open such a thing with a particular shortcut, or by transforming an existing tab into a dormant one - obviously equivalent in terms of JS callbacks and so on to closing the window.)

Other possibilities could include multiple types of tabs, and/or alternative UIs for lists of pages you like/pages you want to look at sometime soon.

>it's actually often practical to make a program that does one thing do another instead

Like using Photoshop to abort a system shutdown if you forgot to commit.[0]

0.https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-greatest-software-misuses...

On Windows, using the built in notepad, you can block any shutdown by having an instance pen with any unsaved changes. Handy when Windows schedules a reboot and you've got your debugging session setup just right.

I read that Win10 will still force a scheduled reboot, even with unsaved documents: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3hb614/windows_10...

Now we know how people behave we can engineer the software to work well for them. Suspend the LRU tabs so they can be paged out, etc.

They're better. If I bookmark something with any service, chances of me ever checking that out again drop to nearly zero.

Tabs, by virtue of being there bugging you, are bookmarks, to-do lists, and task reminders all in one.

No, they aren't. I don't know about you, but I can't have more than 20 tabs open and consciously be aware of the content. I can't think of people like above, having 120 tabs. It's probably a waste of time and resources. First because you can't possibly hold in your memory 120 tabs, thus you'll have to visit them or read the title to remind you why is it there on the first place. With bookmarks at least you can use the search bar...

So it ends up being counterproductive.

Naw, at least with me I seem to be able to by treating the tab ordering as a conceptual discovery ordering. That is, I remember what things I learned / researched prior to and following each tab. It's lossy, but because each has a unique relationship with its surrounding concepts there's plenty of opportunities for parity-like behaviour; redundancy.

When researching a thing I'll open up some high level page about it, then do breadth-first searches of tab contents, opening up new tabs whenever I see something that looks interesting, has wider implications, or possibly has some weaker relationship to a thing with one or both of those properties and I think I might be able to traverse the concept graph this way to find it / them.

So I end up with a sort of flat tree where it corresponds almost directly to my earlier thought graph which produced them. I can work with maybe 200 this way... But not more. Unless I open them in different windows - sometimes different browsers, actually, to help further differentiate/compartmentalise them (eg. I'll use this strategy for largely disparate topics). Then, well, I'm not sure where I top out, all I can say is I once crashed my box from out of memory (not running swap), and it's a 32GB box soooo... I dunno.

There are likely many others that work this way. Perhaps it's not common, but I also feel that it's very unlikely unique!

I do the same. I also try to organize my bookshelf in the same fashion.

You gave me an idea to a chrome plugin to manage tabs. I'm gonna open ne some tabs to learn how to write plugins.

For me session manager sessions (in firefox) are the new bookmarks.

i try to split different fields of interest into separate windows. Then i save that window as a suitably titled session and close the window. If i need to add a new tab to a session, i use the "append to session" feature. That way i dont clutter up my bookmarks or my primary firefox session.

I personally use tabs like a desktop with all kinds of papers, documents and books flying around. Sort of like this:

https://s15.postimg.org/dpq7mpmaz/messydesk.jpg

That seems like Einstein's desk. Is that correct? I remember seeing this picture before.

Sometimes I open 100 or so tabs to do repetitive stuff I cannot code, data entry work that won't be easily automated or needs the human touch, e.g. updating a product catalogue. On top of the 10-50 tabs open that gets to be a lot of heavy pages but makes for an efficient workflow. With hot keys and 'close all tabs to the right' I can quickly get through a lot of stuff that needs attention to detail and focus to get done.

All I am saying is that there are situations when a lot of tabs is the best option given the circumstances, e.g. lots of data entry work.

I too keep a lot of tabs open. I use OneTab and The Great Suspender chrome extensions to also keep memory usage under control. They've been indispensable tools for the tab hoarders like me.

great, did not know this, I do use clutter-free extension all the time which avoids the same URL on multiple tabs.

Exactly. Its hoarding. So eventually they will have to build in features to protect hoarders from themselves.

This is mainly because Chrome allocates a process for each page whereas FF only allocates a thread. The important factor being that threads share an address space where processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory. Separate processes are arguably more secure and of one process crashes it does not take down the whole browser but all this comes at a cost. This cost is very apparent with many tabs open.

> processes are allocated their own and thus consume more memory.

Copy-on-write means this needn't be a large overhead. Only pages that change after forking are duplicated.

But the OS is committing to supplying memory for any writable pages you duplicated, because after all you might write to them. The OS doesn't know which pages you won't duplicate.

Unless you set your vm.overcommit_memory sysctl variable to 1 (= never refuse malloc), duplicated writable pages are going to subtract from available memory, even if all copies are currently the same.

Sure. So your memory usage is reported as high but might not be actually high. Some sophistication is needed to interpret resource counts.

The primary security gain of sandboxing is about making it harder for web content to hijack your computer by exploiting security bugs. Many common types of bugs can be exploited to get remote code execution in browsers because of unsafe programming languages used (C/C++).

Both Chrome and Firefox have multi-process sandboxes now, Firefox is a little behind and plans to enable multiple content processes next year.

While Chrome's is more granular, it does share processes between web pages from the same domain so won't start a new one for quite every tab.

They're shared among site instances, not the same domain. It has to do with web standard semantics. Google has been working on https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-is... for quite some time which will probably ship in 2017. That's the next step beyond the --process-per-site-instance after --isolate-extensions.

Firefox is more than just a little bit behind when it comes to sandboxing though... there's a LOT more to sandboxing than splitting up processes. That doesn't result in any meaningful isolation without a lot of further work, and improving sandboxing is a major undertaking that Chrome has been working on for years.

I can't recommend this extension enough, The Great Suspender:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

It freezes your tab after a set amount of time, freeing up the memory for each tab.

And it's also a huge battery saver.

My laptop has no ssd. This sluggishness brings back memories of linux trashing the swap partition when it ran out of memory back in the early 2000s. Quite understandable since back then most people don't have that much RAM (64Mb?). Nowadays I have 8Gb on my laptop and I run linux with swap disabled. The only disk trashing that I'm having nowadays is due to chrome, and it's definitely not due to swap but the effect is almost the same - at best the laptop is unusable for up to 30 seconds, at worst, I have to do a hard reboot because that's the only way to recover - I can't even switch to a new terminal to kill chrome. Attempts to log in via the tty console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) in order to kill chrome is futile. I could enter the username, but the password prompt took forever to appear. Most of the time it expires after 60 seconds. If I manage to enter the password, the shell prompt can take forever to appear.

Nowadays I do a "killall chrome; sleep 2; killall chrome" whenever it starts to trash the disk and giving me the bad vibe.

put chrome cache on a ram disk, helped me a lot last time I had a spinning hdd

I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people that horde tabs as temp bookmarks. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage. You can also type cmd-shift-e or ctrl-shift-e to switch to it.

Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions. (patches are awesome too)

In Chrome you can press "Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + D" and bookmark all open tabs into a folder. Then you can right click on the folder later to open all those tabs.

Better use OneTab extension, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

Any way to set the minimum tab width yet? Once I get 7+ tabs in a window, they're truncated to a useless width.

Perhaps close them.

I'm assuming that was already though of.

Firefox does this.

nope. no tab overflow.

If you need that many tabs you should take a look at tree tabs for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/

it's the best thing to have all your tabs stacked on the side of the screen and still fit, alongside with a search bar!

Firefox originally had a preference for that, but they moved it to CSS, so you can modify it via an addon or with userchrome.css:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

Also, if you are not yet using 64-bit Chrome, you really should. It is more stable and avoids internal "out of memory" errors individual tabs can sometimes return. Not the default Chrome for some reason!

It's the default on Mac, not sure on windows.

I'm curious why this is the case. You'd think if Google wanted 64 bit Chrome to be the default, they'd do it on both platforms even if only for consistency's sake.

It might just be because of the difference in platforms. 32-bit Mac has been gone for half a decade, whereas 32-bit Windows is still out there (32-bit Windows 10 exists), and those wouldn't be able to run 64-bit Chrome, so they may be using 32-bit as the default in order to avoid user confusion.

More specifically about OS X: support for 32-bit hardware was dropped in 2011, but support for 64-bit applications has been available on all 64-bit hardware since 2007, even if you were running the 32-bit OS kernel. Apple handled that transition way better than Microsoft.

It helps that Apple controls the hardware of their devices.

It does help some, but probably the biggest advantage is that they simply didn't have to support x86 machines from before 2006. By that point, ACPI, AHCI, EHCI, OHCI, HDA drivers would get you a working system, except for 3D graphics and networking. That's why Hackintosh systems are viable: basic PC hardware is extremely standardized now compared to what it was in the 1990s.

Apple's hardware platform control helped them cut down on the number of network drivers they needed to implement, and their decision to do the 3D graphics drivers in-house didn't save them much effort but made things a lot more straightforward.

By contrast, Windows 7 officially supports GPUs from 2001 running on systems that could be quite a bit older, from the days when there were half a dozen third-party chipset vendors that couldn't properly implement a spec even when they were trying to make standard interfaces. Windows 10 moves the cutoff forward quite a bit with its NX bit requirement, but still targets a diversity of core system components that simply didn't exist by the time Apple entered the x86 market.

Microsoft and Apple both have to contend with pretty much the same driver challenges for peripherals like printers, although it tends to be easier to put those drivers in userspace where 32-bit vs 64-bit isn't a showstopper.

To be fair, microsoft's userbase requires backwards compatibility a lot more than apple's does, since Macs are largely consumer systems rather than enterprise ones.

Microsoft got flack for dropping 16bit app support in 64bit OSes (since 64 bit windows doesn't have NTVDM). They'd be flayed alive if they dropped 32bit support.

Apple still supports 32-bit apps. Aside from memory usage and possibly performance, the difference is not noticeable to the user.

32 vs 64-bit app support is quite separate from 32 vs 64-bit kernel-space drivers. 32-bit operating systems need 32-bit drivers and 64-bit operating systems need 64-bit drivers. 64-bit operating systems can run 64-bit apps and 32-bit apps.

Crucially, however, 32-bit Mac OS X 10.5 could run 64-bit apps just fine. That, combined with OS X's universal binary support, made it easy to start deploying 64-bit application code far earlier than most Windows apps began transitioning.

Most of Apple's computer models were only available with 32-bit x86 for less than a year, so the installed base that needed their applications to still be 32-bit was minuscule compared to the installed base of 32-bit Windows editions that couldn't run 64-bit apps even if the CPU was 64-bit capable. Most Windows application developers faced bigger challenges in deploying 64-bit code than Mac app developers, and the Windows devs' work would benefit a much smaller fraction of their userbase. Windows app developers don't switch to 64-bit unless they absolutely have to. (e.g. this year's 64-bit re-release of Skyrim, to accommodate the address space requirements of heavy modding. Skyrim was originally released in late 2011 as a 32-bit only game despite listing CPU requirements that couldn't be satisfied by any 32-bit CPU.)

I think their installer detects what Windows you are on and installs that, now; but I could be wrong.

Yes I have installed Chrome on W10 on few machines and always got the 64-bit version automatically.

This is only for low memory devices. From the linked article -

"All the improvements discussed above reduce the Chrome 55 overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices compared to Chrome 53. Other device segments will only benefit from the zone memory improvements."

The "zone memory improvements" however were also significant:

"Figure 5 shows the peak zone memory improvements since M54 which reduced by about 40% on average over the measured websites. "

From: http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...

Anyone have any perspective as to whether these gains will flow to Electron?

If they didn't, then that would mean development on Electron had stopped. Or that the Electron team needs to remove these features in their fork, and considering how much grief Electron's RAM usage gets, I don't see that happening.

The notes suggested a lot of the gains were targeting low memory environments so it wasn't immediately clear if it was a win in all dimensions.

The underlying changes are in V8, so you'll see them in Electron too.

https://v8project.blogspot.co.nz/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optim...

How does this compare to Firefox?

Not that great. Chrome still crashes beyond 50 tabs and/or eats up a lot of CPU slowing the system while I easily have 150 tabs on FF.

For the layman web developer with little knowledge of browser internals, how does this compare to Firefox's memory usage?

poorly

AWS Console went from 284 to < 150 but that was the only tab that broke 100mb. Not sure what all of you with 100s of 250mb+ tabs are doing.

Excited for electron + node to get this improvement.

This sounds too good to be true. Are there any downsides to this improvement?

A random 30% of the document and scripts don't load. ;)

I'm still getting full white and black screens on Chrome 54.

It's 2016.

Same thing for me, but only on my 2011 MBP. My girlfriend's 2012 MBP doesn't do it, and neither does my work 2015 MBP. I think it might be related to Chromecast, because that's the only difference between each of those browsers aside from hardware.

Do you have any extensions like that might be causing it?

What do you mean? Have you tried reinstalling? Updating graphics drivers? Turning off hardware acceleration?

Tried everything except turning off hardware accel.

But that should not be it - because it works fine on startup.

Every once and a while, screen goes black for most pages, even on reload.

Have to restart.

I shouldn't have to tinker to get a web browser to just load pages.

More exciting news coming in Chrome 56 with complete optimization.. V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language. Can't wait for Christmas presents

Do you have a link for that?

https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/12/v8-release-56.html says:

> V8 version 5.6, which will be in beta until it is released in coordination with Chrome 56 Stable in several weeks...

> Starting with 5.6, V8 can optimize the entirety of the JavaScript language.

That is welcome change, I already switched to Opera and happy with it, but we really need a lot of choices always and that is why I welcome this change.

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ uses less CPU

It also looks like the UI shrunk 30%, and there's no way to change it, except by changing the DPI of the whole OS.

I didn't notice any UI change when I reloaded chrome after updating.

Previously Chrome did not take computer DPI settings into account. Now it scales the UI with DPI settings. I found my laptop was at 125% scaling without me knowing.

http://techdows.com/2016/10/fix-chrome-54-looks-zoomed-in.ht...

On Linux on my 32" 4K screen Chromium automatically scales to 150% or so and the top chrome is the height of a Coke can.

I have to start the process with "--force-device-scale-factor=1" to make it stop.

I got the opposite problem (tabs and address bar were bigger after update), and I fixed it by changing the flag "UI Layout for the browser's top chrome" in chrome://flags from "Touch" to "Normal". Maybe this flag can also fix your problem.

from my testing, there's also a bit of a dip in js perf. maybe due to GC aggressiveness tweaks.

My own tests confirm these numbers.

I have a question - should the same also be true on the latest Chromium?

Chrome and Chromium are essentially the same. In this case the optimizations were made to the V8 JS engine, which is part of Chromium.

does this help the battery life in any way?

No, if anything the energy impact looks worse than before on OS X. I love Chrome, but the fact that it's almost completely unusable on laptops that aren't plugged in is problematic.

RAM is one of your least power hungry components compared to other parts of your computer, such as what generates heat (CPU/GPU) or produces physical motion (fans or spinning drives).

This makes no sense. RAM generates heat just as CPU does, and RAM also actually does consume a substantial percentage of laptop power. However, said usage isn't related to how much RAM is being used, really; it's a constant usage rate to keep the current RAM state alive.

Well, it makes sense to me: CPU and GPU take in the order of 10 times as much power as RAM. RAM power usage just isn't depending on load, like that of CPU and graphics.

Reducing RAM usage will reduce disk activity, though, so there's that.

Why would that be? Unless you're frequently running out of RAM and swapping to disk, RAM usage shouldn't correlate to disk usage much, right?

Because all of that "unused" RAM in the background is actually being used by the OS for disk caching, thus reducing the overall frequency of reads.

Hard to know. Lower memory usage will generally help battery usage, but it sounds like the garbage collection is more aggressive now, which might offset the savings.

If you avoid swapping because of it, yes.

[edit: removing comment as people made it unreadable anyway.]

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/...

It's not so relevant to the conversation about memory, but is indeed a feature that has been removed.

If you want to have a single key on Linux representing going back again, I would recommend not to overload the backspace, but pick a key you don't need.

On my system F7 I never use, so it's perfect for this purpose.

$> xmodmap -e 'keycode 73 = XF86Back F7 F7 F7'

Or persistent:

$> keycode 73 = XF86Back F7 F7 F7 >> ~/.xmodmap

I hope I save you all a lot of keystrokes in the future!

Or get a chromebook: there's a nice "back" button at the top left next to "esc". There are also some nice "forward" and "reload" buttons.

Typo in the title of the article linked : It's not Chome, it's Chrome.

Nice... but why is it faster/memory is more important to me. I suppose I could look at the changelog but it would have been nice if the post guessed why.

JavaScript engine (aka V8) improvements, per the post they linked:

http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...

> heap snapshot 87 KB 85 KB 3%

Are those really kilobytes? Not megabytes?

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