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Comment by lsh | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Vivaldi as my default browser 6+ months ago after new-Opera became such an overwhelming disappointment I felt I had to abandon what it had become after fifteen or more years of use. Vivaldi definitely has the old Opera spirit, but not the performance. On original Opera I could have hundreds of tabs open, in Vivaldi I can have 60? not such a big deal, right!? well it's partly that, partly just a constant reminder that software has become horribly inefficient even with scads of system resources - Opera always felt extremely small and efficient. Vivaldi feels big and heavy like emacs (that I also love and use) but less performant.

I feel that came off negatively! Vivaldi is a fantastic modern browser.

On Arch: yaourt -S vivaldi-snapshot

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I fear this is largely due to modern websites. If you used old Opera on modern websites they would be broken (lack of new features) and still pretty slow.

JS and image sizes have gone up exponentially. I remember discussion on Slashdot a decade ago about average page size going above 100KB - now the average is easily into multiple megabytes. It "works fine" in chrome on a macbook pro so who gives fuck, right? We can't go back to an older web - we can't get off this train, and we can't slow it down, it's inexorably pulled forward by market mechanisms way bigger than we are.

+1. I noticed the other day that a single Medium blog post downloaded MORE assets (in terms of MBs) that a multi user ERP application that I used to maintain in a large multi million dollar turnover business network back in the 80's. (And I am including the ERP database file sizes as well.)

Enjoy this metric: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548816

And nowadays* Chrome unloads "old" tabs from memory, which must be a frustrating user experience for low memory users, open something in a new tab, try to go to the previous tab, and the browser had to load it again.

* Maybe they've fixed this

Of course it all works on the developer's machine, it has 16GB RAM, full HD screen and a connection straight to the backbone...

Well. To be fair the developer is upset that the MacBook pro doesn't come with 32GB RAM.

What's the alternative in this situation though? If you don't have enough RAM to hold everything you don't have enough RAM.

This seems like a decent solution, because the user experience is "wait a bit when loading stale tabs", rather than "have the entire browser choke without being really sure why"

Have you tried firefox with a tab unloading extension?

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