How Come All My Browsers Suddenly Suck? | Hacker News Reader

How Come All My Browsers Suddenly Suck?

theatlantic.com

6 pointsdarklighter321 comments

Because they're all written in C/C++, and it's impossible to write reliable software in C++ without a QA team that's 10x bigger than the development team.

But hey, at least it runs really fast sometimes!

I found that uninstalling flash stops my tabbed browsing sessions from crashing. With 2-6 flash ads per page, a typical session could have 20-50 tabs open, so that there is usually well over 100 flash adverts running. All it takes is a single advert to crash flash, then flash takes down the browser application.

Because people stopped writing web pages and started writing javascript applications.

Also because the major browsers have stepped up their rate of innovation. So they now either have:

a) Shorter release cycles and test phases b) More changes made in a release cycle without a corresponding increase in the number of testers.

It reminds me of the Internet Explorer / Netscape wars (around the time of Netscape 4).

I wonder whether she would have the same problem if she blocked Flash.

I almost always have under 10-20+ tabs open.

I tried to use chrome but it always cries "Oh snap.." and all the tabs crap out (so much for individual). Firefox slows to a crawl, Safari and IE on windows both aren't even worth opening 1 tab in. So I stick with opera. It does the best overall job for lots of tabs. Although it takes quite a bit of memory..

With that said I really notice a lot of slowness on sites that use embedded fonts, more so then anything else. Next is flash, if I block flash from running my browser really speeds up. However Javascript has been replacing EVERYTHING. Even when it shouldn't it does, and is required by many sites, so I cannot turn it off, and some sites use a lot of resources for this mostly pointless js.

I definitely feel this too. I routinely have around 50 to 100 tabs open. This USED to be perfectly fine--no crashes, everything was snappy. Now firefox is crashing sometimes more than once per day on me.

I use noscript to prevent anything from running that is not strictly necessary, but still, regular crashes.

What can you possibly do with 100 tabs that 5 or 6 tabs can't accomplish?

Journalistic research (or any kind of web based research).

Sure there are better ways to do it, but for less tech savy users a combination of browser windows and tabs are a good way to keep track of "thought branches". I do it sometimes, I google a topic (and open tabs) then when an interesting branch comes up I spawn a new browser window and then repeat the process again.

Why should lots of open tabs cause a problem? Worse case a browser should just unload them and pull them back from the cache when they are activated.

I upvoted you to get you back to even. I think this is a very vaild question. There is no reason to downvote this; and I am interested myself to the reasoning...

I agree, I didn't even think you could open that many tabs. I don't know how anyone expects a browser to run optimally with that many resources open.

I thing chaosmachine was right when he said it is partly because of increasingly dynamic web content.

When pages were (mostly) static you could have 100 tabs on a slow machine and it wouldn't matter because they were mostly in the swap file. The more pages try and become active without a mechanism for the browser to "pause" them the bigger the problem lots of tabs becomes.

50 - 100 tabs open at one time!? Why would anyone need that many windows open? I'm not saying that these issues aren't prevalent--but I have to imagine that this is an edge case. Just thinking about ever having more than 5 or 6 tabs open at any given time just makes my head hurt...

I'd bet there is kind of a snowball effect:

Tick: a person will load links in background tabs while they are reading because the pages don't load faster than the person thinks/reads

Tock: a person sees performance decrease and this reinforces the perception that loading in background tabs is a good idea

http://vimeo.com/13560319

Why would anyone need more than 640k?

Ok... Not really the same argument--but I still hold that this is an edge case. I can't even wrap my head around the UI FUBAR of what a window with 100 tabs open looks like. Someone please explain to me how you work within that system?

I have my tabs all down the left side of my window, so they stack nicely. I use a compact theme and a large monitor so I can get 30-50 tabs per window. And I have multiple browser windows (about three) open for different tasks. I've got one for general browsing, and one for each concurrent project.

Well I can't explain for anyone else and I'm sure I haven't reached such extremes but currently I personally have about 50+ tabs open in 7 browser windows (6 firefox and 1 chromium) spread accross 5 virtual desktops. I won't say what they are except they are clusters of tabs on research topics, things related to work I just did, procastination aids like HN. Some tabs haven't been touched in a couple days so it's not as bad as it seems. Some people bookmark-all-open-tabs and read later, I leave them open because otherwise things just get forgotten. Hope that helps.

EDIT: I should maybe point out that I haven't any stability issues here though Firefox from time to time decides that it needs to become laggy(not Flash related).

In a moment of delicious irony, Firefox completely froze up when I used the Back button to return to Hacker News after reading that article.

HTML 5 maybe? I kind of know what she's talking about. Chrome used to seem lightning-fast for me; seems to be slowing. Could just be perception.

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