Ask HN: Today's Google doodle “Garden Gnomes” using 50% CPU when displayed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Today's Google doodle “Garden Gnomes” using 50% CPU when displayed?

10 pointsgregoriol8 comments

Today's (10/06/2018) Google homepage doodle called "Celebrating Garden Gnomes" (https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-garden-gnomes) seems to be using about 50 to 70% CPU just when displayed on the homepage. I mean not clicked, not activated, just displaying the homepage. I experience the same behavior on latest Chrome, Firefox and Safari on macOS.

When the tab is not active (or closed), the CPU goes back to normal.

Does anyone else experience this?

50% percent CPU is extremely huge for a webpage, plus considering that it's a page we all use a lot, and by all I mean millions of people, plus considering that we didn't do anything to start it (I would be ok if the game/animation itself, when clicked, uses some resources, but this is just standby mode here).

How can we stop this craziness? Isn't anyone at Google thinking about the impact?

It looks kind of lazy from the doodle creators since they could hide the whole functionality (canvas) behind e.g. a gif so it wouldn't use too much resources without activation.

*edit tested giphy.com's frontpage and it uses less CPU+GPU combined than that google frontpage

Doesn't for me, not even close.

But when am I ever on the Google homepage? This is probably the first time in months.

Google stopped caring about search a long time ago. Nobody at Google gets promotions for 'keeping search good', only for adding unwanted features. So more and more unwanted features keep coming from all directions, and Google's core products keep getting worse and worse.

A similar thing happened to Microsoft back around the time of Windows Vista (and similarly poor mismanagement by management at the time), so we already know where this train is going.

Qwant, Startpage, DuckDuckGo.... You are not limited to google. If they are annoying you, leave.

I'm trying to switch to DuckDuckGo today

I did it any highly recommend. Still 1 in 5 requests need to go through "!g" but the benefit of not seeing AMP is worth it!

Already made the switch. I can say this, you need to be persistent and ignore the urge to go back to google while are using DDG.

30% on a single core and I have many cores. Kind of too much for a page, but nothing to worry about.

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