10 years of Speed in Chrome

blog.chromium.org

13 points·panarky··4 comments

10 years of chugging the RAM to the point of rendering the whole machine unusable? :P

For some time, I've been constantly switching between Firefox and Chromium. I was switching to Chromium because it was more responsive than Firefox on light workloads; however, on heavy ones it was absolutely unusable, so after a while I was switching back to Firefox - forming the browser-switching loop.

Thankfully, Firefox got a lot better in the past few years and it's been a while till my last browser switch :) Chromium might be fast, yes, but only if you either use the browser pretty lightly, or you have tons of free RAM around. I have only 8 GB of soldered in RAM and hundreds of open tabs on average, so Chromium is not for me. 20-30% improvement sounds like a good start, but not really a big enough difference.

Add version 69 just wiped it all away. So much more bog down when working with multiple tabs open.

Google made Chrome to load pages 10% faster so they could include 20% more ads and 30% more trackers :)

I know it's tongue in cheek, but there's something to it. The browsers themselves became fast enough that now the hardware often becomes the bottleneck, making the web browsing an absolutely awful experience on weaker devices, because, indeed, there are 20% more ads and 30% more trackers.

There's no real reason for not being able to comfortably browse the Web on my Nokia N900 with JavaScript enabled, yet it's almost impossible these days.

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