Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that firefox is only getting faster if you happen to have a half dozen 4+Ghz cores to burn. If you run it on low end hardware all these rewrites in rust/etc to improve parallelism seem to actually be slowing it down and apparently increasing its overall resource consumption. Older versions would run up against a gig and a half or so, and start garbage collecting. Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes.

I've been meaning to play the high speed video capture game with a couple of versions running on the same hardware to see if my feeling that the GUI is actually getting laggier despite posting better benchmark numbers.

More and more I find myself spinning up falkon, or other browsers because I want to actually be able to play streaming radio in the background with my browser without having it skip if I open amazon.com, or some other JS heavy site. Worse, I'm still running 56 on a couple of my machines because I can't stand how laggy the newer versions are on those machines.

I've been having the exact same issue. I tend to leave a relatively large number of windows/tabs open and Firefox is starting to edge towards unusability on a 4x3.2ghz + 16GB RAM system simply because its performance and memory consumption is interfering with other applications.

Though I really think most major browsers are somehow all simultaneously losing the thread. Websites are fundamentally just formatted text and extremely basic graphics, for the most part. It's not like I have 50 high end webgl demos running. Rendering text and basic graphics is not something that should be consuming anywhere remotely near the resources that have become typical. If javascript is the problem, then that should be dealt with and not simply accepted as the price of doing business. In many ways I feel like the mantra that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' has gradually turned into 'any form of optimization short of making sure you don't run O(n) in O(n^2) is not a priority.' But like anybody who's worked on a project knows those placeholders that 'you'll get to later' end up being exactly what goes live. And when optimization is disregarded, you get text/graphics rendering struggling to perform on systems millions of times stronger than what sent us to the moon.

>Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes.

I've been using Firefox continuously since version 3.1 and it's been bothering me a lot recently. Circa 2011 Firefox was perceived as a memory hog, and MemShrink effort was started to keep it under control, which resulted in the nifty areweslimyet.com website (which was transparent and good PR too).

Now MemShrink seems defunct, areweslimyet is obsoleted with seemingly all the progress undone as of last update in 2017, and the new Perfherder website is inscrutable for an outsider.

In my case, Firefox balloons to gigabytes of RAM with just a few tabs open. If you need more than 8GB of RAM on your system to do basic office work something has gone rather wrong (and RAM prices are historically somewhat high right now).

Pretty much my experience. From time to time I see some article claiming how Firefox is getting faster and more awesome, but when I try it out I never see any improvements on my modest hardware.

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