Hacker News Reader

Comment by GreaterFool | Hacker News Reader

Had a quick look. None of this looks like features for power users. How are "spaces" different than having multiple open windows?

View on HN

They do not need the same amount of memory than different windows would need, since we use an intelligente caching system.

Any trick you do to reduce resource consumption from spaces (such as suspending and evicting) can also be applied to normal windows. Even the currently shown page can be evicted if your browser is hidden, should one want to do that.

However, listing this as the only difference when asked make it sound like you're selling "spaces" as only a slight performance improvement and nothing else.

Can you elaborate more on this? My understanding is that on modern browsers, most of the memory usage comes from the tab's contents (pages), or extensions. In both cases they don't scale up with the number of windows.

A lot of browser memory consumption comes with overheads from their multi-process models.

However, that aside, it makes no difference whether you have a window, tab, or "space".

The multi process model was an improvement. In days past browsers were single process, and suffered from:

- JavaScript on one page dragging down all tabs

- Memory leaks

- JavaScript exploits that crossed tabs

And so on.

Multi process browsing is fantastic.

We still have all but the first issue, and that one has nothing to do with multi-process browsing, just multi-threaded processing.

So all we really won was performance regressions (the IPC is expensive) and significantly increased resource consumption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com