I’m sick of Chrome eating all my RAM | Hacker News Reader

I’m sick of Chrome eating all my RAM

techradar.com

49 pointshrathore48 comments

I have an old, slow, 2006 laptop. Still works, use it as a media PC. At first, i went from IE -> chrome. It picked up 5 years of life. Recently thought i would have to finally decommision the box.

Installed firefox, runs like i did -5 years ago. Same websites, same tab consumption, more performance, no intermittant hangs, less ram consumption..

TDLR; install firefox if your having memory issues with chrome. all that tracking, google services and integration has a LARGE cost, not just to your privacy!

I almost made the switch to chrome a few years ago when firefox was seeming slow... but never brought myself to it. At the office I've always used chrome because there was something weird about Firefox for some internal pages, and because I was stuck on some older version (I didn't have admin rights to my desktop when I first got hired and was stuck on the version the helpdesk would push). Today, I'm way happier with Firefox, and I'm glad I didn't make the switch at home. I'm currently in the process of trying Firefox again at work (now that I can install the latest version...), and will probably ditch chrome entirely. It hogs too many resources, and I don't really get any noticeable benefits from using it.

I also downloaded Firefox for Android recently to try it out... but I get the impression that chrome will always be king in the android space.

Try Firefox Preview. It's not feature rich but I've been very happy with it. It is simple and fast.

>all that tracking, google services and integration has a LARGE cost, not just to your privacy!

  Of all browsers I've reviewed recently, Firefox is one of the most active upon installation. I think it may be the only one to immediately collect telemetry data too.

https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658589780578631...

this has nothing to do with daily usage and it's shown that the activity is mostly because the default loaded page is mozilla.org

Firefox with a homepage set to blank contacts a lot of domains which I've had to block or explicitly disable in their hidden settings.

Why defend their poor practices? They should be ashamed about it. By far the best at this is Safari, which contacts just one Apple domain and the Google safe browsing domain. OTOH, macOS itself is way too chatty.

I would suggest installing an older version of Firefox that was around in 2014. Was much faster than the current version.

Much faster at getting your computer added to a botnet, for sure.

I feel like the comments here reflect a weird mindset. (“Switch to Firefox!!” and “Firefox is just as bad!!”).

I’d like to offer a different; probably controversial perspective:

Rendering is a difficult and complex problem to solve. I remember back when I was younger, rendering a PDF was quite CPU intensive and consumed a decent amount of ram (for the time), and that does just a tiny minute subset of what a modern browser can do (and, in fact, many can render pdfs too!).

Modern web browsers are the epitome of a product that has bloated to far beyond it’s initial parameters, and it’s absolutely amazing that they perform as well as they do. But I don’t think the web should be used as an application delivery platform, having the features embedded in to be able to do that turns a modern web browser into a huge monolithic runtime, renderer and templating engine all churning together constantly. I mostly lament the availability of a general purpose language too, which makes it too easy for developers to grab and use it as soon as they have a minor problem, but that’s not the real issue to be honest.

If you put your computer science hat on: imagine how you would implement a fully functional web browser from scratch. I’ll bet good money it would require a lot of cpu time or a lot of memory (or, both).

At some point there was a critical mass of people believing Web Apps are super awesome. (Although I'm not sure if this was ever the majority ;))

Speaking of myself, I was always frustrated that on Linux apps/games were missing. The situation was even worse when I tried other Operating Systems. Web Apps seemed to be the ultimate solution for that.

But yes, RAM and CPU usage is insane. (For now the only solution is to buy computers with a lot of RAM and Swap space I think ;))

> I’m lucky enough to have a PC that boasts 32GB of the stuff. Now, that amount of RAM is – to be honest – overkill for most things I use my PC for.

You should not care about how much ram chrome consume if you have 32gb, however i think you should switch to firefox if you care about your privacy and the future of the web.

You shouldn't _have_ to care but the reality is, if you use your systems and chrome eats 4GB+, then you do care. Chrome regularly consumes a major percentage of my available RAM and I have 32GB.

isnt that why you have ram? to use it?

Yes but not for google apps, slack and a browser full of bloat. I have all this RAM for the actual engineering I do.

The Great Suspender extension [0] is a handy RAM saver for tabs you want to keep open but don't need to use right now.

Pair that with Tabs Outliner extension [1] as a kind of visual bookmarker for related groups of pages, and Chrome RAM is manageable again.

Another benefit of Tabs Outliner is desktop organizing a dump of all Chrome pages that were open on my phone's browser (via Chrome sync, then on desktop Chrome view History, other device, open all, organize in Tabs Outliner and close tree for later, then close all tabs in mobile Chrome to free up phone RAM)

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

I prefer The Great Discarder [1]; saves more memory, and Chrome starts very quickly even with thousands (really) of tabs open. To put another way, Chrome becomes usable almost immediately, with much less time elapsed than needed to shut down.

Tabs Outliner looks interesting. Is this a replacement for the "vertical tabs" extension I've seen others rave about for Firefox?

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-discarde...

It is like Tree Style Tabs but with better keyboard shortcuts, handles a tree of the entire browsing session and not just for a single window and it can act as a session manager where you can close entire (sub-)trees without losing their tree hierarchy. It also can (periodically) upload the tree to GDrive and allows you to restore the hierarchy on different devices.

The drawbacks are that some features are paid only, it is closed source and afaik, it doesn't even work on other Chrome-based browsers because it relies heavily on the Google account login.

Tabs Outliner looked interesting. Four things I noticed in a cursory tryout:

* I did not see a way to search tabs. * I like how the sidebar auto-updates based on the selected window, but it does not do so to the point of always making the current tab visible in the sidebar * The sidebar window interferes with CLUT,[1] my "Alt-Tab between tabs" extension of choice. * Most seriously, I notice a slight but perceptible slowdown when opening new tabs and moving between tabs.

Since tab-navigation speed is important, and I need to search for tabs much more often than an always-visible vertical list, I've gone back to Tab Manager Plus;[2] before that I used TooManyTabs.[3]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for-ch...

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clut-cycle-last-us...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-f...

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toomanytabs-for-ch...

> Plus, Microsoft’s increasingly desperate pleas to stick with Edge that pop up in Windows when you search for and download Chrome simply made me even more determined to stay away.

I think the aversion to being forced/pressured to do something is pretty universal, and I'm wondering whether I'm wrong, or whether companies are going to realize it at some point. I think this also contributed to the failure of Google+: The harder Google tried to ram it down people's throats, the more repulsed people were by it.

Of course there is a benefit to advertising/pushing a product, but overdo it, and you might achieve the opposite: People not just disinterested, but actively hating your product, forever, just due to the way how they were pushed to use it.

Pro tip: you can use chrome extensions in Firefox! I am not sure if I used this but a little googling will light your path: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/346981/how-to...

Also: Tab wrangler is a great extension for Chrome (can be used on Firefox) to automatically close unused tabs with rules. May help some of the people that have memory issues with Chrome.

Well maybe don't open hundreds of tabs in it since it's inefficient anyway? I have an MBP with 8Gb of RAM and I never experienced issues because of Chrome.

If you're a tab hoarder, Chrome does seem to have gotten worse in the last year.

Usually the GPU process. Even if your tabs are all inactive, killed by something like Great Discarder, the GPU process continues to use a lot of RAM (2GB in my case, at times) and CPU.

I am not sure if it's a Mac-specific issue though.

Honest question to tab hoarders, why not use bookmarks? It saves bandwidth, system resources, makes you less prone to tracking and cross-site scripting, at the cost of some elevated organizational/management work and slightly less convenience?

Because bookmarks are a pain in the ass. I have 174 bookmarks for sites that I have only visited once and will never visit again and finding whatever I want takes minutes.

I literally cannot comprehend why anyone would use bookmarks when the friction is multiple orders of magnitude higher.

99% of my tabs do not live longer than 10 minutes so why should I want to persist them in a messy non hierarchical list that is neither organized by context nor by time? If you somehow make bookmarks as frictionless as tabs by making the new tab button create a bookmark and then show that bookmark as a tree structure on the sidebar then it wouldn't be any meaningfully different from a tab other than the fact that it has to reload the entire page every time you switch bookmarks.

Granted, that is a different use case. I've seen tab hoarders fire up their browser, with the same 50 tabs open over and over again, and they usually only need one.

AFAIK, Firefox has countered this by only loading the tabs when you activate them after a cold start, so that's pretty much automated bookmarking.

I wouldn't know how to manage without bookmarks (well, yes, .url files actually, but that's another issue). I'm guessing I have a few hundred of them, and I find what I need easily, because you can organize them in folders.

> makes you less prone to tracking and cross-site scripting

Huh? Those have not much to do with whether some tab is open or not. Pages that have reasons to care about seeing length (and many which don't have good reasons) will log you out anyway.

Well, more open tabs means more connections to the Internet, which means more tracking is inherently possible. Or the other way around, reducing open tabs reduces the number of possible tracking vectors.

You're right, cross-site scripting is the wrong word, sorry... what do you call it what the Spectre-exploit does? It was the case that the exploit could access data from the other tab via Javascript, IIRC.

You're literally using a graphics rendering engine for a script someone wrote to handle how it displays the pictures on your screen. You should be lucky optimisation and operational benefits of web browsers have come as far as they have. Web interfaces are nothing more than a miracle, and you're complaining that the ad-hoc nature of putting up a website and having it render in a magic box is too poor quality for you because of RAM numbers. Great.

I have never had this problem with Chrome on any computer, and I think that it may be due to my usage patterns compared to those who do suffer this issue.

How many extensions do the afflicted users have? What are they? (They are not all equal in terms of CPU or RAM usage.) How many tabs do the users have open, and what are on those tabs? (Simple pages surely use much less RAM than full browser applications.)

Lots of people complain about Chrome and Firefox RAM usage - I want to know why I never see the same issue(s).

switch to firefox you will be surprised :)

Switched to Firefox a month ago. It was worse.

Since then I became more thankful of Chrome(Chromium to be exact).

In what aspects did you find the newer Firefox worse than it was years ago? Aside the dumbing down of the preferences menu, which I deeply dislike but is common to Chrome as well, I found not a single thing that would make me switch to Chrome today. Chrome was indeed a lot faster than FF when it came out, there was no comparison at all, but things changed a lot. Just to be clear, I'm not at all a Mozilla fanboy (in fact using Waterfox in place of Firefox where I can) but should I have to choose between Firefox and Chrome I'd have no hesitation. Todays Chrome domination is due exclusively to advertising: inviting users to use your product to surf the web on your start page helps a lot if you're the #1 search engine in the world.

edit: privacy considerations aside of course.

I've never seen Firefox consume more memory than Chrome. And Chrome chokes way too quickly on 100+ tabs where Firefox will work fine.

How can it "choke way too quickly with a 100+ tabs"??? Your brain will choke way before the browser with that much open.

Not sure what my brain has to do with it. I can handle hundreds of tabs just fine. Put simply: Chrome can't handle my workflow. If it can't handle my workflow, it isn't viable for me as a daily use browser. And in my experience, every time I've tried it (and I've tried it every year for good measure), I've become frustrated by how badly the performance degrades so quickly.

Go on HN. Open 5 submissions you are interested in. Also don't forget to click on the comments link. Bang you now have 10 tabs and this is just the start of your browsing session. As you read those articles you will open more tabs.

As most websites are 10s of megabytes to store, unsurprisingly keeping 100s of tabs alive consumes gigabytes of memory. It’s just basic math. The only way this can work is if the browser just closes most tabs and uses them as transient bookmarks internally.

Chrome is also more aggressive about isolating and forking processes for each and every tab. So yeah, I understand to some degree where the RAM usage is coming from. But if the browser isn't usable for me, it just doesn't matter why.

Not only that, but each extension also gets at least one process to itself, sometimes more.

Chrome has become much better with tabs in the past year. I should know; I have more than two thousand open. I use The Great Discarder (discussed elsewhere) and FooTab (which helps a lot when starting a session with said thousands of tabs), among others. I also recently tested each active extension to see how much it affects performance when opening a new tab, and removed OneTab as a result.

My CPU utilization jumps and maintains at around 25% when I got to techradar using Chromium with no extensions. I see the same kind of thing with Firefox with extensions.

But yeah, blame the browsers for the bloat, not the crappy web site you write for.

Strange how organic content not contaminated by the AdBuddy company (twitter flooded with their sponsor links and almost no real content) doesn’t even consider Brave as an option.

You mean the browser that replaces a website's ads with its own? Also it feels laggy compared to chrome.

I believe that the blame here is mostly misattributed.

Caching (a good thing) and also the remote sites being bloated. I'm not sure if or should the browser be fixing that ?

And yet the problem doesn't seem to affect Safari or Firefox. So, people only visit bloated sites in Chrome?

No, but it sounds like Safari and FF are not caching as aggressively. After all, unused ram is wasted ram.

Chrome, without any extensions is not that bad. It's when you add all the extras to it that it starts to get more and more bloated.

Morning routine: kill all Chrome processes bigger than 300MB (Mac)

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