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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I'm getting absolutely enormous memory leaks in stock Safari on my new M1 MBP after a few hours of use. It doesn't seem to be reclaiming memory when tabs are closed.

https://imgur.com/a/HqxAspK

There are growing pains, and they're not all in third-party apps. (It is hilarious to me, though, that WinZip a) exists for Mac and b) is used by anyone on a Mac.)

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I might be mistaken but, IIRC many browsers will not free memory from closed tabs. They'll keep it and reuse it for new tabs instead of deallocating and reallocating too often as you play with tabs.

Yes, but it's not doing that.

Every new tab incurs more RAM usage; it's not reusing. Usage keeps growing and growing until the system gets sluggish and it prompts me to kill Safari.

If you're using 1Blocker, you might want to turn off the (memory-leaking) 1Blocker Button until an update shows off...

Worked like a charm at least to me :-)

https://twitter.com/kb091412/status/1330470681813934086

If you are using an ad block or other extensions, that is likely the cause. I can't find specific reference, but try turning those off.

edit: https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1329132372034347009

A browser isn't viable to me without ad blocking and 1Password.

Firefox has issues currently on M1, as well - uBlock Origin won't load, for example. Thankfully, that particular issue is fixable by disabling javascript.options.wasm and javascript.options.wasm_trustedprincipals in about:config as a temporary solution.

I fully expect these to be fixed, but it's clear it's gonna be a few weeks/months before everything runs right. If I were a non-technical user, I'd be returning it for an Intel Macbook.

Of course, maybe you are experiencing a different issue that also leaks memory, but Dan confirmed 1Password was not causing his problem, just 1Blocker. https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1329471604649205760?s=2...

The 1Blocker extension can be disabled as a temporary fix, and crucially, the ad blocking functionality does _not_ have to be disabled.

https://twitter.com/1blockerapp/status/1329744152150626304?s...

In the meantime, disabling the 1Blocker Button extension in Safari > Preferences > Extensions and restarting Safari fixes it. It won't affect how our app blocks intrusive content in Safari since 1Blocker Button only provides quick actions to the main app.

I'm not using 1Blocker, but perhaps AdGuard has the same issue for similar reasons.

He’s not saying permanently disable Adblock, but rather disable it to see if it’s responsible for the memory leak in question.

As far as I can tell, the issue is present without any extensions. I'm not willing to browse unprotected for several hours to 100% confirm, but it still grows with every tab.

Yes, it grows, but slightly. Ever since 1Blocker updated their app to use the older logo rather than the new monochrome logo I am not seeing the disastrous memory growth I was seeing before. After ~5 days of use without restarting Safari it is still hovering at around 800 Mb used, instead of the 10 Gb+ it was using before.

As others have said, I was simply offering a suggestion to help debug, not passing judgement on adblockers.

I have had Safari open for 23 hours on my M1 MBP, and it is using ~800mb of memory right now. Extensions are the most likely culprit.

Ultimately, my point is not "I need help fixing this" - I've gotten Firefox working fine with a few about:config tweaks. My point is "non-technical users are going to run into weird issues they can't necessarily fix right now".

HN seems to really dislike Brave, but it is hands down the best browser for people that care about ad-blocking.

It’s strange, I haven’t experienced the memory leaks but now you’ve got me curious.

Not running mac currently, but one of the things I hated was how the UX was for thinks like keka etc, vs 7-zip/winzip interfaces... they just didn't match how I was used to using the things, also having to extract an entire archive to pluck out the one or two files I was looking for is often a pain.

I don't disagree re: the GUIs for Mac compression apps.

Part of the reason for this IMHO is because your typical developer on a Mac has always used the command line tools for that sort of thing. So, Mac developers were never really motivated to build great GUI tools for certain things.

Compared to Windows, where the built in command prompt was lacking for so many years, and as a consequence 7zip/WinZIP/WinRAR gained really robust GUIs.

It's ironic that you mention that, as I often used to just defer to the command line as the UX for the gui apps was so bad. I've always been centered around client/server or web app development or the backend and it was never painful enough to make something for myself. (scratch the itch)

Wow, that’s a lot of memory use. Would you be willing to file a Feedback Assistant report with a sysdiagnose? Would like to see what’s up here. How many tabs is this?

This is after a couple hours of use. It stays high until quitting - closing all tabs doesn’t budge it.

Happy to file a report. Any special instructions to make sure it gets to you? edit: Filed one; FB8927230.

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