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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

The whole browser situation at the moment is so incredibly frustrating. I will NOT browse the internet without a fully-fledged adblocker - no pihole is not enough.

This means pretty much only using Firefox - but I have about 10 tabs open at the moment, each using over 500mb of ram while idle. What on earth they are doing I don't know... and I find it very sluggish when playing video.

Chrome is my daily browser, even after they limited the number of rules that ublock origin can use. But it grinds to a halt on my top of the range macbook pro and uses 100% cpu if I open a couple of twitch streams and 20-30 other tabs.

Safari is a joy to use, much better on battery but webextension implementation means ublock origin is not possible.

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The crazy thing to me is the ads aren't even the biggest problem anymore: it's clunky SPAs that load 1MB of js to save 10kb of HTML on navigation.

No, ads are a big problem too, let's not pretend they aren't a horrible blight. With that said, it is a bit ridiculous that webpages load MBs of JS (SPA-related or not), and that browsers load hundreds of MBs to JIT said Javascript...

I know when I've clicked on a medium.com link because my CPU fan spins up chewing on all the framework junk.

In Firefox reddit (new version) will sit at about 50% of a core on my laptop. Simple mouse hover effects on the page lag about half a second behind my actual mouse cursor. YouTube (while not playing a video) will use about 15% of my cpu, even when idle in a background tab.

I’m not sure if the bug is in Firefox or in the sites, but it’s awful. I don’t understand how these issues don’t get fixed immediately. I thought for sure after the new reddit redesign landed that they’d iron out the performance issues in a month or two but I swear if anything it’s gotten worse.

Did you report it? You can use firefox profiler to learn what triggers CPU usage.

It probably works fine on the developers' 32-core 96GB workstation, so could not reproduce, problem is on your end.

> In Firefox reddit (new version)

Lately been using teddit.net for browsing reddit and it’s been great.

New Reddit is almost unusable for me in Safari as well, it amazes me how they are so popular when the experience in the browser is so bad. (old.reddit.com kinda works, but lots of embedded things like slideshows or videos are a really bad experience)

I have the exact same issues you’re describing - but only on my third monitor that’s attached to its own GPU. - I’m still investigating, but I think it’s a PCIe issue.

Also, do you have an NVMe or Optane SSD attached?

Im confused, your post says Firefox is the only possible option but chrome the daily driver?

I use Firefox on windows and Ubuntu and yds it eats ram but I don't really experience any sluggishness or issues from this.

I went to check my Firefox memory usage on Windows 10 (two tabs, extensions include ublock, facebook, bitwarden, contrast and multi-account containers) but I saw something unexpected.

https://imgur.com/a/UJnV7ak

Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must be extensions in sure, but then what is the primary process with 4 sub-processes when I only have two tabs?

Without extensions, it looks like the browser is using about 280MB.

I don't think you can compare Windows Vs Mac when it comes to FF. There have been countless complaints about FF mac performance over the years - even after they supposedly fixed it all.

15 FF tabs open currently: https://ibb.co/MRkJjwY

- 1 outlook email tab - 1-2 custom web apps for dev work - the rest are jira and gitlab

If you take a profile (perfht.ml) it'll show you the names of the processes as part of the profiling report.

“4 sub-processes when I only have two tabs?”

I don’t know anything about Firefox’s specifics, but forking an already initialized process typically is faster than launching a new process, so if I were to write a multi-process browser, I might have an empty, initialized, process hanging around of every type that can be forked and then sent a message to load a page or extension.

Alternatively, Firefox could keep processes running on the decent chance that you will want to open a new tab soon.

If you go to about:memory and click on "Measure" you can get some information about what is in memory. In addition to web pages, Firefox uses child processes for things like the new tab page, extensions, talking to the GPU, and some other things. It also uses a preallocated process like another commenter suggested, to speed up opening a new page.

Check `about:processes`. (I'm not sure if this is only available in Nightly right now.) It lists all processes, threads, and their memory + CPU usage.

This is cool. I did not know this was a thing.

Wipr is what you’re after. “Native” adblocker for Safari. I’ve switched to it from uBlock years ago and not looked back since.

Wipr is fantastic! It basically convinced me that manifest v3 wasn’t going to be the end of the world after using it in Safari.

Still not as good as uBlock origin in terms of blocking quality.

I much prefer 95% ads blocked and 2% CPU with Wipr vs 99% ads blocked and laggy browser on uBO

I'm in the same boat.

No matter how much I like Safari optimization, taking advantage of OS, eye candy, etc. - this is all SECONDARY to a full functional ublock origin.

This is non-negotiable.

I prefer ubo, but have found adguard very tolerable for browsing with Safari

+1 for AdGuard. I picked up a lifetime license a while ago but I was sceptical. Now I have it installed on my iOS devices and on my Mac. Working fine.

Adguard is an electron app that runs in the background of your machine. I found the whole idea of that apalling and uninstalled it.

You don’t have to keep the app open, it’s just for setting settings.

It's all worth it because Javascript is such a fantastic evolution in programming language technology, productivity, security, scalability, and consistency.

Sigh. That's sarcasm if it wasn't apparent. And no I don't care if Typescript / ECMASCript v-latest "fixes everything".

The V8 devs are certainly doing yeoman's work, but at the same time that hard work enables all the JS insanity to get worse and worse, to say nothing of the advertising sociopaths, tracking cookies, and browser profiling.

I 100% agree that it should be a required feature of web browsers to limit RAM, disk, and CPU usage. Yes you can prompt for more resources, no you can't ask for unlimited.

Cue every website asking for that along with cookies, and not working otherwise. And of course, notifications.

I'd appeal to google to start enforcing good behavior, and maybe Apple, but that would be counterproductive

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