Chrome Used 10x More RAM Than Safari on macOS Big Sur in Recent Test
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
I'm tired of this sensationalist armchair administration. All of this goes without even mentioning that Safari still competes with Internet Explorer (not Edge, Explorer) for compatibility laurels. Sure, slow clap for supporting WebM, Apple. Really saved the farm with that one. It's horribly ironic that Apple simultaneously claims that the web is a viable platform for open distribution when their implementation of it is the most bare-bones, notoriously broken implementation we've ever seen.
You wanna use a good browser? Start with one that doesn't hide things from you.
Just my own n=1 anecdata.
Also, the speedometer 2 (just discovered it a few days go, so not sure how reliable is this) shields a lot better results when using safari.
That is only on x86 though. It seems Apple is now running optimisation only on M1. Safari on M1 is still faster than Chrome.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
if someone only runs a web browser on his machine (and maybe a few other programs that aren't resource intensive) then using as much RAM as possible sounds like the correct tradeoff since unlike CPU, RAM has the same power budget whether used or not (so it is worth it to cache results).
The alternative would be to page to disk, but that would hurt responsiveness. If nothing else requests the RAM you are better off keeping tabs alive.
https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1375557440578539521
This brings it to 2x more RAM for Chrome, compared to Safari.
To be honest, one of the best reasons for using Safari or Firefox is just to remind companies that “web” doesn't mean Chrome. The added performance is a rather nice bonus.
Only google has a stake in chromium - if google wants a feature that feature becomes a "basic web feature". If chrome does something one way, anything else is buggy. That's literally what happened in the IE4-6 era.
Firefox all the way, Extensions, Privacy, Speed...and a somewhat decent company.
Citation needed, this is quite the claim.
> basic web technologies, such as webrtc
WebRTC may be important to some people, but is by no means a basic web technology
> I'll happily pay for a little extra ram in my computer > if I can just go to a website and know that it will > work in my browser.
A common web browser requiring RAM upgrades for normal use doesn't sound like the right trade off for most people.
WebRTC is absolutely a basic web technology in 2021. Especially in the COVID age. Safari's implementation is lackluster at best, and unusable at worst. Many popular conferencing services simply don't support it.
It links to the previous HN thread on this, in particular, a V8 dev noting the Safari stats didn't include _any_ of the rendering processes for _any_ tab, and their surprise that an informal benchmark with extremely surprising results wasn't checked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186114
This got a lot more attention than it deserves. As I'm pointing out below, it's likely the case that the system tool I used for measuring memory footprint isn't giving the full picture. It's also not a very indicative test in terms of every day use. However, I do think the reason this resonated with so many people is that most of us have heard the fans cool down when they exit Chrome. I'll see if I can find a better way to measure that. Stay tuned on @mortenjust
So indeed, these statistics are unreliable at best and likely inaccurate or incomplete. They were recorded through psrecord[2] which doesn't record all the processes for Safari.
[1]: https://www.flotato.com/post/memory-chrome-safari-flotato [2]: https://github.com/astrofrog/psrecord
Complete waste of CPU, Memory and Disk space. A triple negative for all software.
Might as well download more RAM, since Chrome and these Electron apps are having a huge RAM-eating feast on my computer. /s
Nobody runs 20+ Electron apps. Really, nobody runs 20+ apps.
The only people who need to buy a laptop with more than 8GB of RAM in 2021 have a specific workflow that they already know they need the RAM for - and that workflow never involves Electron, instead it involves something like video/photo editing, 3D graphics work, CAD, virtual machines and/or containers.
Heck, even gamers get away with 8GB easily, with nearly zero games from the PS4 era hitting performance limitations at that level. And really, does your MacBook Air have the graphical capability to run anything that could take advantage of more?
Slack using 300MB of RAM to send GIFs around isn't your problem, and end users don't stare at the Activity Monitor all day counting their bytes.
Honestly, for simple use it is fine. I use Affinity Photo and it is nearly as fast as my Ryzen 3700/32GB box, and is faster in some instances.
For simple editing of home videos with Final Cut Pro taken with my DSLR, it is surprisingly useful. I wouldn't want to do big projects with it, but it is fine for what it is. I certainly couldn't say that about my Dell XPS that had 2x the ram and sounded like an industrial vacuum cleaner under any moderate load.
It runs World of Warcraft fine, which takes a decent amount of GPU power to run even though it is an older game.
I must be out of the loop on what constitutes as "decent GPU power", but my $600 desktop from 2014 plays WOW at max settings and 1440p without issue. Are there any other GPU benchmarks you've tried?
If you can run DOTA, League Of Legends, Fortnite, Rocket League, etc, and run your streaming/voice and text chat/browser apps simultaneously, then you're golden. And I think, for that use case, RAM is basically not a concern. Someone with an 8GB MacBook Air/XPS 13/X1 Carbon can do that exact workflow.
Ahem, you mentioned Fortnite in there somewhere. The XPS 13 and Carbon are both excellent machines in that regard, but there's some... arbitrary limitations on the behalf of the M1's Fortnite capabilities.
I need a few I cannot live without (a rule based proxy switcher, an ad blocker, a GraphQL client).
Still lots of things don't work quite as nicely (Dashlane isn't as reliable, Hangouts you can't have backgrounds or share a select window, and other stuff too) but overall it's worth it I think.
For example, try going to compass.com and using embedded Street View in Safari. It's nearly unusable.
Sure, you might say Chrome is going to have a monopoly on "making things work nicely with Google Maps/Meet" but then you jump on Firefox and the experience is just fine. Safari's the only one with compatibility issues in my subjective experience.
Microsoft Teams also has missing web functionality specifically in Safari, functionality that works perfectly fine in Firefox and Chrome.
There are many more examples than just these two. Despite being an incredibly popular mobile browser, and being the default browser on macOS, I find that Safari is the only browser that I have to periodically switch away from temporarily in order to get some random website to work properly. If I'm doing critical work like taking an online exam I will always choose Chrome or Firefox because I know I can depend on it working and being properly tested.
At the end of the day, casual users aren't staring at Activity Monitor all day, and for them RAM is "free." I have a Mac with 8 GB of RAM and I've never noticed any slowdown or issue from using Chrome, Firefox, and/or Safari all simultaneously along with many other open apps. I don't have to care about what my OS does to manage memory because it's 2021, not 1995.
I think we all know, of course, that Chrome is Internet Explorer at this point. We are close to another monopoly situation that I'm not confident the US Government will properly address.
Mobile Safari is extremely popular and seems closer to old IE
Safari is still my default browser. It has better password manager integration and a number of OS integration features that I prefer. But, like I said, I find myself having to switch to another browser for a number of common websites.
Furthermore, on my M1 Macbook Air, battery life is quite literally an irrelevant concern. Not only is the battery life longer, but the difference in draining rate between light and heavy applications seems to be greatly reduced compared to Intel (by my subjective measurement). Of course, I can understand that not everyone owns this particular machine.
If you're a Reddit engineer, what is the deal there?
Maybe what you meant to say is, "if you're an Apple engineer, what's the deal here?" It sounds like it isn't an issue on other browsers, which means the issue likely falls squarely in Apple's camp. Especially considering that Safari makes memory management the kernel's problem, I fail to see a way in which a "Reddit engineer" could be responsible for not knowing how to work around an undocumented interface.
Perhaps, but this isn't a problem for old.reddit.com, so there's a business decision being made to not consider the value of the redesign/re-implementation if Apple's desktop brower is completely un-usable for the app.
Moreover, if Reddit is aware of this, why isn't there a banner or an alert indicating "Hey, Apple's memory management in Safari is shit and they won't help, can you use a different browser for an optimal experience?", but that's not the case. Obviously they wouldn't word the banner like that but you get the idea. It's questionable that Reddit would lie the blame on Apple's feet but don't communicate this to users
Either way you play it there's horrendous UX going on on Reddit's part
The user doesn't care. Putting up a banner to tell people to switch browsers because of memory constraints is an even worse UX decision, so there's no straight path forwards here. For what it's worth, visiting Reddit on mobile will urge you to use the app instead, likely with performance issues in mind.
>Either way you play it there's horrendous UX going on on Reddit's part
Not... really? You'd have to do some pretty immense mental gymnastics to claim that it's Reddit's fault for making a site compatible with every browser but Apple's. Furthermore, I also have a hard time imagining how you'd blame Reddit for causing a memory leak that should be managed by the kernel in the first place. Best case scenario, this is an issue inherited from MacOS's BSD heritage, what with the lazy memory management and lack of virtualization. Worst case scenario, Apple is consciously ignoring their incompatibility, with hopes that WebKit will somehow become the new standard for web browisng. I won't cut and dry it for you, but I don't see a point on that spectrum where it's somehow Reddit's fault all of the sudden.