Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

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Here's a good example! Open up this page in your web browser; not the site the thread is linking to, just the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576937

Opening it up, fresh, it's taking 49.9MB of memory for me. For a tab I've had open for a while, of the same page, it's doing 60MB. And that's despite it not being a "web application": it's barely a web page! So here I am, doing exactly what everyone claims I should be doing, and using a web browser for my web content. And one of the most spartan sites on the internet, Hacker News, has mildly-active threads that take up 60MB of memory. For the tab. Not for the browser, for the individual tab.

The best Electron application I've ever came across launched with 100MB of memory consumption and pegs a CPU core. That's not even getting into how nearly every single Electron application puts 150MB+ on your hard disk, because that in particular isn't incredibly relevant.

Just trying to understand you... When I open it, it takes 6.37 (sometimes 6.18) MB of memory. I look at the 'Memory'-tab in the webdev tools in FF browser. For a second I thought uBlock or NoScript made a difference, but when I disable these I get the same result of around 6 MB. What am I missing?

Using about:performance for Firefox 88.0.1 on GNU/Linux. As far as I know, this is the most accurate way of measuring single-tab performance on Firefox.

Thanks. I still hover on 5 or 6 MB. Your point still stands if you ask me, even simple webshit is unnecessarily heavy a lot of times.

I (and I think most users) don't care about how much memory an individual webpage uses, as long as it feels fast.

I'm sure there are many like you who want applications to be frugal with memory and cpu consumptions, but I think most users don't really give a damn.

They care when the computer slows down and the battery drains faster.

I personally like having battery life and the ability to multitask. I don't think it's something that only non-technical users want, or even something particularly rare. Surely most users like their phones lasting longer on a single charge, given that's sort of the root of the discussion.

Memory consumption of that level has no noticeable impact on battery life.

There are bloated web apps that should be improved for sure, but they also exist with "native" languages.

The issue has always been runtime computations, PWAs are perfomant if you keep them low.

I wrote myself an ebook and webnovel reader PWA which tracks progress by pixels and percentage amongst other things. There is no noticeable difference between fbreader (native) and this angular app. I get the same amount of drain per hour as I repeatedly verified when I switched.

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