Thorium – The Fastest Browser on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Thorium – The Fastest Browser on Earth

thorium.rocks

10 pointsthunderbong14 comments

Is there a browser that doesn't crash when I have 50 tabs open?

Firefox 3. I easily had 1500 tabs. Don't get why every browser afterwards, including FF, including plug-ins and tab unloading etc is not capable of this anymore.

Because ff3 era websites didn't nearly have as many JavaScript, ads and surveillance shit than today's.

Firefox

Is there one that does? I regularly have more than that open in both Safari and Firefox.

I just opened 60 or 70 tabs in Firefox on MacOS, and no issues.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Went to https://brutalist.report/

2. Set limit to 50

3. Opened the 50 most recent HN links in new tabs

4. Observed no problems

5. Opened 10-20 more tabs, got bored

6. Used this snippet suggested by ChatGPT to count memory usage: `ps aux | grep -i 'Firefox' | awk '{sum += $6} END {print sum / 1024 " MB"}'` ....result: 18134.6 MB

I'm running uBlock Origin which I presume helped a little. I also have 64GB of RAM, which I presume helps a lot.

I just repeated the test with Chrome (also with uBlock) and similarly had no issues.

Total RAM usage for Chrome measured in that manner was 16844MB, although it's not an apple-to-apples comparison; I had Firefox running for a while before opening those 50 tabs.

Safari launched about 40 tabs with no issues, and then subsequent tabs simply contain an error message: "The operation couldn't be completed. No space left on device". Total RAM usage seems to be about 20GB. The remaining tabs seem perfectly functional; there is no "crash" but obviously there seems to be some kind of limitation here.

Not sure WTF that error is. Some Google results suggested turning off "hide IP address" but that had no effect. My boot drive has over 1TB of free space so that's not it.

UPDATE: I installed Adguard for Safari, and was able to open 100+ tabs with no problem.

    Is there a browser that doesn't crash 
    when I have 50 tabs open?

To summarize, your answer seems to be "all of them, but you will perhaps need an adblocker and/or 32GB+ of RAM."

Probably the last update, but: I opened 73 tabs on FF on Windows with no issues before I got bored and gave up.

RAM usage as reported by Task Manager was ~6GB. (This counts memory differently than ps)

Firefox. I have way more tabs and even more across containers. I can’t remember Firefox ever crashing.

My FF regularly has over 300 tabs open across 7 windows and never crashes.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38894920 (33 comments)

If we're playing the browserbench game, vivaldi / chrome are pretty close, I'd say within the margin of error.

Isn't this the browser that had some weird stuff in the source code?

The developer has a post from earlier today discussing that situation

https://alex313031.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-good-bad-and-ugl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com