Terrible popular websites waste your CPU and energy | Hacker News Reader

Terrible popular websites waste your CPU and energy

ericra.com

25 pointsericra11 comments

For me the most CPU is used by idle Youtube tabs in Firefox. Turns my whole browser into a janky mess, gets progressively worse the more time the Youtube tabs are left open/loaded.

Just a little experiment I did to test the inefficiency of websites. When looking into this, I found that most people measured website efficiency mainly based on the amount of network requests or just general subjective slowness. I wanted to see what the objective results were when isolating a website and observing CPU usage directly.

Excellent research.

I think this helps to explain how a particularly enshittified page loads OK, but if you don't close that tab before you move on, it can be trouble later on. Even if you add a number of lightweight tabs and everything is fine when clicking between them, clicking back on the "overloaded" tab tips the balance so much more than it should, that everything freezes.

Thank you.

It surprised me quite a bit that so many resources were being used even though Firefox is not in focus. It makes sense from the browser perspective, though, since you don't want to completely stop a web app when tabbing away. Almost all CPU usage is the result of the active website's design.

It actually made it appreciative of how Firefox uses almost no CPU "passively", and I'm curious if the same thing would be true for Chrome. If you discount memory usage, the browser is surprisingly lightweight.

There is very little that continues to run in the browser that is of any value to the user. But they want to cram as many ads, autoplay videos and the like down our throat. How are they measuring the value of that sort of stuff that they think it accomplishes anything?

At least the news/media sites can pretend they are loading something useful for the user, even if that is not usually the case.

I can't figure out why Google needs 15X more CPU indefinitely to display a white page with a search box, though (compared to a blank tab or simple site).

I wish I would have a way/setting to stop JS on tabs that are not in focus (without unloading them, and waiting for the reload when I focus them), maybe with a whitelist. I have plenty of memory.

I've always been a bookmark guy, and I don't know how you hundreds-of-tabs guys do it. It would driv me crazy I think.

That being said, have you looked into something like this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

(Disclaimer: have never used it, but it is a recommended extension). It may not meet your needs exactly since it would likely reload YouTube tabs when "undiscarded", but it might be worth a look.

I have used it, but it doesn't stop JS in background tabs, it unloads them which means that I'll have a multi-second delay when I focus the tab again. ATM I unload them manually, in bulk.

> I've always been a bookmark guy, and I don't know how you hundreds-of-tabs guys do it.

I use both. I use a modified version of TabsAside, but I also use multiple windows, one for each topic + general. The way I work, as I go through the relevant material for the current topic, I open new tabs in the background (to research later) so I don't interrupt my flow. Bookmarks are too much friction for this workflow.

Did you try facebook with a few tabs open? It absolutely thrashes your CPU and Memory with some background worker. Even with an ad/tracker blocker, CPU usage remains high, if not higher because some request failures trigger something in that massive script.

And with some news and minimalistic blog sites, one would be led to think the clean design points to a lack of bloat, but nope.

That's interesting. I don't have a Facebook account anymore to check, but I'm guessing you only see this when logged in, correct? I get very little CPU usage on their main/login page when logged out.

I don't doubt that Facebook is a hellscape when actually in the web app, though.

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