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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier toward excessive features - making them borderline-unusable on slower computers - because they were developed and tested on fast computers exclusively.

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It's certainly not the only issue with running Chrome on machines that aren't configured just like Google's. If you try and run it on a Linux distro which limits the number of open files per process to 1024, like most do by default, it crashes when you try and open more than a handful of tabs. Turns out that Google run a custom version of Ubuntu internally with the limit raised to something like 32,768 open files per process, so they never ran into the issue.

I frequently have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on Ubuntu without any problems and I haven't touched the open-files-per-process limit. You must be talking about a problem with older versions.

We are in the weird situation where even most web application developers run their dev environment on beefier machines than the VMs they are hosting it on.

Great point. I think this is horrible practice and I've seen it lead to lots of slow/clunky code and UX.

Next time I start a new team we're all getting Raspberry Pis for development.

I'm just using Vagrant VMs for that :). (I work on databases, though)

I have a Raspberry Pi (albeit one of the new ones) sitting on my desk right now; I should implement that idea :)

I have 16GB and regularly have >100 tabs open in Chrome.

It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time.

The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again.

As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard.

Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.

I've using firefox on a 4Gb linux machine for about two years so far.. and it's working just fine, each release it keeps better and better

Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox.

So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote.

Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way):

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I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1.

I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.

I don't doubt. Firefox with hundreds of tabs works well with 4GB RAM, and somewhat bearable on 2GB, with occasional restart once per week or so to clean it up.

On the other hand, I wasn't able to use Chrome the same way I use Firefox on PC with 8GB RAM.

> I don't doubt.

I misread eridal's comment. :) I thought he/she said they were using Chrome, not Firefox, hence my understandable surprise!

I've corrected my mistake. Sorry about the confusion. Surprised no one else picked it up...

I, at least, do typically run with anywhere from 50-200 tabs (or more!) at any given time. Yeah, there's some slowdown if you're running on an 8GB machine (I'm typing this on a Macbook Air with a Firefox session with at least 100 tabs open at the moment (SEE EDIT)), but it's certainly way more than I used to get with Chrome before I switched back to Firefox a couple years back (Tree View Tabs being the motivating factor). Currently using 5.4GB of RAM (OSX is reporting a "Compressed Mem" of 2.96GB), and it's currently pegging one of the cores of the i7 on this thing. This is after about a week of nonstop (i.e. same Firefox process) use, and with Flash present in a lot of places (like the 20+ Github tabs I have open, thanks to Github using Flash for its silly "click here to copy a link to your clipboard" feature; I really need to get those wretched things blocked); a lot of things will clear out pretty well after restarting and restoring the opened tabs (though this is partly because they're not loaded into memory again until they're accessed again).

EDIT: After posting this comment, I closed all my tabs (something which causes one of my extensions - probably Tree Style Tab - to throw a confirmation dialog with the number of tabs). The number was 233, plus another ten or so in another window. I must say, that's pretty damn good, all things considered.

I'm trying out Nightly right now to see if I can push that even further with the new e10s features.

Same here. I'm regularly hitting 200+ tabs on multiple profiles for various reasons (news, documentation, etc.). This is precisely why I use Firefox for all my browsing usage (and have for some time). Chrome/Chromium chokes once you hit about 100-150 tabs, and the tab UI is not usable once open tabs fall off the edge of the window (there's probably an extension to fix this).

Now, I will admit that Firefox misbehaves once you hit about the 500 tab threshold (or higher) to the extent that closing it takes longer. But since tabs aren't loaded on restart until you click them, its memory usage tends to stay much, much lower during regular usage.

I want to like Chrome. It's fast, it's pretty speedy, but for my use case, it's not ideal. It's good for some things, but Firefox is much better behaved!

Tree View Tabs? Do you mean Tree Style Tabs?

Yeah, that. I can never get the name right :P

why don't? unused tabs won't consume much, or at least noticeable to me.

I do have a coffee-break whenever I open my IDE

> why don't? unused tabs won't consume much, or at least noticeable to me.

Because I COMPLETELY misread your original comment. :( I thought it read that you were using Chrome, not Firefox.

I'm truly very sorry about that, eridal.

My experiences are just like yours, though. Firefox works great for me (relatively low memory usage, up to and including 200+ tabs). Chrome, on the other hand, not so much.

Hopefully you can see why I was surprised, but it was through the entire fault of my own eyes apparently interleaving another comment with yours. I'm an idiot. ;)

hey, that's ok!! you don't really need to apologize, at all

Eh, I do if I did something stupid. :)

And you gotta admit, that was pretty stupid.

Cheers!

I have a 4GB Windows 7 machine with over 500 tabs in Firefox and it still runs Office, IE11 and various other stuff without any problems. Mind you, Firefox only loads tabs when you click on them, so only about 30-50 are actually "live"....

Google also happens to be behind the Chromebook effort, so I would be surprised if they don't do any testing on Chromebooks.

Maybe some testing of, say, a few tabs, but I'd be very surprised if a significant number of Chrome devs (or any Chrome devs, for that matter) use Chromebooks for Chrome development (maybe the Chromebook Pixel, but even that seems unlikely). The Chromebook is optimized toward content consumption; while I'm sure it's possible to do serious programming on ChromeOS (just as it's possible to do serious programming on Android or (jailbroken) iOS if you really wanted to), it's not going to be nearly as productive as a high end workstation (portable or stationary) with 16+GB of RAM and a quad+ core processor.

Anecdotal, but I know a decent number of Googlers using Pixels as their daily (development) machines, SSHing off into the abyss. YMM, of course, V.

I remember having a few Google engineers coming to my uni to do a talk - afterwards they mentioned that internally they've been doing a large amount of programming work using internal tools on Chromebooks.

Why not both?

Many Google engineers (including folks like me outside of Chrome) use Chromebooks as our primary laptops. In my case that also (mostly) makes my Chromebook Pixel my primary computer. I average 25-100 tabs, many of them doing 'heavy' things like editing large Google Docs or running Inbox.

I do have a beefy dev desktop that I access via ssh, although frankly it mostly exists for running emacs for the pedestrian task of actually typing out bits of code.

Yup. Similar to the mobile html5 app I am rescuing that ran smoothly in chrome om the developers desktops with 16 gb of ram and core i7 and what not but the complex animations are shockingly less smooth on the iPad 2. Weird

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