[HN Gopher] Browsers eating RAM
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Browsers eating RAM
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 77 points
       Date   : 2021-02-18 13:56 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.flotato.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.flotato.com)
        
       | devioustree wrote:
       | Time to buy some fanless RAM
        
       | alecmg wrote:
       | graphs don't show for me on page
        
       | mhd wrote:
       | Sure that's counting all processes? My Safari process stays the
       | same size no matter how many tabs, but I'll get a bunch of web
       | content processes. Although that would apply to Chrome, too, of
       | course.
        
       | mattkevan wrote:
       | Had the misfortune of having to do a FB messenger video call with
       | Chrome yesterday. Chrome and Facebook with one window open
       | brought my 2020 Intel MacBook to its knees.
       | 
       | Activity Monitor showed windowserver at about 50% CPU usage,
       | Chrome at another 40%.
       | 
       | I thought Teams was enough of a hog, but clearly FB is worse.
        
       | perryizgr8 wrote:
       | The bigger problem is that Macbook fans are incredibly noisy. Fan
       | noise is a non-issue on most other laptops. I do agree that
       | chrome is highly unoptimized. Sometimes I wonder if the Chrome
       | team themselves use it as their main browser or not.
        
       | system2 wrote:
       | This test is broken. I tested with Mac and Windows. Safari and
       | Chrome numbers are very close. Author didn't collect correct
       | data.
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | Chromes multiprocess model and arena memory allocators have a
       | _massive_ impact on memory use... But they are also a big
       | security win.
       | 
       | Any browser with a small memory footprint you should ask yourself
       | "if someone manages to find a buffer overflow in this thing, will
       | my bank password be sitting adjacent in memory because the memory
       | allocator is trying to save RAM rather than being security
       | conscious"?
        
         | eklitzke wrote:
         | What is the security win you get from arena allocators?
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | By making sure each type of C++ object is allocated in an
           | arena, then many memory safety issues (use after free, buffer
           | overflow) can only impact objects in the same arena. In
           | Chromium land, they're called Partitions.
           | 
           | That means an attacker has to find some memory safety issue
           | _and_ some code execution issue in the same object. They can
           | 't corrupt memory using one flaw and then get code execution
           | by forcing another type of object to be allocated at the same
           | place.
           | 
           | Learn more here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/s
           | rc/+/dcc13470a/t...
        
       | QazCetelic wrote:
       | Could it be similar to the "Linux ate my RAM" situation and that
       | the RAM is used but still available?
        
         | Yoric wrote:
         | As the author of a task manager, I can confirm that RAM usage
         | is... complicated.
        
         | The_rationalist wrote:
         | What do you mean? If it's allocated to chrome it cannot be
         | reused by other software. Even if it's allocated but unused
        
           | roblabla wrote:
           | You absolutely can allocate memory without using up any
           | backing resources. On Linux (which is where I have
           | experience, but I assume macos works similarly), even after
           | mapping some memory, it won't be backed by any physical
           | memory (e.g. RAM) until you actually write there. And you can
           | mmap files into your address space, meaning you can place a
           | huge file you can access through memory, but it's not
           | actually taking any RAM, the kernel is just doing the reading
           | of each "chunk" of the file as you access them, unloading the
           | old bits once you stop using them for a while.
           | 
           | Measuring memory usage is hard.
        
             | snet0 wrote:
             | So can you allocate more memory than what is available in
             | this way?
        
               | rank0 wrote:
               | Yup! Processes see/use virtual memory, not the literal
               | physical RAM address spaces. The kernel maintains
               | mappings between virtual-physical and will allocate/free
               | physical memory as needed. All of this is invisible to
               | the process.
               | 
               | Pretty neat huh?
        
           | rank0 wrote:
           | In fact, this is the entire premise of virtual memory! More
           | memory is/can be allocated than physical memory exists. Each
           | process has its own isolated address space with (from the
           | process perspective) "unlimited" size.
        
       | random42_ wrote:
       | Off topic: a bit hard to read on iOS Safari because left margin
       | is 0 (or close to).
       | 
       | Back to the subject at hand: Chrome is a memory hog and there's
       | nothing new here, but nice to see the comparison with Safari. Too
       | bad Firefox wasn't part of the test.
        
       | taf2 wrote:
       | Let's please remember it's a trade of space and time... memory vs
       | cpu... I see safari using a lot more cpu then chrome and also
       | being much less responsive when using complex sites... both
       | engines are mature these are trade offs
        
         | Jyaif wrote:
         | There's also the security tradeoff. If you put everything in a
         | single process you save a ton of RAM at the expense of
         | security.
        
           | BugsJustFindMe wrote:
           | Safari appears to use a separate process for each tab.
        
             | Jyaif wrote:
             | Oh, there's _much_ more processes than just tab. You also
             | have a separate process for the network stack, the JS
             | engine, the password manager, audio, etc... You can also
             | have one process per extension.
        
       | zamadatix wrote:
       | Don't have a Mac so can't look into it but can anyone confirm
       | this test is actually right? E.g. Brave claims (I don't use Brave
       | I just know they had this claim) Safari is worse for memory usage
       | https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology...
       | while this product that uses Safari claims it's 10x better.
       | 
       | Obviously both claims can't be true. From what I remember with
       | Edge (pre Chromium) and Firefox I'm going to guess Safari doesn't
       | really use 1/10th the memory of everyone else - maybe I'm just
       | not familiar though!
        
         | kitsunesoba wrote:
         | The linked blog post doesn't state it explicitly, but I suspect
         | that the non-Brave browsers were not equipped with any kind of
         | adblocking for the test. Brave has built in adblocking, so if
         | my suspicions are true the test is rather disingenuous. At
         | minimum Firefox and Chrome should have uBlock Origin installed
         | and Safari should have Wipr or 1blocker installed to make it
         | fair.
        
         | strmpnk wrote:
         | I'd suppose some of it relates to sites with heavy ads. Safari
         | with no extensions will likely require more resources which
         | makes the comparison a little skewed vs Safari with some ad
         | blocker support added via extensions.
         | 
         | It looks like their test includes plenty of ad heavy sites like
         | news articles which seems to confirm that the results are
         | cherry picked.
        
         | runako wrote:
         | I don't have stats handy, but this has been published lots of
         | times by many different authors. As others have said, comparing
         | browsers fairly is difficult.
         | 
         | But Chrome is simply not an efficient browser on Macs.
         | Anecdotally, it uses more memory and measurably consumes more
         | energy. The Mac's fan will run more when using Chrome, and you
         | will need to charge more often. If you use a lot of tabs, your
         | entire computer will slow down.
         | 
         | There's market validation for this assertion. There is a YC-
         | backed company currently working on tech to offload Chrome tabs
         | to the cloud so the browser uses fewer resources. This is not
         | something that would be identifiable as a problem in Safari.
         | 
         | If you have access to a Mac, you don't need to take anyone's
         | word for it. Just use Chrome for a few days and then use Safari
         | for a few days. The difference is pronounced. If you use your
         | browser heavily, you will notice.
         | 
         | Since password managers are in the news, Safari also syncs
         | passwords to iOS devices (password sync also works in native
         | apps). It's free.
        
         | moksly wrote:
         | I use a MacBook Pro 2016 everyday. Safari is easily the best
         | browser memory and systems wise, but I still mainly use chrome
         | because it's better at addblocking and synchronises with my
         | non-Mac devices.
         | 
         | Chrome is fine though, as long as you don't open 20+ tabs.
         | Beyond that it's not fine.
         | 
         | I replaced Firefox with Chrome because it kept ranging from a
         | great to terrible user experience with various updates.
         | 
         | This is all anecdotal and based on personal experience.
         | 
         | On iOS I mostly use Safari even though that is kind of against
         | my synchronised argument, but it works alright as I have found
         | that I use my phone for very different web things.
        
           | CharlesW wrote:
           | > _...I still mainly use chrome because it's better at
           | addblocking and synchronises with my non-Mac devices._
           | 
           | (In case you're interested...)
           | 
           | iCloud for Windows now does bookmarks and passwords sync.
           | https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-for-windows-
           | ov...
           | 
           | For ad blocking, I really like 1Blocker. NextDNS is great as
           | well.
        
         | dahart wrote:
         | Chrome does use a lot of memory, but I'm extremely skeptical of
         | this blog post's methodology and results. Does it seem
         | realistic to have 54 different real web pages open that total
         | under 1GB? (If they're opening tiny fake pages, this test is
         | misleading and useless.) Most real web sites transfer several
         | megabytes on load. CNN.com loaded 4.2MB for me. Amazon.com
         | loaded 4.3 MB. That's just the data transfer of compressed
         | assets. The images and content have to be uncompressed and
         | rendered, which takes a lot more memory.
         | 
         | I'm playing on a Mac right now and see nothing like what is
         | reported here. When I open cnn.com in Safari, that tab alone
         | takes 1GB. Chrome reports far less usage than that.
         | 
         | Also "Real Memory" is not the same as active memory in RAM,
         | it's not necessarily giving a complete picture. Memory can
         | allocated but unused or compressed or paged out.
        
         | lucideer wrote:
         | Anecdata: I find browser RAM usage varies _enormously_
         | depending on which specific websites you use.
         | 
         | The Flotato test uses Twitter and Gmail (for the first set; it
         | doesn't specify the sites used for the 2nd set). Both Twitter
         | and Gmail are large, complex, slow webapps which likely do some
         | sort of advanced active memory management (extensive use of
         | service workers, local storage, etc.). They also load mainly
         | (exclusively?) 1st party resources.
         | 
         | The Brave tests use a large varied set of sites[0], which seem
         | to be a combination of simple news & ecommerce sites. There are
         | no complex webapps in the list. Modern news sites do have a
         | reputation for being slow and heavy, but this will mostly be
         | due to 3rd-party resources from ad companies; the sites
         | themselves are simple and lightweight in terms of 1st-party
         | content.
         | 
         | So they seem to be comparing very different browser usage
         | patterns.
         | 
         | Given that, and looking again at the Brave tests: Safari does
         | actually have lower memory usage than Chrome for _most_ of
         | their graphs. It just creeps slightly ahead of Chrome in the
         | later tests.
         | 
         | [0] https://github.com/brave-experiments/browser-comparison-
         | tool...
        
           | ASalazarMX wrote:
           | As a side note, GMail memory usage has improved vastly
           | (probably because it was monstruous to begin with). Years ago
           | my GMail tab consumed almost 500 Mb, but nowadays it uses
           | less than 100, with my same usage patterns.
        
         | wooger wrote:
         | We already know apple's own software has special exemptions in
         | the OS e.g. from packet sniffers.
         | 
         | Any reason to trust the ram usage for Safari nowadays?
        
       | evmar wrote:
       | Chrome is a pig for sure, but most attempts I see at measuring
       | memory consumption are wrong. The two main ways they're typically
       | wrong is either by misunderstanding how memory works (which is to
       | be expected, it's subtle![1]) or by doing the measurement wrong
       | (e.g. confusing CPU usage for RAM, or looking at the wrong
       | process, or using a memory consuming extension in one setting but
       | not the other). I think this post does both.
       | 
       | (Disclaimer: I worked on Chrome. I believe the conclusion "uses a
       | lot of RAM" is correct, but it doesn't mean the reasoning that
       | led to there is right.)
       | 
       | [1] http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2011/05/memory.html
        
       | fermigier wrote:
       | Who are these people? No contact information whatsoever on their
       | website. Twitter account inactive since last October. Undated
       | blog posts (this particular one may be several months old).
       | 
       | I'd love to use their product but this doesn't incite confidence.
        
       | Cthulhu_ wrote:
       | > I reached a point where I could barely hear the podcast I was
       | trying to listen to. That's how loud the fan was.
       | 
       | > focuses mainly on memory usage
       | 
       | I mean I get it, Chrome is not the most efficient browser out
       | there and Safari is more efficient in terms of memory and power
       | usage. I'd probably use Safari as my daily browser if I didn't
       | depend on Chrome's dev tools.
       | 
       | What's the tradeoff though? Usually you sacrifice memory to spare
       | the CPU, and vice versa.
        
         | Jyaif wrote:
         | Security and stability is an other tradeoff: isolating code by
         | running it in separate processes has a cost both in terms of
         | memory and CPU.
        
           | pseudalopex wrote:
           | Safari has separate processes.
        
       | The_rationalist wrote:
       | Chrome doing caching and therefore taking some RAM is correct
       | behavior. What's not being measured is if and how much the chrome
       | memory policy is adaptative to system memory contention, i.e If I
       | open another app that make the RAM full, will chrome adapt by
       | doing less future caching, by freeing some of the existing
       | caches, by tuning the JIT to reduce throughout for reduced memory
       | consumption, etc
        
         | millstone wrote:
         | I don't think Chrome does any of those things on desktop.
        
       | superkuh wrote:
       | Any multi-process browser is going to be an extreme RAM hog. Any
       | JS-engine priority browser is going to be a CPU hog. Modern web
       | browsers are not browsers, they are bloated virtual machines with
       | a bit of browser tacked on.
       | 
       | If you want a browser for the web instead of a JS virtual machine
       | you have to look backwards, not forwards.
        
         | iainmerrick wrote:
         | Safari has a very decent JS engine, so I don't think that's the
         | problem.
        
       | cute_boi wrote:
       | its sad not to see firefox :(
        
       | Leszek wrote:
       | (Disclaimer: V8 dev)
       | 
       | This post is unfortunately nonsense, because it's making a
       | fundamental measurement error: not including renderer processes
       | for Safari, and only measuring the browser process (which should
       | be expected to be roughly O(1) memory in the number of tabs).
       | 
       | To the author's credit, they _are trying_ to include child
       | processes - I'm not sure why, but `psrecord` seems to not (in
       | local testing) include child processes for Safari even when the "
       | --include-children" flag is passed. I guess it does for Chrome,
       | for whatever reason.
       | 
       | I'm somewhat disappointed that the author, or half the comments
       | on the post, didn't question these _wildly_ different results
       | though...
        
         | dmitriid wrote:
         | > I'm somewhat disappointed that the author, or half the
         | comments on the post, didn't question these _wildly_ different
         | results though...
         | 
         | Given that Chrome is busy trying to subsume the web and the OS
         | (it has bluetooth now, and usb, and serial ports, and over a
         | thousand chrome-specific web apis [1]), no one is even remotely
         | surprised to see such results, because by now people just
         | assume Chrome to be a beast. And Chrome _has_ in the past been
         | the most RAM-eating of all browsers out there.
         | 
         | The graphs should be questioned, of course, but Chrome has
         | already earned its reputation, and it's very hard to un-earn
         | it.
         | 
         | [1] https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence see
         | "Browser-Specific" tab
        
           | striking wrote:
           | This is a bizarre rationalization of a misleading post. So
           | what if Chrome has features, some of which you don't care
           | for? That doesn't make the post right.
        
             | aae42 wrote:
             | he's not rationalizing the original post, he's
             | rationalizing the thread parent's
             | 
             | > half the comments on the post, didn't question these
             | _wildly_ different results though...
        
         | mayli wrote:
         | That's pretty much what I suspect from those numbers. Safari
         | seems having constant memory usage no matter how many tabs you
         | open. Unless its unloading inactive tabs from ram, there is no
         | way Safari can save ram by using almost 0MB for new tabs.
        
       | barbacoa wrote:
       | Long ago man landed on the moon using 4 kb of ram. Today it takes
       | 1 gb of RAM to open a chrome tab.
        
         | minikites wrote:
         | Going to the moon was a government project. We need the extra
         | 1023 MB of RAM to store all the advertisements and user
         | tracking scripts required for a company to do anything under
         | capitalism.
        
         | chii wrote:
         | and that 1gb of ram costs less than $5. That 4kb of ram costs,
         | i bet, way more than the inflation adjusted $5 back then.
         | 
         | And chrome's UI is much more fancy, displays way more data, and
         | has way more functionality, than the UI that was powered by the
         | 4kb of ram.
         | 
         | It's a cute comparison, but ultimately, it's meaningless.
        
       | BugsJustFindMe wrote:
       | I use Safari because it's best by a mile on macOS for power
       | consumption, but if you ever use a memory hungry site like
       | Facebook for more than a few minutes it throws up a memory usage
       | warning and everything becomes extremely slow and you get
       | astronomical scroll jank. I'm guessing that's because it throws a
       | hard cap on tab memory usage and if you go over that it thrashes
       | wildly. So it respects your system, but in doing so is harder on
       | the user for some of the most commonly used websites and _might_
       | be whacking your drive.
        
         | deanclatworthy wrote:
         | Yep this is really weird and annoying. I get it even streaming
         | video in full screen.
        
         | imbnwa wrote:
         | You got about 10 minutes to look at Reddit with the new design
        
           | Klonoar wrote:
           | Safari + Old Reddit redirection is the way to go here.
           | 
           | Now if only there was a way to calm Twitter down...
        
         | mobilio wrote:
         | This is the reason i was used in past two Facebook sites -
         | mbasic. and m.
         | 
         | But Facebook surprises me with removing Messaging functionality
         | from mobile sites. So i must use desktop site. Within 5 minutes
         | fans starts howling...
        
       | tpetry wrote:
       | https://chromeisbad.com/
       | 
       | I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but
       | i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver
       | cpu activity.
       | 
       | Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For
       | normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery
       | will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the
       | chrome developer tools are so damn good i can't get rid of it for
       | development.
        
         | powvans wrote:
         | I stumbled on this site last week and anecdotally I can confirm
         | that disabling Keystone helps. I was driven to find answers
         | after no longer being able to _hear people on Zoom calls_
         | because of the fan noise from my 16 " MBP. I got sick of having
         | to wear noise cancelling headphones when Chrome and Zoom turn
         | my laptop into a space heater.
         | 
         | The Keystone thing though, it's not a panacea. It seems to fix
         | the issue with WindowServer running away with the CPU, but
         | Chrome is still pretty terrible. I decided to just deal with
         | the switching cost and stopped using Chrome altogether. It has
         | made all the difference. Switched to Firefox and I'm not
         | looking back.
        
         | deanclatworthy wrote:
         | WindowServer is more than just chrome. I don't doubt chrome is
         | eating the resources on my machine, but it's not as simple as
         | this site makes out.
        
         | lettergram wrote:
         | I find Firefox dev tools sufficient pretty much 100% of the
         | time... have you considered it?
        
           | pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
           | I use Firefox as my main browser (and always have -- just to
           | give some context about where I'm coming from). But Firefox's
           | developer tools are just not as good as Chrome's. Again, I
           | use Firefox. But every couple months or so, I stumble upon
           | some annoying instance where its developer tools are either
           | inadequate or are just buggy (whether it's the element
           | inspector not working, or pausing on a debugger statement and
           | not giving me a source view, or applied CSS rules not showing
           | up, or some weird behavior in the console, or...), and I have
           | to resort to using Chrome's developer tools to get the issue
           | resolved. This easily accounts for 90+% of my Chrome usage
           | (i.e. more than the number of times I've had to resort to
           | opening a website in Chrome because the developers didn't
           | test it in Firefox).
        
           | atfzl wrote:
           | Have you used the firefox performance timeline, it is awful.
           | Chrome's performance timeline is amazingly smooth and has
           | much more features.
        
       | minikites wrote:
       | Why do people continue to use Chrome? Inertia? Genuine love for
       | Google's "services"?
        
         | lrossi wrote:
         | UX is quite good as long as you don't have to edit the
         | settings. Most buggy sites work on it, which is no longer true
         | for Firefox. It's also very stable and secure.
         | 
         | But it does get slower and slower with each update.
        
       | karmakaze wrote:
       | > * Macbook 16" from 2019 with2.4 GHz, 8-Core Intel Core i9 with
       | 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 RAM and an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB GPU
       | 
       | Nice specs (32GB RAM) but perhaps not representative of the norm.
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | Indeed. I'd like to see the same tests on a dual-core from 2015
         | with 4 GB of RAM. Which is more like what most people use day-
         | to-day.
        
         | rovr138 wrote:
         | Depends on the audience.
         | 
         | HN audience wouldn't be too bad.
        
           | nerdponx wrote:
           | 8 cores and 32 GB of RAM is a seriously big computer. That's
           | close to maxed-out for any off-the-shelf laptop _or_ desktop,
           | especially considering it 's using a recent CPU architecture
           | and chipset.
           | 
           | Edit: as of Feb 18, 2021, you can't even buy a 13-inch MBP
           | with 32 GB of RAM. The 16-inch model with 32 GB of RAM and
           | all other specs set to their minimum/default comes out to
           | $2800 on the Apple online store. That is far, far outside the
           | range of what most people have access to.
        
             | rovr138 wrote:
             | The 13 inch does, but not the M1. You have to use the Intel
             | ones. That's an issue with Apple/M1. No i9 though on them
             | or dedicated graphics.
        
       | readittwice wrote:
       | Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would
       | use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my
       | machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of
       | memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The
       | Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as
       | well?
        
         | markdog12 wrote:
         | Yep, was thinking of the same thing when I read it. I have 2
         | gmail tabs in Safari, each taking over 1GB. One twitter that's
         | about 1GB, one Slack that's over 1GB. Some of this is shared
         | memory.
         | 
         | Is it that they don't realize Safari is a multi-process
         | architecture, and they're only measuring Safari's main process?
        
       | rovr138 wrote:
       | Flotato,
       | 
       | From homepage,
       | 
       | >From browser tab to magic Mac app. >Break free from the browser
       | and add web pages to your Mac dock. How about a mac app for
       | Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, and literally millions more?
       | 
       | From their help page,
       | 
       | > Dig in to making real Mac apps from websites with Flotato.
       | 
       | Looks like you can create apps of your websites. And it looks
       | like it does it using Safari's engine.
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | For anyone curious, the GNOME Epiphany browser on Linux has
         | this feature as well. Incidentally, it's also based on
         | Webkit2-Gtk internally (Webkit is the Safari browser engine).
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | Isn't that just the same as installing a PWA?
         | (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
         | US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...)
        
           | headsupernova wrote:
           | Exactly but with the benefit of using the Safari engine and
           | some other bells and whistles
        
         | leokennis wrote:
         | It's a pretty nifty app: you download it and you have
         | "Flotato.app". If you want a "Gmail" app, you copy Flotato.app,
         | rename that copy to "Gmail.app" and open it. It will open
         | Gmail, and the app icon changes to the Gmail logo.
         | 
         | So far this has worked consistently for more or less every site
         | I tried.
        
       | c22 wrote:
       | I used to have this problem, I routinely keep well over 100 tabs
       | open. Then I disabled default loading of javascript and now I
       | never hear my fans.
        
       | felixding wrote:
       | Wanted to learn about flotato after reading the post but the
       | hamburger menu doesn't work on Firefox mobile...
        
         | hundchenkatze wrote:
         | It doesn't work in Firefox desktop either. I guess they only
         | test with webkit based browsers.
        
           | larrysalibra wrote:
           | The hamburger menu doesn't work on iOS Safari either!
        
       | deanclatworthy wrote:
       | The whole browser situation at the moment is so incredibly
       | frustrating. I will NOT browse the internet without a fully-
       | fledged adblocker - no pihole is not enough.
       | 
       | This means pretty much only using Firefox - but I have about 10
       | tabs open at the moment, each using over 500mb of ram while idle.
       | What on earth they are doing I don't know... and I find it very
       | sluggish when playing video.
       | 
       | Chrome is my daily browser, even after they limited the number of
       | rules that ublock origin can use. But it grinds to a halt on my
       | top of the range macbook pro and uses 100% cpu if I open a couple
       | of twitch streams and 20-30 other tabs.
       | 
       | Safari is a joy to use, much better on battery but webextension
       | implementation means ublock origin is not possible.
        
         | coffeefirst wrote:
         | The crazy thing to me is the ads aren't even the biggest
         | problem anymore: it's clunky SPAs that load 1MB of js to save
         | 10kb of HTML on navigation.
        
         | neogodless wrote:
         | I went to check my Firefox memory usage on Windows 10 (two
         | tabs, extensions include ublock, facebook, bitwarden, contrast
         | and multi-account containers) but I saw something unexpected.
         | 
         | https://imgur.com/a/UJnV7ak
         | 
         | Adding up the RAM totals 671.7MB on a 16GB device. But why do I
         | have one Firefox with 4 sub-processes, and 3 (no 4) additional
         | lone Firefox processes? I think the 4 background processes must
         | be extensions in sure, but then what is the primary process
         | with 4 sub-processes when I only have two tabs?
         | 
         | Without extensions, it looks like the browser is using about
         | 280MB.
        
           | deanclatworthy wrote:
           | I don't think you can compare Windows Vs Mac when it comes to
           | FF. There have been countless complaints about FF mac
           | performance over the years - even after they supposedly fixed
           | it all.
           | 
           | 15 FF tabs open currently: https://ibb.co/MRkJjwY
           | 
           | - 1 outlook email tab - 1-2 custom web apps for dev work -
           | the rest are jira and gitlab
        
           | jdashg wrote:
           | If you take a profile (perfht.ml) it'll show you the names of
           | the processes as part of the profiling report.
        
           | Someone wrote:
           | "4 sub-processes when I only have two tabs?"
           | 
           | I don't know anything about Firefox's specifics, but forking
           | an already initialized process typically is faster than
           | launching a new process, so if I were to write a multi-
           | process browser, I might have an empty, initialized, process
           | hanging around of every type that can be forked and then sent
           | a message to load a page or extension.
           | 
           | Alternatively, Firefox could keep processes running on the
           | decent chance that you will want to open a new tab soon.
        
         | llimllib wrote:
         | I prefer ubo, but have found adguard very tolerable for
         | browsing with Safari
        
           | dotdi wrote:
           | +1 for AdGuard. I picked up a lifetime license a while ago
           | but I was sceptical. Now I have it installed on my iOS
           | devices and on my Mac. Working fine.
        
           | deanclatworthy wrote:
           | Adguard is an electron app that runs in the background of
           | your machine. I found the whole idea of that apalling and
           | uninstalled it.
        
       | droidist2 wrote:
       | This type of browser looks good to use along with tiled window
       | managers like i3 and xmonad.
        
       | spurgu wrote:
       | My problem with Flotato has been unreliable notifications. No
       | matter how much I fiddle with the settings they oftentimes never
       | appear.
        
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