When did browsing the web suddenly start requiring more than 4GB of RAM?
Like.. how did that happen? What changed between 2008 and today that made a few webpages take up more RAM than Photoshop?
@mawr AFAICT, mostly increased resource requirements for advertising and mass surveillance--sorry, "big data".
@mawr If it's taking that much ram you need to get a different browser o.o
@Felthry Chrome, Firefox and Safari all have the same results. ;~;
@mawr Chrome developer tools and script blockers tally the damage well. JavaScript and browser tabs all running tiny VMs are most of the damage.
As a fun side-by-side experiment, I recommend trying your most common websites in a text-only browser, then looking at its memory footprint. Elinks with JavaScript disabled is a good benchmark.
@mawr well when your javascript depends on 5MB or more of other javascript shit that tends to happen. Not to mention many sites have their HTML generated on the fly instead of static assets. And finally larger media assets
@mawr Admittedly, I'm kind of gobsmacked when I try to wrap my head around the complexity of rendering websites these days. Perhaps it's only magical because I don't have a more intuitive grasp of these systems, but I get a headache just trying to think about the sprawling horror that is Unicode. A web browser has to contend with navigating that plus XML plus CSS plus ECMAScript or whatever plus system APIs plus....
It seems a miracle that it works at all. Miracles take RAM. *shrug*
@mawr hmtl5, uh... ad-pocalypse, sites resorting to cryptomining injections..
@Zordrak My performance issues have been with a good ad blocker installed, and most ad serving domains blocked at my hosts file. D:
Vivaldi would be lovely if it had an OS X client. >..<
@Zordrak WAIT I was thinking of a different one! Vivaldi was the one I was trying to remember!!
Thank you!! :D
@mawr gotta leave room to load up all those trackers following you around!!! :(