> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier back then than working with ten in today’s Safari or Chrome. But that’s a whole different story. What would you do today if you opened a link and saw a long article which you don’t have time to read right now, but want to read later? You would save a link and close the tab. But when your browser is fast, you just don’t tend to close tabs which you haven’t dealt with. In Opera, I would let tabs stay open for months without having any impact on my machine’s performance.<p>This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. And it doesn't reload every page when I quit and restart my browser -- it only loads a tab when I click into that tab. And it has tab groups so that my current group has only about 8 tabs in it, and the other groups are sorted by topic. And on and on.<p>I find it frustrating when people post these articles as if everyone has this problem, and don't provide enough details as to their setup so that people can help them fix it. I promise you -- if everyone around the world right now had the problem the author was having, it would have been solved. No one would stand for it. Rather than assume everyone is suffering just like you, assume that other people either a) don't behave the way you do, or b) have found a way to fix the problem.
I didn't see the correct answer yet, so I'll just tell you, tabs have a delay to create because in almost all modern browsers you have to wait for a process to be created and for everything to be paged in, _then_ wait for a bunch of IPC calls to complete.<p>Old browsers didn't do this, so creating tabs was so fast! But they were also much easier to compromise. Tradeoffs.<p>Source: Electron maintainer
Wow this tab madness... I want one row of tabs, and I want to see the page title on the tabs. I get an itch when I get enough tabs that they just become little favicons so I can't see what the tab is doing (By that time there is a 99% chance it's garbage and I don't need it- but now I don't know!).<p>I wish there was some system of grouping tabs, e.g. if I visit a newpaper site and Ctrl+Click 3 article links it would keep those tabs "under" the main site tab, and the tab would only display "nytimes.com (4)". As long as I'm viewing one of them, the tabs of that particular domain would expand and other sites would collapse.<p>Is there a browser or chrome plugin that does this?
I'm not sure what the author is talking about. After my recent tab clean-up, I've got 35 tabs open. Opening a new one is near-instantaneous, and I can say the same thing about bringing up any other tab I have open, as long as it has been loaded since the last time I restarted my browser.<p>I've got an Atom-based 2014 laptop at home. That one might take a second to open a new tab if I'm doing anything else on it at the time.<p>Modern browsers handle a higher load than older ones did; a more complex web means a greater amount of more complex data, and that means more complex data management. The overhead is higher (there's a lower floor), but it allows the browser to scale better (higher ceiling).
Chrome is the culprit. For as much as they helped with V8 innovations, they've also done harm<p>- ignores usability basics: horrible UI with > 10 tabs, reloads all tabs, many other issues - all of these are things people have complained about forever, they refuse to fix<p>- memory hog: Chrome uses more memory than almost any other browser<p>- Google forces Chrome upon you since Hangouts etc will not work with other browsers<p>- for reasons passing understanding, the Chrome UI has been copied by every browser<p>Firefox is better at every single thing and has a far better extension model, which sadly they will deprecate again to copy Chrome. I find it very sad that its popularity and market share has fallen as the world has collectively dumbed down the browser UI.
If you're in a recent Firefox, open a new tab to the URL "about:performance" -- it will show you a report on how your add-ins and tabs are affecting the browser. One of my coworkers used it to find that a tab from a IoT device controller page was slowing down the whole browser by doing lots of unnecessary page refreshes.
I don't have this problem, blank pages don't take "seconds" to load, even on my little atom-based tablet. The big question I have for people noticing this behavior is how many add-ons do they have. How many times is your "blank page" parsed by an enormous amount of code written in a language not known for its performance?
All of these anecdotal benchmarks people are doing are silly because you're overlooking so much detail:<p>* SSD or slow spinning disk (makes a massive difference if your computer is swapping out tabs to cache).<p>* Have the tabs been loaded or not (a new browser session will open placeholders for the tabs without loading the site, but an older session will likely have dozens -if not more- of those sites loaded)<p>* Frontend code. Are we talking low footprint sites like HN or dozens of JS and CSS heavy sites like Facebook, Office 365, etc)<p>* Similarly to the above, media content. Streaming videos? Flash? etc.<p>I bet you a 100 active tabs of MS Excel Online would perform crap in any set up while 100 inactive HN tabs would stand a better chance of not crippling your whole system.
I wrote a simple bit of code to calculate the size of index pages with includes (js, css, images) and here's what I get:<p><pre><code> page resource total url
(b) (b) (Kb)
----------------------------------------------
33857 143 34.0 news.ycombinator.com
62690 55975 118.7 arstechnica.com
11844 223862 235.7 seldomlogical.com
218837 765943 984.8 newyorktimes.com
l592771 545304 1138.1 guardian.co.uk
</code></pre>
The one thing I notice watching the index page being broken down, is the sheer number of resources requested. Didn't bother with JS/browser interaction which you can check with browser dev tools.
I'm very surprised to see that nobody has mentioned OneTab.[1] With my use of Chrome, it performs fine with hundreds of tabs open until I attempt to reopen them after a restart, at which point I'll be waiting for about 5 minutes until I can do anything. Firefox seems better for this as it only loads tabs when I actively select them IIRC.<p>Regardless of performance, with that many tabs open I just find browsers unpleasant to use because you can't see the title of each tab and switching between them is a mess. OneTab is fantastic - I have it as a pinned tab on all my browser windows and I send it all the tabs I'm not actively using. For me it also doubles as a short-term bookmarking system so I don't clog up my pinboard.in bookmarks with articles I have not yet read etc.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.one-tab.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.one-tab.com/</a>
Something I've found very useful for Chrome is "The Great Suspender" extension.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...</a><p>It frees up lots of memory but still lets me keep lots of tabs around without having to be militant and killing them off as I stop using them.
Surely there's a trade off, as we add more and more features to browsers, w3C specifications, add ons, JavaScript updates etc, a browser will inevitably get slower. Yes older browsers were fast, but they did little in comparison to today's virtual machines.<p>The fact that you can do this <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo</a> in a browser should tell you we've come a long way from them just being Document readers.
>Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs. Opera was sane: it did not reload a tab unless you asked for it. It just reopened everything from cache.<p>Firefox also loads suspended tabs from cache. It reloads them(on first switch to tab), but no data is downloaded from server.
Browsers are slow, but I can cope with it. But what I hate is that browsers are nondeterministic.<p>Try Ctrl+C,Ctrl+T,Ctrl+v,Enter combo. In opera it worked flawlessly everytime. In Firefox, it sometimes works, sometime it opens new tab without URL, sometime it pastes half of URL (?!) and navigatest there.<p>In chrome you never know what sugesstion will the address bar give to you. In opera, you were 100% sure that your bookmarks will be there, so you could do Ctrl+T, type first few letters and press Enter without looking.
As usual, this is simply not true in general. If your system is doing 10 other things and is memory/CPU constrained then, sure, you probably know why it's taking so long.<p>If you have 100 tabs open of which 10 are rather badly-behaved, maybe the browser cannot do enough to mitigate it. But again, although this is a common power-user setup, it's not standard.<p>If none of the above, it's likely due to an extension. I was starting to blame Safari for slow tab opening and page loading recently and then I uninstalled an extension and everything became lightning fast again. I have around 100 tabs open across 4 windows. All major browsers are very fast for normal browsing in the default configuration.
Your problem might be disk IO speed related. How fast is your storage? Most browsers still do trash a lot of disk IO even if you have plenty of memory available. For whatever reason it seems like OSX is way more prone to having performance problems due to slow disk IO. I have plenty of RAM, CPU and GPU so whenever I see a performance hiccup I know it's time to clear some space off my SSD. Performance of my (several year old, third party) SSD goes off a cliff when it has less than 15% or so free space available. If I get it back to 20% free space it's back to smooth sailing again.
I downloaded the latest version of Opera this weekend after a lot of frustration with Chrome's drain on my Mac's battery life. Man was I shocked. It uses the same engine as Chrome (Blink) but somehow manages to double the amount of battery life on my machine. I could never get more than three hours on my Retina MBP before I tried it.<p>And it supports Chrome extensions, to boot.
Installing Ghostery, Privacy Badger and adblocker makes a world of difference in terms of how fast page loads are for me. Ads are not just annoying, they slow the web down considerably and make the mobile experience terrible.
So, incidentally I noticed a couple days ago that Firefox on Android handles > 99 tabs with a special icon.<p>I found that quite amusing..<p><a href="http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo" rel="nofollow">http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo</a>
It was the same thing i posted about Apps made with Web Tech.<p>Opera 1x, managed to be a email client, RSS reader and Browser while keeping the size below 12MB. Chrome/Blink or Firefox all takes 40-50MB Download.<p>I really wish they could Open Sources the old Opera.<p>P.S- I am not sure if these Tab Problem is nerd only. Basically people are trying to gob too much information. But i have yet to see a Sane UI to fix this.
(disclaimer: I work for Opera)
This year Opera has had a lot of focus on performance tuning under the umbrella of Power Saving Mode that was shipped in Opera 39. It was many small optimizations like for example reducing timer frequency in unused tabs or UI animation fixes as well quite advanced memory compaction that is now being upstreamed (<a href="https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/oZw5F3fO-aU" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...</a>).
Recent Opera 42 features a small but nice update to startup
p/restart behaviour - it schedules only the most important/recently used tabs for reload right away - which is quite useful for people like me who normally have dozens of tabs open all the time.
> <i>"You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? "</i><p>I currently have nearly 400 tabs open, across 7 browser windows (Firefox).<p>The main reason for this is context switching. I have tried several context switching type addons but not found one yet that is reliable, simple and fast. Right now if I am programming, I have 2 browser windows I use for that. For news and related articles of interest, 1 browser window. For games and related, 1 window, etc, etc.<p>Firefox and Tabmix plus makes this easy and relatively painless. Chrome would have about 12 million processes and use 4.7 petabytes of memory for same use case (I exaggerate a smidgen)
Browsers are slow because objective metrics of quality (e.g. performance, usability) are irrelevant to the common user, despite what individuals may claim. People are very susceptible to branding and growing trends, and it's a hard pill to swallow.<p>Back in the day when I was writing on the forums "guys, forget Firefox and use Opera, it's fast it's usable you have everything you might want in a browser with undeniable proof", the reply would eventually be "yes but Firefox has _this_ webdev extension and I can't do without it". So Firefox would get installed in their families' and friends' PCs, because that's what the web developer used. Also, the "safer faster better" marketing campaign, although that slogan would have been much more appropriate to Opera than Firefox.
Fast forward a few years. Google Chrome comes out and everyone stops caring about those damn extensions; suddenly performance becomes a huge decision factor (nevermind Chrome was a resource hog compared to Opera, nevermind the horrible lack of features, nevermind the bad usability). I could go on, but you get the drift.<p>There's no incentive for large market share browsers to significantly improve because the (mediocrity+marketing=success) recipe is proven to work, over and over. What would it take for Chrome to lose market share? A new hot hip popular company with lots of money thrown in advertising, like (extremely unlikely example) Tesla, with a new cute interface. Because people like new and shiny trinkets.
I only notice the kind of "tabs are slow to open" behavior pretty randomly, and without knowing the state of the rest of my machine at those moments (is there something else pegging a few of my cores for some reason?) I can't confidently place any blame on the browser itself.<p>For what they are, I consider modern web browsers to be exceptionally fast and reliable, and they tend to put a lot of other applications to absolute shame. They are imperfect, but still very, very good.
I just counted my open tabs in Opera 42, and quit it so I could see the memory use.<p>799 open tabs. 8.5GB. Restarted in around 10 seconds and it's currently using around 2GB. "Delay loading of background tabs" is checked, which I believe is the default now.<p>Not had any serious responsiveness problems. The browser extension I use to give me a list of tabs on my sidebar is a little slow when opening a new window, that's about it.
> Safari may take a second or two just to open a new blank tab on a 2014 iMac<p>Is "blank" actually blank? If you have new tabs set to show Top Sites (the default setting), there's a notable lag that doesn't occur if you set it to Empty Page. Of course, changing it is a reduction in functionality, and it's silly that loading a simple grid of screenshots is so slow. Chrome, for its part, is even slower (on my machine) to actually load the new tab page, but it loads it asynchronously with the address bar responding instantaneously, whereas Safari lags out the whole UI.<p>I still use Safari myself, with new tabs set to Empty Page, because I don't really care about the screenshot-grid functionality (in either browser), and Safari has better performance in other respects, as well as lower power consumption. But it irks me that the default macOS experience makes you wait to open a new tab; it's a terrible UX for something that shouldn't be hard to optimize.
Fascinating and frustrating at the same time, reading people going back and forth on their browser experiences.<p>"I've got 450 tabs open, in any browser, ever, and I experience 0 lag - in fact, it tends to finish rendering before my eyes even focus! And I've only got 6 gigs on some old 386!"<p>vs<p>"I can't even move my mouse in FF/Chrome/Safari without massive memory spikes and random reboots!"<p>At least some of the reports have to be expectations - I've sat next to someone and they thought I was "moving so fast" in my browser, and I was - at the same time - cursing how slow everything was running.<p>Someone reporting "no lag" might actually be experiencing what someone else reports as lag. Is there any way to adjust for our vague descriptions? Videos, perhaps, of what someone considers "fast" or "no lag" on a browser with 100s of tabs open?
The same could be said about Computer, OS, or any Apps.<p>We have SSD, CPU, Memory and Network 100 to 10000x faster then what had 20 years ago, and yet Apps didn't get 100x faster. It is still not instantaneous.<p>In someways i think it is because we have created far too much abstraction /layers.
Browsers need to translate instructions using a current formal spec, whilst being forgiving to human error and allowing backward compatibility with past specs / browser quirks. They also need to evolve quickly to meet future potential spec requirements.<p>I'm no expert in the development of browsers; but I'd hazard a guess that the problem isn't as straightforward as it seems… and performance will suffer as a result, especially since all this has to occur at runtime.
As a Firefox user since v1 on Linux I have witnessed how slow some parts of the browser has become. For instance, textarea text typing can be so painfully slow with a visible lag between keystrokes.. that's not just on a certain websites and with spell-checking enabled, but with all options off on a blank page with single textarea element.. I guess there is no way to get rid of all the bloat of the ages..
I tried to avoid both "real" and "fake" news sites like the plague. Firefox performs admirably.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400</a>
I know the article mentions openning new tabs.<p>But When it comes to clicking on links and opening a new page, Browsers aren't slow. The software that runs on them is slow: all those applications loading too many libraries, widgets, videos, video ads, Angular and lots of code that's not needed.
Why for view HTML/1.0 1990 specification (<a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945" rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945</a>) modern browser needs about:config 3000 variables for show it?<p>Too many modules in this "Bot Machine".
I am one of the tab hoarders and I think the general attitude of browser vendors/developers towards us is "you're doing it wrong" (they might be right). FYI Having huge amount of RAM helps (a bit) and on Windows, Firefox works quite well with up to 100-200 tabs.
Maybe the question should be "Why don't I spend time optimising browsers?"<p>Certainly that's my problem - I don't even try. Enough people with that attitude and browsers never get optimised...
A technical question. Does using other format like XML or XHTML make rendering faster given the same amount of nodes + styles in the page? Can it help make browsers render a page faster?
What happened to the performance of the 'back' button?<p>Pressing 'back' used to be quick, on the modern web its rather sluggish, like it re-loads the old page from scratch.<p>I can forgive sites that are implemented as single page with their own 'fake' URLs (though that is still annoying). But even static content.<p>Given the emphasis on browsers handling lots of tabs I'm surprised 'back' isn't implemented by, effectively, keeping the old page around for a bit and pausing its Javascript, then just picking up where you left off.
Agreed, I have about 8GB of pages open right now not doing anything. Many computers don't have that much total ram. I think it's time to have per tab resource throttling. For example if a page uses over a certain amount of<p>. compute resources, the cpu cycles allowed in the next epoch are halved<p>. RAM it's memory accesses per second are halved in the next epoch<p>. network traffic it's kB/s are halved in the next epoch<p>This would allow all pages to still work but the resource intensive ones would be flagged quickly by users and developers.
Unimaginative, non-technical rant. Please find the bottlenecks, and provide a technical solution. The code is open source for you to read, and your patch will be constructive and helpful. Your idealist blog-post, not really that helpful.
Yeah, Opera with Presto engine was amazing. It was the only browser that focused on UX, really fast and responsive UX. It also had real keyboard navigation, going through the links was easier, than using a mouse, temporarily enabling javascript or cookies in a tab was couple of keypresses away. Good times.<p>Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. And they are big and so deep in the government, that no one seem to be able to do anything about it.
My Firefox instance has recently picked up the nasty habit of every time I move to a different tab, the web area is white save for a spinning grey loading icon in the center for a good half second. I've never seen anything like this before recently and it's a real bummer on speed
Has the author tried <a href="https://vivaldi.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/</a> (started from the remnants of original opera I believe)