Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreezerburnV | Hacker News Reader

Sorry I like the battery in my laptop, and I like my browser not consuming 1GB RAM per process, tabs not taking multiple seconds to close if I have the browser open for a while without restarting it, etc. I try it every so often and it’s always exactly this bad. I’ll just stick to something like Brave if I’m not using Chrome directly.

View on HN

I have to say that is precisely the opposite of my experience.

I held on to a 2012 4 GB MacBook Air until fairly recently as my casual web browsing machine. With such low system memory, I had to be extremely economical with my open tabs; no more than 3 or 4 at a time. The great suspender plugin helped until it became malware infested, and with that no longer an option, I moved to Firefox. The resource utlization improvement was immediately apparent and I haven't looked back, even after I finally updated my machine.

Chrome will catch up on energy use once non-heuristic / dumb ad blockers are the only option for non-tech people. Once manifest v3 is in place, the other shoe drops, and you start getting ads that you can't block. And ads add page bloat, unneeded data transfer, etc.

E.g, my boring Chevy starts to looks pretty performant next to your Ferrari once you have to tote around 2 tons of bricks and I don't :)

> Sorry I like the battery in my laptop, and I like my browser not consuming 1GB RAM per process

With more effective ad blocking in Firefox you'll process less and load less. And since Firefox lets uBlock Origin use WebAssembly the blocking runs faster and more efficiently too.

I don’t use browsers unless I have uBlock Origin installed. Despite Firefox getting better features from it, it’s a crazy resource hog. And that’s in comparison to Chrome! Let alone all the other issues I have which I have no hope of going away either. (Well, no hope isn’t quite accurate since like I said I give it a spin occasionally only to walk away disappointed)

> it’s a crazy resource hog

It isn't. Chrome and Firefox have similar memory usage these days.

Actual measurements are better than anecdotes. Here are some actual measurements:

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-compa...

Funnily enough, responding to someone saying "I literally saw multiple processes eating 1GB+ of RAM" with "This website over here did some measurements and says you're wrong" isn't going to come across as well as you think it is.

I've had Chrome open for some number of days and when I check Activity Monitor, the most RAM-expensive process is currently sitting at <500MB, a few others at 100-300MB, and the rest at under 100MB. The "energy impact" of it is at 160-ish. Whereas, again, Firefox was taking up 1GB+ of RAM in multiple processes and the energy impact was more like 260-ish, my battery was dying way faster, I would see CPU usage of double Chrome regularly, and macOS was always saying that Firefox was using a lot of power. The RAM usage is something I've seen on Windows as well, along with issues with the browser just behaving poorly over time. I just don't see these issues on Chrome or (most of) its derivative browsers. (I've used Brave a lot as well)

Guess I'm just objectively wrong though, because Toms Guide disagrees with what I'm seeing.

No, you're objectively wrong because other users aren't seeing what you're seeing. That's the problem with anecdotes.

I've had Firefox 120 running for days and it's not doing what your strange set up is doing.

Never had that problem even at FF’s worst. Try deleting your profile and starting over.

I guess I could give it a try. I see this kind of thing across both macOS and Windows though, but I do have sync on so theoretically there could be something there causing extreme issues across multiple computers and 2 OSes, generally despite me trying to even follow stuff like FasterFox to make it work better.

Don't use Fasterfox. It tweaks many settings that frequently result in performance regressions. The default networking-related settings are set the way they are for a reason.

Performance has not been a complaint of mine, especially network-related. It's everything else. Almost like Firefox is optimizing for just shoveling as much CPU power and RAM as possible into it's gaping, bloated maw, not caring about anything else. Kinda like an old mail application from a startup I worked at. Nothing has ever matched how amazingly good it was at certain things it did (or even have similar features), but hot DANG did it just drink battery like its going out of style.

Use a fork like Librewolf, and look into having a customized user.js for performance tweaks. There is a lot you can do.

For me, currently, my setup is the best browser I've ever used.

Don't use a fork and don't customize your user.js. It is exceedingly unlikely that excess power consumption is caused by anything you can easily tweak. Instead report issues to Mozilla.

Very bad advice.

Some forks have clear advantages, are well maintained and trustworthy.

There are numerous reasons to maintain a user.js file also, not just performance reasons.

Indeed, report issues to Mozilla directly, but that isn't inconsistent with using a fork and maintaining a user.js

> Almost like Firefox is optimizing for just shoveling as much CPU power and RAM as possible into it's gaping, bloated maw, not caring about anything else.

That is of course not the case.

Enjoy your Chrome prison, then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com