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Comment by JVIDEL | Hacker News Reader

In what planet? I'm not even going to use myself as an example because I do other heavy stuff with my PC, I'm going to use my non-tech friends: one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system.

Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience. That's not a problem in mobile where the need is the mother of invention so mem management is automatic and chrome reopens the tabs you had by itself, but in a desktop environment (specially windows) one wrong click and the session restore in chrome wipes your previous session.

But it was cheap, cheaper than an unlocked iphone and it gets the job done so its ok for her.

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> one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system.

I suspect a few people on HN will be reluctant to see their role in this arrangement. ducks

Don't duck, it's the truth.

We built really powerful computers and decided the best way to use them was to run web apps consisting of a poor performance scripting language with a poor performance visual-rendering language and half the people who build with it seem to think that anything done in a web browser is free.

"Modern" CSS for even a simple site is pretty silly. So many horribly inefficient rules, sometimes dozens of levels of overwriting properties, etc. And gobs upon gobs of Javascript that does very little but is constantly running, checking input boxes, animating every tiny little detail, doing things that can be done without Javascript, etc.

I have better system performance when running a Windows 7 VM, a semi-bulky image editor, or compiling the kernel than I do with a few bulky webapps in Firefox. And this is on a desktop built just 4 years ago.

I have a light-weight Linux setup that uses 80MB of RAM after logging in. It has 1GB of RAM. I can't run GMail and Facebook Firefox and browse the Internet at the same time with minimal open tabs. It's sad.

It's not like it's constrained to the web either. I had a bit of an epiphany about the state of desktop Windows a few years ago when for a hobby project I wrote a UI using only Win32 and C and no external dependencies. Maybe it took longer to write than it should have but I was really shocked at how the thing ran so much faster and smoother than just about any UI I was using on that machine. It dawned on me that all those layers of MFC, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and whatever else they'll come up with in the name of developer productivity are no match for a set of APIs designed to run at 25MHz with 8MB of RAM.

This is believable, but I'd like to dig a little deeper. Do you remember which Windows apps you were comparing yours against? And on what version of Windows?

This was Windows 7, I am pretty sure with dwm disabled, and it was comparing (albeit informally) against every Windows app I used at the time.

I know that some newer frameworks take advantage of GPU features (actually I used to work as a dev in the Windows org) but guess what, GDI is still faster.

This is why I still use Winamp, nothing else comes close to dealing with playlists of thousands of items while also being fairly customisable.

Let us also not forget it's power to literally punish ungulates as well.

I can pop-up Activity Monitor any time in the day, with multiple apps open, and it's guaranteed the app using the most memory is a browser (any browser).

As a data point: Safari is using 600+MB now with just HN and GitHub open. It's using more memory than all the other apps (editor, terminal, mail, Rdio, Skype) combined. 600MB is not much by today's standards, but comparatively, is ridiculously wasteful. It's a damn CD.

Hope the Mavericks update improves this a bit since I'm short on RAM on this machine (4GB).

Mavericks does amazing things to memory usage. My machine has 4GB as well, and safari went from 1GB+ memory usage to 200MB memory usage for the same amount of tabs. Under ML, I was swapping constantly; now, no swap at all.

Did you count up all of the individual processes? Webkit is now finally on par with Chrome in that each tab is it's own running process.

Did update today, and it's certainly much snappier, it rarely hits the disk now.

I have 16MB, and usually have dozens of windows/tabs open in Safari, Xcode, Textmate2, and a few miscellaneous apps. Currently, Activity Monitor shows 15.9x MB used, 10.87 App, 1.26 File cache, 1.91 Wired, and 1.94 Compressed. Swap used 0 bytes, virtual memory 20.12 GB. No noticeable hesitations attributable to compressing/uncompressing when switching windows/apps.

4GB is plenty of RAM for a web browser with many tabs, especially with an SSD for backing virtual memory. If it isn't there is a memory leak, and if there is a leak, 8GB is as bad as 12GB.

My MBA has 4GB and I constantly forget, because it is enough, and I am constantly surprised that it doesn't have 8GB.

All modern web browsers save and restore sessions across restarts.

> 4GB is plenty of RAM for a web browser with many tabs,

I always up-to-date Firefox, so hopefully the memory leaks are minimal. I reboot my Linux machine every month-ish and don't exit Firefox unless necessary. I always keep a few "app" tabs pinned, only a couple of them are heavy. I have 4GB of RAM and turned swap off for an experiment. Sure enough, after a couple weeks of browsing and keeping about 25 tabs open, Firefox's memory consumption would creep up and up and eventually it would crash.

I can only guess/hope that there are memory leaks involved.

Re: MBA/MBP - with Mavericks 4GB is doable given how it aggressively manages memory: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compresse...

Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience.

Why should they? If a tab's "dormant", the browser can just quiesce JS timeouts and let the tab's memory get swapped out. Not a problem anymore.

That most (all?) web browsers don't do this currently isn't the user's fault.

That's not interesting idea, but I'm not sure any browser is designed to be able to fully restore the state of a tab that it's swapped out.

Do you even know what swapping is? The whole idea of swapping is that the OS pages out memory without the application being aware of what's happening!

A bit over a year ago RAM was cheap enough you could just stock up. I have 16GB of RAM and paid 80€ or something for it. I keep stuff in tabs or windows now I used to stick in bookmarks. Right now I have Visual Studio open after work as I want to do a deployment in ~3h. No need to close and re-open the rather big project later.

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