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Firefox outperforms Chrome in speed for the first time according to a Speedometer assessment
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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There is this misconception of "using a lot of ram = bad", but memory is not like cpu or gpu cycles.
Unused memory is wasted memory. Chrome will use available memory to improve responsiveness. Primarily the memory use comes from keeping all open tabs in memory, so they are in the same state as you left them.
When the system runs low on ram, chrome will start discarding old tabs and giving back memory to other processes. Firefox does the same thing.
Also windows task manager is very inconsistent when it comes to memory usage. Right now it's telling me chromium is using 1.4gb for 47 tabs. And memory usage is a lot more complicated anyway.
Counter-point: Chrome brought multiple computers/laptops to a standstill, but Firefox doesn't. I used Chrome for years and just put up with it... But the lagging/slowness literally stopped when I switched. So while I'm sure you're right in theory, something about Google's implementation sucked on all the computers I used it on...
Hmm…interesting. I didn’t know Chrome was smart enough to use less ram if the system is taxed. Figured it just always used a shit ton…which sucks if you’re editing videos or something and need to open a browser or something.
That's because it isn't as smart as it sounds. Like with everything in programming there's a tradeoff being made. This behavior runs the risk of making the computer unresponsive while the garbage collector and the scheduler run after each other trying to clean house. “Unused memory is wasted memory” is kind of a fallacy. Overextending and requesting the OS for more memory than is available will always hurt performance. Ram operations aren't free, however much software engineers like to pretend they are. Neither are scheduling tasks. They cost time and responsiveness and can add up fast.
One of the immediate consequences, for example, is that if the users wants to interact with one of the discarded tabs, now the browser has to re-download the page (internet IO is insanely slow compared to disk operations), reload it to memory from disk cache which can also be slow—specially if the disk is busy with other IO—discard other older tabs to make room (compounding the problem), be slapped in the wrist because the OS says “No, you can't have DaVinci's RAM!” scramble for some more ram from some other idle task, reestablish the page state which might've been lost. Etc. it becomes messy fast, and now the user is frustrated that “I was reading this page a minute ago, why is it taking so long to load again, is my OS frozen? Damn I lost the forms I had partially filled?” So no, ballooning memory until it's all used up is not inherently always a good strategy. Nevermind that Chrome (and FF as well) have been found to have severe memory leaks that come and go.