Hi,
Chuck Burns wrote:
On Monday, August 25, 2014 5:08:36 PM Mihai Popescu wrote:
Actually, I can somewhat understand his reaction. Let's not be so quick to
judge here. Yes, many "windows-primary" web browsers -DO- seem to
be less-than-capable under Unix.
Thanks. I just did a quick and dirty comparison, since I felt similar
problems as the original poster, although I experience less crashes, I
notice high resource usage.
However, is that a problem with Unix? Or is that a problem with the
browsers being -first developed- for Windows, and then ported to the
other OSs.
There are also more restrictions on UNIX than on Windows, so when you -
do- exceed the limits on UNIX, apps misbehave because they aren't
expecting to be told "No. You can't have more RAM" because on Windows,
they ask for more RAM, they get more RAM.
Now, does this mean that windows is better? No. Not really. What it means
is, those browsers are not written with limits in mind.
That's one thing for sure.
However if you add that browsers "leek" RAM everywhere (even my quick
test showed that after a couple of task, turning back to the original
page lost a lot of memory) and that in addition the memory usage is
higher, it is easy to see that we are worse on Unix than on Windows.
What needs to be done is find the leaks and patch the leaks.. OR use
browsers that are lighter and/or smarter about their memory usage.
Patching the leaks will benefit any OS, perhaps we can work with on
upstream.
However, getting the same memory usage on Unix as on Windows would be a
first step, at least we are "no worse" when using our favourite BSD!
Many mainstream browsers simply require more cpu and RAM than they
really should, especially on older systems.
I bet all those custom interfaces, like the latest Firefox, do not help.
That is why Seamonkey, which is actually a suite, is often quite lighter
than Firefox. However, I can still do quite some decent browsing on an
aging WinXP laptop with 1G of ram. My FreeBSD machine has twice the RAM
and two cores... and feels slower, the OpenBSD machine has about the
same spec and problem.
Riccardo
