On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 8:22 AM, o1bigtenor via talk <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 7:32 AM, Alvin Starr via talk <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On 12/11/2017 12:29 AM, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote: >> >>> On 2017-12-10 09:50 PM, o1bigtenor via talk wrote: >>> >>>> 1. You need to set up at least 10 windows in FF. >>>> 2. You need to find some kind of topics so that you have ranging from >>>> say 5 to 35 tabs open on EACH of those windows. >>>> >>> I'm feeling some déjà vu here: wasn't it suggested a few months ago that >>> 50–350 pages open at the same time is way beyond what a general-purpose >>> web browser might be expected to display? Each one of those pages can be >>> executing arbitrary code of unknown size. Maybe I'm a web protozoan, but >>> the findability of tabs drops massively when I've got more than a few in >>> even a single window. >>> >>> FF57 is much cleaner than before, and is at least as fast as Chrome. You >>> can quit FF, then have it restart with all your windows and tabs open. >>> The clever part is, it'll only render that tab when it gets focus, so >>> you could have hundreds of tabs open yet only a few loaded. So while I'm >>> pretty sure it won't fit your needs of an entire Starbucks-load of pages >>> in the one browser, it might get a little closer than FF <57. >>> >>> >>> The trouble is that more and more services, systems and applications are >> using HTML as the interface. >> So you will find yourself with pages(tabs) open in your browser instead >> of applications open on your desktop. >> Typically I run 20 tabs to keep applications I frequently use open and >> add on to that things I am working on ... now you have lots of little tabs. >> >> What I find as a bit nuance is when something crashes your browser it >> takes down all your open pages and your getting as much or as little as the >> restore on start up gives you. >> >> It would be nice to have the ability to run multiple browsers that are >> independent of each other on the same desktop as the same user but Chrome >> and Firefox keep their context on a per user basis. >> >> I am sure there is some way to get around this but I have not yet been >> sufficiently aggravated to figure out the magical incantation. >> > > It sounds like I'm not the only one who has issues with browsers - - - > thank you! > > Perhaps it is time that browsers were split into parts that do separate > things, > and things that could be managed by the USERS of those browsers rather > than by the advertising (I'll use the word people although I would much > rather > not include them as such) people that think they do own my desktop. > > If the browser coders were actually listening to their users this would > have > already been happening! > Most people do not have hundreds of tabs open. If I were leading the team developing Firefox, I would only investigate that issue to determine if it's a symptom of some bug that doesn't manifest itself unless the system is stressed like that or merely a resource exhaustion issue. If it's the latter, I would make it a low priority and concentrate on the higher priority issues. If I were inclined to investigate this issue, I'd want to know lots of details about the hardware environment in which the browser is running, the sites that are open, which extensions are installed, and I would not even bother listening to a user who hasn't cleared their cache completely and tried running with no extensions. There are simply too many variables there to point the finger at the browser implementation before looking at more likely scenarios. For instance, you have not mentioned how much RAM you have. I also tend to have many tabs open and I have 16GB of RAM on my desktop machine. I'll notice that Chrome will often chew up the majority of that RAM and the machine will start swapping. When that happens, things will slow to a crawl and I'll just restart the entire machine just to clean things up. I don't blame the browser for that. If you're like most people, you're unlikely to have more than 16GB of RAM on your machine and in fact, you're likely to have less. Just because you can open hundreds of tabs doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. Having said that, Stewart (I think) has already explained that Firefox 57 and later has lower resource utilization for inactive tabs. That seems like a win. As for why more services, systems, and applications are using HTML as the interface, I can answer that. Cost. I've been working on a healthcare application that was implemented using a proprietary language that can only be deployed on Windows or macOS desktops. That precludes an entire category of devices that people use, like tablets. If we do not provide a means for our customers to be able to use tablets where appropriate, we will eventually have no customers. When we analyzed this situation, it made no sense to have three different codebases, one for desktops, one for iOS and one for Android, so we settled on HTML5, AngularJS, and Node.js as the platform to serve all those deployment scenarios. While we are migrating this hugely complex application to a modern web application, we cannot just tell our customers, "We won't be upgrading the existing application for the next few years until we've finished migrating to the web application." so we embedded the Chromium browser via the Chromium Embedded Framework into the legacy application. Essentially, within a window of the legacy application, we have a web browser that renders the web application. We are migrating the legacy application to a web application piecemeal and eventually, the web application will "break out" of the constraints of that window. That is just a first step. Once we've completely eliminated the dependency on the legacy application, we can then iteratively improve the web application by creating a native application for tablets, hence my interest in Flutter that I've been talking about. In this particular application, like most vertical market applications, squeezing out the last 25% of performance simply isn't that important. It's much more important to our customers that their staff can continue to use the application they've been using for over 20 years with as little re-training as possible, which means that in many respects, our modern web application is imitating the look, feel, and behaviour of a legacy application that looks like it was modern when Windows 95 was released. We can do that thanks to the power of CSS and we can make evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes to the application. By the way, browsers are already modular. They may not be modular in the way that you care about but there are definitely distinct components in all modern browsers. One of the reasons why browsers are as resource-intensive as they are is that they have to be very forgiving of ambiguous or bad markup. Part of that is due to the ambiguities of the specifications. Part of it is due to the implementations of those specifications by browsers. Most of it is due to the fact that there are multiple ways to express the same layout, some more efficient than others, and most people will not pay for the level of expertise that it requires to understand the intricacies of browser internals. They just want pretty sites for cheap. Regards, Clifford Ilkay +1 647-778-8696
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