On 7/7/14, 6:58 PM, Brian M. Blakely wrote:
I am not a browser developer, I am a Web developer, but it stands to reason
that (as stated in the OP) there may at least be a fruitful memory savings
I just measured in Firefox 30, and a bare-bones document (about:blank)
uses approximately 550KB of memory.
This breaks down as about:
* 330KB of JS heap (which presumably would be there anyway for your
special document),
* 10KB DOM data structures
* 210KB layout data (mostly style data, looks like).
So you could plausibly save about 220KB of memory. I encourage you to
do similar measurements in other browsers as desired.
For comparison, a 320x426 canvas (and I doubt you're going to be using
ones smaller than that in this special mode) will have a backing store
that takes about 545KB for a 2D canvas. The sort of devices where
you're likely to actually use WebGL will probably have 4MB+ canvas
backing stores, and probably comparable for WebGL.
On the memory front, this could be especially useful when sharing space with
the 30+ tabs
That would translate into a savings of about 7MB. Not nothing, but just
to put that in perspective simply loading
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.1.min.js into those blank tabs above
makes them use 1.43MB of memory instead of 550KB. That's without
_doing_ anything; just loading the library.
So I suspect in practice the script state and canvas backing stores in
those 30+ tabs would totally swamp the 7MB of layout/DOM data.
-Boris
