How did web browsers become such fat, sloppy, disgusting pigs?

T

Tha_Bomb

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 15, 2000
Messages
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I don't get it. I'm sitting here on too many torrents, waiting for uTorrent to empty it's 512MB of cache and (yeah, too much, I know) while my poor USB harddrive is screaming away and as I watch the pot of Task Manager dwindle away to a boil I notice something. I'm using OVER 2GB of RAM...on XP! wtf? I have 3 MAJOR programs open and a few (maybe like 5) smaller ones, but uTorrent (at about 520-530MB) and my two browsers are eating me ALIVE! IE is at 300MB and Firefox is using over 500MB of RAM! I already know I open way too many windows at once, but after they're mostly shut down, the RAM usage (as measured in the VM Size column in Task Manager) stays up like it's just seen the hottest fox of it's life! What the FUCK? Am I missing something here? Whatever happened to the glory days of browsers using about 100-200MB and NO MORE with about 10 windows (before the tabbed days) open? Is it flash? Youtube? I just don't get it and its really starting to piss me off because the "alternative" browser is worse than the corporate slob. Where do I sign up to be a web browser programmer? I mean I can't code, but I'm sure my doodles in Notepad will be more than adequate. I'll bet I can make 100K+ at it, too! Where have all the cowboys gone, dammit!
 
Tha_Bomb said:
I mean I can't code, but I'm sure my doodles in Notepad will be more than adequate.
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Sure give it a try. After all, its magic, those symbols and syntax don't mean a thing.

You must have a memory leak or something, I don't see how uTorrent can be using 500MB of RAM either in Physical or Virtual memory.

With tabbed browsing my Firefox can easily hit 250+MB.
 
haha dude, say you have a few tabs open, thats 20-50 pictures, each picture is 1+ mb(browser has to make a bmp out of every jpg before it can show it), you're playing a myspace mp3, which is 5 megs, but also has to be decompressed before you can play it, here you go another 60 megs, average myspace page is 5-6 megs, all the files including html are compressed, once you unzip everything it can become 80 megs..lol.. there is JAVA VM, javascript interpreter, i'm not even talking about video..
 
Yeah, it does seem like web browsers are pigs. Poorly written plugins (looking at you Flash and Acrobat Reader) balloon memory like crazy until closed. This 5 day old session of IE i'm running with 2 windows open and 16 tabs between the two is using over 800MB right now. I have 6GB in this system so it's not a big deal, and I can always (or I should) close the session and open a new one.

I wish web browsers could use a slimmer profile when extras aren't needed, or are explicitly disabled. And 3rd parties need to get their acts together too.
 
This is what happens when web browsers are also expected to wash the dishes.
 
There's always www.opera.com

Great browser (I still prefer Firefox myself however) and it's quite efficient at memory use
 
Tha_Bomb said:
I don't get it. I'm sitting here on too many torrents, waiting for uTorrent to empty it's 512MB of cache and (yeah, too much, I know) while my poor USB harddrive is screaming away and as I watch the pot of Task Manager dwindle away to a boil I notice something. I'm using OVER 2GB of RAM...on XP! wtf? I have 3 MAJOR programs open and a few (maybe like 5) smaller ones, but uTorrent (at about 520-530MB) and my two browsers are eating me ALIVE! IE is at 300MB and Firefox is using over 500MB of RAM! I already know I open way too many windows at once, but after they're mostly shut down, the RAM usage (as measured in the VM Size column in Task Manager) stays up like it's just seen the hottest fox of it's life! What the FUCK? Am I missing something here? Whatever happened to the glory days of browsers using about 100-200MB and NO MORE with about 10 windows (before the tabbed days) open? Is it flash? Youtube? I just don't get it and its really starting to piss me off because the "alternative" browser is worse than the corporate slob. Where do I sign up to be a web browser programmer? I mean I can't code, but I'm sure my doodles in Notepad will be more than adequate. I'll bet I can make 100K+ at it, too! Where have all the cowboys gone, dammit!
Click to expand...

Firefox 2.x has always been known to have massive memory leaks. Get the 3.0 beta. It's supposed to be faster and the memory leak supposingly fixed. I haven't tried it myself though due to lack of plug-in supports at the moment.
 
Luda said:
There's always www.opera.com

Great browser (I still prefer Firefox myself however) and it's quite efficient at memory use
Click to expand...


I've been using Opera for a few days now, and it's actually pretty good. It is either missing just a few things I use in FF, or I just haven't found them yet, but overall the experience is nice.
 
my ut doesn't use more than 40 megs of ram, 1 or 2% cpu. seti uses the rest :D

ie7 sucks :(, a definite mem hog
 
I like IE7, not too bad on memory on my machine. Better than firefox a lot of the time.

Opera renders too many pages incorrectly compared to IE/Firefox so I cant use it regularly.
 
Grentz said:
I like IE7, not too bad on memory on my machine. Better than firefox a lot of the time.

Opera renders too many pages incorrectly compared to IE/Firefox so I cant use it regularly.
Click to expand...


I'm finding that. It doesn't format many forum pages correctly.
 
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