Switching to Opera: It's Time to Break up with Chrome and All the RAM It Eats Up

I know I'm going to get shit for this but the Edge browser isn't actually half bad, especially now with extensions. Also does 1080p in Netflix.
 
kidstechno3 said:
I know I'm going to get shit for this but the Edge browser isn't actually half bad, especially now with extensions. Also does 1080p in Netflix.
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Sonicks said:
I guess if you work remote it can be slightly different but I still don't see why you'd need all them open at once. Again, I don't see any benefit to preloading sites because I know I'll use them at some later point. This is why I have the bookmarks bar with all the important work stuff visible to me up front.
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Well here's an example. Lets say we have a problem customer at the box office that purchased tickets to our show through Groupon. Now the customer actually makes the purchase through groupon, but the Box office is using Ticketmaster, Comcast Tix, or some variant of veritix or outbox. Groupon sends a customer list to the ticketing system, who then pulls the tickets directly. All of this happens without any interaction from the box office at the venue, or our box office operations team, and really from the customer's standpoint none of it matters, they just want their "good seats".

This means trying to find the order in the Groupon merchant center which is fucking terrible. If we have multiple offers in the market, it's easier to just leave all 4 of them open all the time, otherwise I lose time opening up each one at a time. Then trying to find it in the ticketing system, which again depending on what I'm working on at the time, I may have 3 or 4 instances open as well. That's 6-8 tabs right there that i just leave open for ease of access to information, and this is something that I'm only doing 10% of the time.

The HR stuff all runs through our Intranet portal. it's just easier to have it up in case i need it. The electronic filing system runs over the browser and I use that to access our previous settlements, Box office info, contracts etc. Also, my access to Lawson also runs over a browser for when I need to access either our GL or a prior show's GL. Lawson is linked to our AP imaging system, there's another tab right there.

All of the financial stuff (Concur, BofA, Amex Vpayment, Oanda) absolutely necessary for creating payments to vendors which of course have to be reported.

This stuff doesn't start every time I start opera, but on the busy days when I know i need quick access, I just call them all up in the morning to start off with, and then I have access to them as I need them. As the run of shows wind down, or we get closer to end of day it tapers off pretty quick, but again at the start oh yeah you bet i'm hitting 15-20 tabs without even blinking.


In the touring entertainment world, decisions have to be made quickly and correctly. in order to do that, I (as part of the management) team and sometimes the techs need to be able to access a lot of information quickly. it would be great if all of it's in-house, but a lot of time it's not. That means we have to connect all the dots in our head from all these data sources which are not connected at all.
 
This is an ad for Opera.

I've been using Opera for most of the last 12-15 years. It uses the same codebase as Chrome now so I am sure that it performs very similarly.
 
I'm also in the tab whore crowd. Some of you need more work to do I guess. ;)

I routinely have to research multiple issues for multiple projects daily. There's usually a dozen tabs per topic. Plus I spend time doing research on a variety of topics of hobby interest. Invariably I get interrupted and I just leave the tabs open to continue my work later.
 
Semantics said:
Hardly say sandboxing means jackshit when base Chrome was left unexploited this year in the very contest you mentioned.
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Doesn't mean it didn't get busted wide in previous years and won't get busted again in the future. I'm just saying that "I totally put my trust in sandboxing" is not as safe a mantra as it sounds.

Stay cautious.
 
I've been using Waterfox exclusively for the last three or so years and love it.
 
Showbiz said:
Honestly I haven't even looked back. Firefox could very well be superior to opera, but since I switched 4 years ago, and it's be working flawlessly for me since then, I haven't had a reason to look again. If an Opera update breaks something for me, I'll give Firefox another try, but for now I just have no reason to risk losing time at work having to re-login, and reload everything.
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I prefer firefox over everything else as well. Chrome simply sucks
 
daglesj said:
I don't get the whole "I have to have 80+ Tabs open!" Like it's some super user status thing.

Just shows to me a messy unorganised mind that loves to wait while 80+ tabs populate when they open a browser and then moan when their machine runs out of ram.

On a bad day I may go to 9-10 tabs. Average is three to four. That's it.
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Why not, different people do things differently? That's part of having a decent computer (it's [H] remember?). At some point I had like 300 tabs in Firefox and it consumed around 10GB of RAM. I have 32GB so why should I care, at least something uses it up. lol
 
daglesj said:
There's always one...:D
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I'll admit, I've had a ton of tabs open too. Several teams I follow randomly select people from their virtual waiting room for public tickets. So I open up as many tabs & windows as possible to have a higher chance at snagging some. I found out, IE is limited on my machine to roughly 40 or so windows & tabs.

As far as Chrome & RAM, this is a problem I have. Far too many applications imho use way too much RAM. I blame it on modern day computers and graduating computer science students who never had to worry about system limitations before. Why bother trying to optimize when you can just throw more power into the equation?
 
Showbiz said:
Well here's an example. Lets say we have a problem customer at the box office that purchased tickets to our show through Groupon. Now the customer actually makes the purchase through groupon, but the Box office is using Ticketmaster, Comcast Tix, or some variant of veritix or outbox. Groupon sends a customer list to the ticketing system, who then pulls the tickets directly. All of this happens without any interaction from the box office at the venue, or our box office operations team, and really from the customer's standpoint none of it matters, they just want their "good seats".

This means trying to find the order in the Groupon merchant center which is fucking terrible. If we have multiple offers in the market, it's easier to just leave all 4 of them open all the time, otherwise I lose time opening up each one at a time. Then trying to find it in the ticketing system, which again depending on what I'm working on at the time, I may have 3 or 4 instances open as well. That's 6-8 tabs right there that i just leave open for ease of access to information, and this is something that I'm only doing 10% of the time.

The HR stuff all runs through our Intranet portal. it's just easier to have it up in case i need it. The electronic filing system runs over the browser and I use that to access our previous settlements, Box office info, contracts etc. Also, my access to Lawson also runs over a browser for when I need to access either our GL or a prior show's GL. Lawson is linked to our AP imaging system, there's another tab right there.

All of the financial stuff (Concur, BofA, Amex Vpayment, Oanda) absolutely necessary for creating payments to vendors which of course have to be reported.

This stuff doesn't start every time I start opera, but on the busy days when I know i need quick access, I just call them all up in the morning to start off with, and then I have access to them as I need them. As the run of shows wind down, or we get closer to end of day it tapers off pretty quick, but again at the start oh yeah you bet i'm hitting 15-20 tabs without even blinking.


In the touring entertainment world, decisions have to be made quickly and correctly. in order to do that, I (as part of the management) team and sometimes the techs need to be able to access a lot of information quickly. it would be great if all of it's in-house, but a lot of time it's not. That means we have to connect all the dots in our head from all these data sources which are not connected at all.
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Dang, that sounds like quite the work flow. Sort of brought me back to my last job where things were that faced paced for me (and we also used Lawson, which was a slow IE-only pain in the ass at the time).

I see why you'd need all those resources available to you at any given time for sure. It sounds like it can go one way or another for you very quickly and being prepared is better than having the customers wait longer than they should.

Even with all that though, you're still rocking at most 20 tabs for a demanding job which is still a reasonable amount given the work load. This author writes articles on a Mac and I can't imagine why the hell he would need anywhere near 65 tabs to be productive at what he does, lol.
 
Megalith said:
While I hate seeing all of the duplicate Chrome entries in Task Manager, I have not experienced what this guy is complaining about: Google’s browser, he claims, uses so much RAM that it is practically unusable. The author urges everyone to switch to Opera, which supposedly performs flawlessly in comparison, particularly in regard to handling large numbers of tabs. Is this just a clever ad for the new update, “Reborn,” or is Opera really the right alternative? The browser was bought by a Chinese consortium last year for $600 million.

…if you like opening more than a couple tabs at once, Google Chrome is not the browser for you. Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management, especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too. With Chrome, my computer crawls to complete unusability multiple times a day. After one too many times of having to go into Activity Monitor to find that one single Chrome tab is using several gigs of RAM, I decided enough was enough. I switched to Opera, a browser I had previously thought was only for contrarians.
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In my day job I use chrome and need to have multiple tabs open at a time, 5-15 depending on work flow. Yes it consumes a fair bit of ram, but if the 8gb in the laptop can handle it I imagine most people will be ok.

I like that every tab is essentially a standalone instance in case one tab crashes I don't lose all the tabs. RAM hungry I suppose, but comes with a benefit.
 
Staples said:
This is an ad for Opera.

I've been using Opera for most of the last 12-15 years. It uses the same codebase as Chrome now so I am sure that it performs very similarly.
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The fact that a guy from motherboard.com uses Opera tells me everything I need to know about using Opera.
 
I have used opera as my main browser for years, and I always have lots of tabs open. It has never caused me any problems, so i can see where he is coming from. never tried chrome browser due to early reports of privacy issues.
 
I'll use tabs to open a series of links from one page to be viewed in succession later... is there a better way, at least as fast, to do this that doesn't actually load up memory? like an option in chrome to not do anything until I click on the newly created tab?
 
I prefer the look of chrome over opera the favorites is on the upper right side via a dedicated spot so is a quick click to open saved bookmarks, the favorites bar is right there, with opera have to click on the left "icon" heart bookmark to access the all bookmarks and open a new tab to actually use them, though the favorites bar is there it seems to be 1 less spot then I can fit in chrome, the screen real estate on opera with the side bar and favorites bar active seems a bit more constrained as a side by side comparison then I have done with chrome.

As far as ram usage, I do not have 20 billion tabs open at same time so cannot comment on this(never really had an issue with crawlin to snail speed even with barely see the icons of tabs opened the few times I did via chrome) but just as a base line, I find opera is using ~200mb more ram then my chrome install uses(just sitting idle no tabs open my ram usage via chrome 1.15-1.28gb with all background tasks etc, whereas opera sits 1.6-1.8gb, even more so when open multiple tabs chrome might hit ~2.56gb whereas opera in my build gets to 2.9gb or so)

Not sure why my ram usage seems higher then the reviewers hate on cause chrome is so ram intensive, I noticed the opposite in that chrome is actually using less ram then opera is using, not fond of the GUI for opera over chrome, one thing I can say about opera that I like, it does seem a little snappier in comparison, maybe cause it is using more process instances so therefore mor ram therefore more working memory available to it so will be faster?

Right now only have the start-hardocp landing page-this post box open and have 5 opera instance 1 crash reporter using 1.82gb perf mon memory usage, chrome having basically same 3 tabs open gives 7 process instance and using 1.62gb says to me chrome less ram usage for more open process. opera is snappier but it seems to cast its process loading all over my cpu 12-18% whereas chrome was sitting ~8-11% doing same thing(not sure when watching youtube or whatever) so more ram more cpu load over the cores in opera vs chrome side by side quick testing for me.

Not sure but seems load higher ram-cpu it should be snappier, am using opera out of the box no extra anything, chrome have been using a long time and have numerous extensions added to it, so chrome should be using more of everything, in my case it does not seem to do so??

IE seems to use less yet then chrome, easier on cpu as well but also less secure less snappy less "able" to do what I need to do(hence the us9ing chrome in first place) with opera essentially using the same backbone as chrome IMO chrome should be the best of the breed using its own stuff cause it is the one that makes it all.
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Maybe if you were on a laptop or phone something along those lines opera is "intelligent" enough to conserve snappiness/ram/power usage so it will actually use less then it does on my desktop, but as it stands prefer the look of chrome GUI, ram usage is better for me on chrome and it seems a touch less cpu load(or using it better) but I dig the snappiness of opera and the wallpaper it has which chrome does not, so I will use opera for awhile I suppose.

IMO opera or chrome are both good options(have not used firefox/waterfox in years and safari only on my iphone 4 the few times I was going on the web with it whereas my moto G4 uses chrome seems to be a bit heavy battery wise IMO but that is besides the point)

I just do not see where the reviewer was saying opera is so much better really, even the ad blocker though built in you have to go into setting to adjust everything, very easy to find on chrome, with opera you have to type about:settings in a search bar then you can adjust it, chrome, it is in the top right you can adjust pretty much everything via one click less searching for it.

anyways :)
 
I've used Opera once in my life. Two weeks ago a customer wanted me to put Vista on his old PC and Opera was the only browser I could find that still supported Vista. Didn't look half bad.
 
I switched to Opera initially for its built in VPN feature but really have been enjoying it.
 
daglesj said:
I don't get the whole "I have to have 80+ Tabs open!" Like it's some super user status thing.

Just shows to me a messy unorganised mind that loves to wait while 80+ tabs populate when they open a browser and then moan when their machine runs out of ram.

On a bad day I may go to 9-10 tabs. Average is three to four. That's it.
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Thanks.gif
 
Let's try something. I'll open every bookmark. My rig (at work) 12 core Xeon, 32GB.

Memory in use 9.7GB (including Outlook, spotify, and Visual Studio and sundry other crap)

And ...GO:
So many tabs open you can't even read them. Memory in use: 14GB. Machine responsiveness: like butter. Memory remaining: lots. Hey, look at that. I had a UHD/HDR video encode going too. Still like butter.

I'm sorry the guy in the video has a shitty computer.
 
I used Opera years ago. I loved how you can customize the look of the browser, such as you can move both address bar and tabs to the bottom, have a panel that hides all of your bookmarks, friggin mouse guestures yaaasss. All that was lost at one point after updating Opera. Big thanks to a fellow [H] member through [H]ard|OCP , I got them back with Vivaldi. It's wonky at times, but man, Vivaldi is great, especially the picture toggle to save precious kb/s (sometimes a must for my single digit kb/s connection...)
 
The only thing that fucks my phone is anandtech opened with chrome. Nothing else does it.
 
LOL you do that... ill keep using my chrome... you shouldnt have a pc with less than 16gig ram to start with lol
 
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Unless you're constantly being sent to the page file due to RAM usage, which shouldn't happen as most applications willingly return unnecessary cache when asked by the system, I don't see what the big deal is...
 
MysticRyuujin said:
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Unless you're constantly being sent to the page file due to RAM usage, which shouldn't happen as most applications willingly return unnecessary cache when asked by the system, I don't see what the big deal is...
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The author was on a Mac. He didn't have the $1,000 to upgrade from 8gb to 16gb
 
daglesj said:
I don't get the whole "I have to have 80+ Tabs open!" Like it's some super user status thing.

Just shows to me a messy unorganised mind that loves to wait while 80+ tabs populate when they open a browser and then moan when their machine runs out of ram.

On a bad day I may go to 9-10 tabs. Average is three to four. That's it.
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For me it it's normally a mix of work and personal, I will have 5-10 windows open each with 1-20 tabs as I look up parts and manuals I need for the day. Normally if I'm doing something like speccing out a new joystick for a control system I will have 1 window open for that with 10 different tabs to various models that I want to view. Then repeat for each type of device and it adds up lol.
 
daglesj said:
I don't get the whole "I have to have 80+ Tabs open!" Like it's some super user status thing.

Just shows to me a messy unorganised mind that loves to wait while 80+ tabs populate when they open a browser and then moan when their machine runs out of ram.

On a bad day I may go to 9-10 tabs. Average is three to four. That's it.
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I don't understand this either. I can find a book mark or google a result in less time than it probably takes to search through 80 tabs of shit. I've got 64GB of RAM and I don't care how much my browser eats up but 80 tabs being open has no organizational advantage.
 
All my computers have at least 16GB of RAM. Why should I care? If there's a memory leak yeah that's a problem, but otherwise I'm not particularly concerned.
 
I left opera because it was bought by the chineese and its bigest designer left the company to start Vivaldi
Vivaldi Technologies AS.
A Browser For Our Friends
 
For those of you that have tons of tabs open... I use chrome and I'd love to have more than 1 row of tabs. Has anyone discovered a browser or extension that allows more than 1 row of tabs?
 
For all of you who use Vivaldi, does it have bookmark sync yet?


I mean if it doesn't (and it didn't last time I tried it), I have to question the credibility of anyone recommending it.
 
Staples said:
For all of you who use Vivaldi, does it have bookmark sync yet?


I mean if it doesn't (and it didn't last time I tried it), I have to question the credibility of anyone recommending it.
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I love Vivaldi and don't know or care if it has bookmark syncing. It might be a live and die feature for you, but a lot of us don't care in the least.

My concern is guzzles ram just like Chrome, and I expect Opera does the same.
 
Am I the the only one that usually has IE, Chrome, and Firefox open at all times? My system is not exactly latest and greatest, but even with all 3 browsers, photoshop, visual studio, and whatever other dozen things I have going at one time, I can't say I ever really run out of ram with only 16GB. Now I don't run any of my VMs on this system, I have a few VM hosts downstairs in my rack for that (128GB of ram and 96GB of ram with 12c/24t and 8c/16t respectively, neither are all that new), but it's used for just about everything else.

IE usually has open all my MS centric sites like SharePoint, OWA, etc. Chrome runs only in Incognito and is used for ONLY social media stuff (F their tracking crap). Firefox is my main browser I typically use for general browsing.
 
Been using Opera for years now. What sold me on it was a not-so-very-scientific experiment between IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera I did a few years back.

The experiment was done using a clean system. By clean, I mean verified clean by an antivirus, and all the varying anti-spyware/malware stuff available at the time, all ran in safe mode for the entire system.

Then I went onto all the usual sites that load up the computer with adware, bad tracking cookies, etc. using each browser for the test. I would then go back into safe mode and run the same full system scans, clean the system, restart and repeat with a different browser until all were done.

IE wound up with over a few hundred bad things, from cookies to bad BHOs to just about anything else you can name, and a couple viruses.
Chrome and Firefox IIRC were under 50 bad things, mostly questionable cookies, but no viruses.
Opera came back with nothing bad other than a couple questionable cookies.

Been using Opera ever since as a result. I don't know how it fares now but I'm not against switching to a more secure alternative.
 
Pro tip:

Den read articles about memory usage when the writer does not know the different between private working set. working set and commit size
His "proff" of memory usage usage don't not show real RAM usage. Just memory address which is a hugely different thing.
You can have 9001 process open with 500mbyte Working set each, but not actually use more then maybe 800mbyts of ram.
 
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