[geeks] Replacement MacBook question

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 01:54:31PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Running FF2 for a few days, it would hit 800MB or more resident memory.
> 
> Running FF3 for two weeks now, I'm still only at 260MB resident.
> 
> This is on MacOS.
> 
> I've not run FF3 on Linux.

On linux, I'm seeing 280M resident after about 20 hours.  I currently
have 43 tabs open, most with flash disabled via the NoScript extension.
 
> One thing that has helped me lately is I use RSS more often to avoid  
> having to run though a bunch of browser pages.  Makes catching up on  
> sites I like or need to check much easier.

I use RSS pretty heavily, but I still end up with a lot of "To Process"
tabs open.
 
> The point is though, FF3 is dramatically less piggy than FF2 under the  
> same load, at least it is for me.

Absolutely what I've found.
 
> Do your tabs have a lot of Flash or active JS code running?
 
> "Web 2.0" apps have greatly increased load in many cases.

Some of my tabs do indeed have a lot of javascript active.  Tabs with a
lot of flash aren't as commonly left open, except for sometimes a
youtube tab will sit around for a long time.  

Obviously this will increase load, but it shouldn't grind everything to
a halt.  Thus some of the excitement for Chrome.

> All these people putting Flash and other programs on their pages  
> aren't thinking about the impact of all that crap running on a dozen  
> pages on one machine.

And they don't want to think about it or care if you mention it to
them.  I see a lot of 100% Flash web sites and they drive me crazy.
 
> >Pages with Flash definitely make all of FF's bad behavior worse, but
> >even avoiding Flash entirely doesn't cause it to behave *well*.  Heavy
> >AJAX/javascript pages also tend to kill it - I avoid GMail in FF, for
> >example.
> 
> Well, see above: Web 2.0 is horribly inefficient.

But, Web 2.0 is what we have.  Otherwise I'd have to individually
write client applications for Linux, Windows (98 through vista), OS X,
QNX, and probably others.  And the customers would have to jump through
hoops to be allowed to install the clients on their systems.

Likewise, on a smaller scale, it is much easier to write my RSS reader
in a web2.0 style than it is to write clients for Linux, Windows, and
OSX, not to mention that I sometimes use it from computers where I can't
install my own software.

Plus, with all of the above, there is no reason that it can't be more
efficient. Why should writing with javascript be any slower than any
other similarly dynamic language (smalltalk, lisp, etc), and why should
HTML be that much worse of a markup language than whatever Forms, VB,
Fluid, or Glade use?