Max Nikulin [2025-02-13 09:04:38] wrote:

On 11/02/2025 06:06, Stefan Monnier wrote:

Web browsers are bloated monsters.

Does anybody have a bookmark for an article with a balanced view on degree >>> of responsibility of
- web site developers,
- users,
- browser developers
in respect to browser resource consumption?

Reminds me a "recent" rant of mine:
https://oldbytes.space/deck/@monnier/113290809168999071

Thanks. I hope, somebody has wrote a more detailed article in this
spirit. The idea is to adjust user expectations and suggest a way to use browsers when system resources are scarce.
By the way, chromium may display memory footprint in tooltips for tabs. In some cases it is more prominent than about:processes in Firefox.

But that still points to the resources used by the browser, whereas my
rant above is above displaying the resource requirements of the webpage
itself since I think a big part of the problem is the public's
perception that it's the browser that's at fault.
I want to put pressure on webpage designers

When you view simple webpages,
Firefox is clearly bloated (I count 8 processes for a vanilla `firefox`
visiting my trivial last-century-style home page at
https://www-labs.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/, with an RSS of at least
100MB).

This page is a kind of a corner case nowadays. Notice that the mastodon link above is useless without JavaScript. I think most of users prefer faster reaction when they open webmail, video players, word processors, etc.

Right, these are web applications, not web pages. There are still loads
and loads of web *pages* which *should* be like the "coroner case" but
instead are implemented as if they were web applications, loading and
running crazy amounts of Javascript code (mostly for nefarious purposes
such as propaganda and associated user tracking): those web pages would actually offer "faster reaction" if they were more like my "coroner
case".

I do not think there are enough users who a ready to spend their time to minimize namely startup memory footprint, so I do not expect that enough knobs are implemented for this purpose.

Knobs in the browser can't help because (almost) all the logic that
controls resource usage (above the base 100MB) is in the downloaded
Javascript code. By the good ol' halting problem, the browser can't in
general know which piece of that Javascript code will control what.


Stefan

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