I've never seen a computer game use as much RAM as a web browser. I've never seen anything use as much RAM as a web browser.
I see people insisting now that they need 32 GB of RAM on a personal computer, and I look at my fifteen year old desktop that almost never uses more than 2 GB of RAM and a fraction of a percent of CPU time. The performance constraints are disk access time and, with some games, GPU.
@tk @foolishowl It's not the browser's fault per se. A browser like chromium is very optimized to use as little RAM and be as performant as possible. Most of it is the web dev's fault: https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/
@FoolishOwl @lori I'm actually livid because I am using a 12 year old computer, and it's perfect for everything, except I'm terrified of opening Discord on it
Modern personal computers are massively overpowered for what people actually want to do with them, and if the Web wasn't a nightmare of aggressive advertising, most people's needs could be met with cheap, energy efficient SBCs.
@foolishowl yep - using adblockers can as much as halve RAM usage. It's pretty messed up that an ads company both runs and promotes the browser that makes every other browser a rounding error.
@depereo @foolishowl Not only that. Sometimes I browse using curl to avoid the loading bottlenecks. But then I find that "pure html" duckduckgo uses captchas to avoid people like me.
I.E. there is so much web scraping, that sites are bloated with javascript to avoid robots.
No, seriously, this was all because advertisers suddenly started demanding dynamic webpages so they could track us and show us ads. The majority of bandwidth and resources for webpages come from advertisers.
The irony is that advertisers were supposedly the way to finance the websites' bandwidth usage. In the end, it's the end user who spends most of the bandwidth. The entire web has been turned upside down.
@socketwench @yuki2501 Part of what's frustrating is that I see these discussions of what complicated platform to use for running a personal website, and I wonder how many people know that you can pretty much dump plain text between the "body" tags in a simple HTML template and boom, you've got a basic Web page.
@Cyber Yuki @socketwench @FoolishOwl @lori The worst part is that I couldn't think up enough so I DDGed "AWS static site" and copied the list off the first thing I saw.
Literally all I've added beyond that is one line for utf8 and one line to rescale it for mobile so it's not awful to read and maybe a meta description which isn't necessary
@tom @UkeBLCatboy I really need to get around to setting up a sequestered less secure wifi network for my old devices so I can test some sites out with my Sony Clie. I've tested it briefly by just turning security off of on my (hidden) guest network but I don't want to leave that open for more than a handful of minutes lol. It took me forever to get one of the few Clie models with built in wifi but so far i haven't gotten to use it a ton.
@UkeBLCatboy At least I don't have _that_ problem :). This device is using a serial cable to a box running PPPd + https://github.com/atauenis/webone doing stuff like stripping out HTTPS.
The Web was such a good idea we co-opted it to become a software distribution platform, which means browsers are basically sandbox emulators running a JavaScript VM with a weird DOM language as its rendering and UI engine.
... I think there's room for improvement (no reason I should have to download all these frameworks over and over) but the real reason it costs to much RAM is we invented a way to distribute and run millions of unique programs transparently. That's not a bad thing!
The web pages are built as small apps now, but they turn into a rube goldberg-esque contraption built from HTML, JS and CSS, and with a truckfull of JS libraries, frameworks and shims to make sure the site runs in any browser, any screen size and any device. Then you have 37 tabs open, which are all essentially one of these dumpsterfires... No wonder it gets hot and heavy.
@faxmodem actually I recently played some weird 3D unity games in browser and they did not slow things down as bad as having YouTube open in a background tab lmao
I keep saying that since ... forever. I used to work as graphic-designer in a small advertising company 20 years ago. and back then it was always VERY important that graphics, photos, webdesigns are fast and as small as possible. I spent a LOT of time optimizing images, exporting, minimizing... This has gone so far out the window. 14mb useless java shit? No problem, let's do it. useless rendering-scripts, 3.party fonts from 5 different sources - sure. sure. fuck all that.
FoolishOwl
in reply to lori • • •I've never seen a computer game use as much RAM as a web browser. I've never seen anything use as much RAM as a web browser.
I see people insisting now that they need 32 GB of RAM on a personal computer, and I look at my fifteen year old desktop that almost never uses more than 2 GB of RAM and a fraction of a percent of CPU time. The performance constraints are disk access time and, with some games, GPU.
Neil E. Hodges likes this.
Neil E. Hodges
in reply to FoolishOwl • •like this
FoolishOwl, The Witch of Crow Briar, lori, Sr. Estegosaurio 🦕, CyberB, always tired (moved to chaos), ShadSterling, Games Games Games, Andrei Kucharavy, arceuthobium, Écho Mike Yankee 🌿👩🏻🦽➡️, lunchy, migrating & dividing myselves, F4GRX Sébastien, sotolf, flo, vascorsd, Allanon 🇮🇹 :amiga:, Sébastien Lugan, Shaula Evans and jollyrogue like this.
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FoolishOwl
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •vascorsd
in reply to FoolishOwl • • •Somē
in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •JavaScript Bloat in 2024
tonsky.meTuxedo Wa-Kamen
in reply to Somē • • •@some @tk @foolishowl
I would also assume that the memory usage shown in e.g. the windows Task Manager is just "reserved" memory, not actually used memory.
Because it makes little sense that a website would actually use 400 MB or more memory.
silverwizard
in reply to FoolishOwl • • •Neil E. Hodges likes this.
FoolishOwl
in reply to FoolishOwl • • •Modern personal computers are massively overpowered for what people actually want to do with them, and if the Web wasn't a nightmare of aggressive advertising, most people's needs could be met with cheap, energy efficient SBCs.
It makes me angry.
Alex White-Robinson
in reply to FoolishOwl • • •MicroBlog Castellano
in reply to Alex White-Robinson • • •@depereo @foolishowl Not only that. Sometimes I browse using curl to avoid the loading bottlenecks. But then I find that "pure html" duckduckgo uses captchas to avoid people like me.
I.E. there is so much web scraping, that sites are bloated with javascript to avoid robots.
Cyber Yuki
in reply to lori • • •Neil E. Hodges likes this.
Cyber Yuki
in reply to Cyber Yuki • • •No, seriously, this was all because advertisers suddenly started demanding dynamic webpages so they could track us and show us ads. The majority of bandwidth and resources for webpages come from advertisers.
The irony is that advertisers were supposedly the way to finance the websites' bandwidth usage. In the end, it's the end user who spends most of the bandwidth. The entire web has been turned upside down.
socketwench
in reply to Cyber Yuki • • •FoolishOwl
in reply to socketwench • • •silverwizard
in reply to FoolishOwl • • •Cyber Yuki
in reply to silverwizard • • •silverwizard
in reply to Cyber Yuki • • •lori
in reply to FoolishOwl • • •@foolishowl @socketwench @yuki2501 that's what I do lol
Literally all I've added beyond that is one line for utf8 and one line to rescale it for mobile so it's not awful to read and maybe a meta description which isn't necessary
theothertom
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to theothertom • • •UkeBLCatboy
in reply to theothertom • • •theothertom
in reply to UkeBLCatboy • • •Personal digital assistant
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)UkeBLCatboy
in reply to theothertom • • •@tom wow I'm surprised it doesn't catch fire 😂
Cool device though
Would it do neocities pages? 😂
theothertom
in reply to UkeBLCatboy • • •UkeBLCatboy
in reply to theothertom • • •@tom try this special site, I want to know if it even loads one letter 😂
https://801musings.neocities.org/
I didn't optimize it or anything any pc has at least 4 or 8 gb of ram anyways so doesn't matter, I'm curious if it loads at least any text 😆😂
801musings
801musings.neocities.orgtheothertom
in reply to UkeBLCatboy • • •lori
in reply to theothertom • • •theothertom
in reply to lori • • •GitHub - atauenis/webone: HTTP 1.x proxy that makes old web browsers usable again in the Web 2.0 world.
GitHubdrawnto
in reply to lori • • •If the PC has free RAM the browser might as well use it
Andrew
in reply to lori • • •Sasha
in reply to lori • • •Delta Wye
in reply to lori • • •Dragon-sided D
in reply to lori • • •… and JavaScript became the dominant language
This timeline suuuuuucks
Rev. Roger BW 😷
in reply to lori • • •C.B.Leslie
in reply to lori • • •Mark T. Tomczak
in reply to lori • • •The Web was such a good idea we co-opted it to become a software distribution platform, which means browsers are basically sandbox emulators running a JavaScript VM with a weird DOM language as its rendering and UI engine.
... I think there's room for improvement (no reason I should have to download all these frameworks over and over) but the real reason it costs to much RAM is we invented a way to distribute and run millions of unique programs transparently. That's not a bad thing!
Gemma 👽
in reply to lori • • •faxmodem
in reply to lori • • •lori
in reply to faxmodem • • •Schneckbert 🐌
in reply to lori • • •I used to work as graphic-designer in a small advertising company 20 years ago. and back then it was always VERY important that graphics, photos, webdesigns are fast and as small as possible. I spent a LOT of time optimizing images, exporting, minimizing...
This has gone so far out the window. 14mb useless java shit? No problem, let's do it. useless rendering-scripts, 3.party fonts from 5 different sources - sure. sure.
fuck all that.
DHeadshot's Alt
in reply to lori • • •