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0 pointsbscphil5y ago0 comments

The frustrating thing about modern browsers is that none of them try to be good desktop citizens, for the lack of a better term. If you have 8 or 16 or 32 or 64 GB of memory, and you open enough tabs, your browser will eventually consume all of it, even though most browsers are perfectly capable of suspending unused tabs when they're under memory pressure. They simply don't register a problem until your memory is nearly gone.

If you have swap space, it's even worse, because there's not noticeable memory pressure until you've always consumed a good bit of your swap. So I frequently find myself in a situation where I start compiling something or launch a game, and have my computer immediately slow to a crawl. Check htop, and it's always the browser I have open, taking ~13 GB of memory and another 4 GB of swap. It's certainly true that "unused RAM is wasted RAM", but that only holds when you can reclaim low priority RAM when you need to launch something new. Browsers are really bad at doing that, so they sit rather uncomfortably next to the other programs on your desktop.

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h0p35y ago

Bingo. You got it. `/salute`. Given sandboxing security features, it's too easy to balloon up too. I periodically have to restart the application (which incurs some costs on this external cognition process, unfortunately). Browsers aren't built for people like me (and the way standards maliciously churn qua Google doesn't inspire confidence in finding a long-term, meaningful solution), and I appreciate that it's seemingly a lot to ask. Btw, my name is h0p3. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for your charitable response.

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