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Raspberry Pi Gets a Brand New Browser
sfcrazy writes The Raspberry Pi team has announced a new browser for Raspberry Pi. They had worked with Collabora to create an HTML5-capable, modern browser for Pi users. While announcing the new browser, Eben Upton said, "Eight months and a lot of hard work later, we're finally ready. Epiphany on Pi is now a plausible alternative to a desktop browser for all but the most JavaScript-heavy sites."
No, it has nothing to do with the WWW. It has a lot to do with poorly designed web browsers written in C/C++ which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it. A well designed web browser supporting ALL of the HTML, Javascript and other web standards could use a small fraction of what Firefox uses if it is written properly and in a better language like Ruby. With some quality programming, the web browsers could use a fraction of the CPU power they do now by storing off screen graphics in compressed formats, for instance, especially since ending up with disk caching due to using up the RAM is far more resource intensive than decompressing images. There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM. The Javascript and HTML engines supporting ALL of the latest standards and ALL legacy standards only take up a few MB of RAM. There is massive memory leakage going on these browsers of forgotten image and multimedia data. Observing the behaviour of Firefox it cannot be anything else, when you open 20 windows and then close all except the first one, memory never goes back down. If web browsers were written in say, Perl or Ruby, I gaurantee that you could easily have browsers that are many times faster than current browsers because the memory usage and swapping would be much less, plus would be much safer without all of the buffer overruns.
So because they insisted on using a crappy 12-year-old design ARM11 CPU, they need a custom browser to compensate.
Why not make a Raspberry Pi model C, with a Cortex based CPU? If they used a modern A17 at 1.4Ghz, it would be just as low-power and have ~8x more performance.
Because they like to sell their the Pi's at or below $35?
Be seeing you...
There are weird ruby lovers out there.
There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM.
Firefox caches images and rendered pages so that things happen reasonably fast. A 1000x1000 colur image at 24 bit is already 3M. There is no way a modern page with an image or two would fit in a few M.
Once you have 800 tabs loaded (something I tend to do) all running JS and using images all over the place, memory vanishes fast.
There are basically several problems. Yeah firefox isn't perfect and could do with some optimization. But, many websites do pointless bloaty stuff and require scads of JS and huge images just to show some text. And then there's the browsing habits.
These days I run with NoScript, and a tab unloader, and I'm picky what scripts I allow. It makes firefox usable on my 1GB netbook. It's taking up 176M at the moment. Actually it's got a bit better recently. Even with those it needed restarting to clear the ram, but now it runs substantially longer.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm actually using Epiphany, the new browser, to post this. Slashdot was one of the first sites I visited and co-incidentally there was an article about it right at the top! So far, it does seem to be a nice upgrade to the previous Midori browser, which I found essentially unusable.
which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it.
You have no idea what a memory leak is. None. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard a layman use the term correctly. A memory leak would lead to the application using a hell of a lot more memory than Firefox ever could in just a few seconds, if not immediately, and lead to the application faulting. And, for a point of fact, modern computers start with 8gig of memory, and then there's the page file/swap space. Effectively memory is unlimited, at least in comparison to the paltry 1 gig of memory Firefox is using. Firefox is a browser meant for browsing... and if that's what you're doing with it, that 1gig of memory is nothing. What background apps are using up the other 7gig? If you're running it in the background to do something, you're using the wrong application. Pandora has its own lightweight app for example.
A well designed web browser supporting ALL of the HTML, Javascript and other web standards could use a small fraction of what Firefox uses if it is written properly and in a better language like Ruby.
Example? Why aren't we all using it? Firefoxes massive advertising budget?
There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM.
Of course there is. You seem to have this idea that memory is the be all end all of resources. This was true in the 70s and 80s. Memory was $$$ then and you gave up everything to save memory. But now memory is insanely cheap... so you can use more memory if it decreases load times, lowers CPU load... or in the case of firefox, if it reduces badnwidth usage. Now-a-days bandwidth is the $$$. Many people in the world are on capped internet connections or they get charged by the gig downloaded. So Firefox has made caching its #1 priority, You are saving money on you monthly internet bill at the expense of storing that data in memory.
What about the Banana Pi http://www.bananapi.org/p/prod....
Web pages don't usually have 1000x1000 images, with the exception of wallpaper sites, and people sure as hell don't keep 300 tabs open with those images, to justify Firefox using 1GB+ of memory and swapping to disk... Never mind the fact that Firefox could cache the compressed version of the images, and re-render that part of the page when the tab gains focus.
If we're going by Firefox, it seems there's no way a modern page or two will fit in a few GB.
Yes they do, but Firefox is smart enough to delay the loading of tabs until they gain focus, and could STOP the processing of all JS and unload decompressed images from cache when they lose focus again.
My browsing habits sure aren't to blame... I use NoScript and Adblock, too, and never have more than 20 tabs, and yet about every 8 hours I need to close Firefox because my 1GB of RAM is exhausted, and the swapping to disk is making my system unresponsive... This with the lightweight Fluxbox as my WM, and absolutely nothing else running.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
People and programmers have been spoilt by multi-GHz multi-core CPUs. People used to edit video, design space ships, simulate physics, ray trace liquid metal and just about everything else on far weaker machines. It good to see that some people can achieve good performance on limited hardware. The raspberrypi foundation are funding work all over the free software stack, which will benifit plenty of people who have never seen or used a pi.