Slashdot Mirror
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 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.