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Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Opera Browser? (vice.com)
mspohr shares a report written by Jason Koebler via Motherboard who makes the case for why you should break up with Chrome and switch to the Opera browser: Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management, especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too. With Chrome, my computer crawls to complete unusability multiple times a day. After one too many times of having to go into Activity Monitor to find that one single Chrome tab is using several gigs of RAM, I decided enough was enough. I switched to Opera, a browser I had previously thought was only for contrarians. This, after previous dalliances with Safari and Firefox left me frustrated. Because Opera is also based on Blink, I almost never run into a website, plugin, script, or video that doesn't work flawlessly on it. In fact, Opera works almost exactly like Chrome, except without the resource hogging that makes me want to throw my computer against a brick wall. This is exactly the point, according to Opera spokesperson Jan Standal: "What we're doing is an optimized version of Chrome," he said. "Web developers optimize most for the browser with the biggest market share, which happens to be Chrome. We benefit from the work of that optimization."
Slashdot reader mspohr adds: "I should note that this has also been my experience. I have a 2010 MacBook, which I was ready to trash since it had become essentially useless, coming to a grinding halt daily. I tried Opera and it's like I have a new computer. I never get the spinning wheel of death. (Also, the built-in ad blocker and VPN are nice.)" What has been your experience with Google Chrome and/or Opera? Do you prefer one over the other?
Slashdot reader mspohr adds: "I should note that this has also been my experience. I have a 2010 MacBook, which I was ready to trash since it had become essentially useless, coming to a grinding halt daily. I tried Opera and it's like I have a new computer. I never get the spinning wheel of death. (Also, the built-in ad blocker and VPN are nice.)" What has been your experience with Google Chrome and/or Opera? Do you prefer one over the other?
Why not? It could hardly be much worse ... could it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because I still use Firefox.
I use a program capable of utilizing large amounts of ram and then max out my system resources. Please help! I have no idea what I'm doing wrong...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yeah he bought a Macbook with soldered in ram and then complains when he uses too much of said ram.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Bingo!
And this is why devs and beta testers need to be forced to do all their testing on a first-generation Athlon64 with less and 1GB RAM.
Not because they expect their audience to use such a machine, but because their audience will be using their program and a dozen others at the same time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Because that page with 'text and a few pictures' actually loads 10 mb of scripts and video players and comments sections and sidebars and headers to surround the text that you actually want to see with useless garbage you don't.
This is why for any site you visit frequently you need to spend 5 minutes going apeshit on it with ublock/abp and its element hider making all the custom filters you need to so absolutely nothing loads *except* the 2kb of text you actually care about. Page download and load times fall to almost literally zero.
(Wait, can you not do all that on an iToy? Well sucks to be you then.)
Put simply, resources of your computer that are not used are just that... not used. Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.
Except that modern OSes do a very nice job of utilizing all of that spare RAM as disk cache, and when the cache gets allocated away to greedy applications, everything else on the machine appears to slow down.
There is no cogent argument against efficient use of resources when modern CPUs are more than fast enough to do things like view web pages.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
You don't need an extension any more. For a few versions now Chrome has been automatically unloading tabs from memory when memory pressure increases. When you switch back to them they are automatically reloaded from cache.
Chrome is very well behaved with memory. Unused memory is wasted memory. Chrome uses as much memory as it needs to for performance reasons, until there is pressure. Then it releases that memory. There might be a few extra milliseconds delay opening another app as Chrome has to free some RAM for it, but the overall gain in terms of interactive performance more than makes up for it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC