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?

Comments

Exception to butterage

[Hognoxious]

Why not? It could hardly be much worse ... could it?

Is this an Apple problem?

[Zaelath]

Something to do with not enough RAM installed and inability to do anything about it?

Re:Is this an Apple problem?

[ArchieBunker]

Yeah he bought a Macbook with soldered in ram and then complains when he uses too much of said ram.

solution

[supernova87a]

Just use The Great Suspender -- idle tab suspending service: https://chrome.google.com/webs...

Re:solution

[AmiMoJo]

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.

I suppose I'm a hopeless old fogey

[Chris Mattern]

Because I still use Firefox.

Re:"Open too many tabs"

[EvilSS]

The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.

Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

On a side note: Opera's a great browser, however i'm skeptical of its Chinese ownership. If i'm going to have any intelligence agency know my private details in and out, I prefer it to be the NSA and CIA. /sarcasm

The problem is it shouldn't take over 100MB of RAM to display a webpage. Opened this very /. page in a Chrome incognito window (so no browser extensions in the tab, clean as I can get it) and it settled in at around 140,000 KB of RAM. That is ridiculous.

Interesting

[The Wild Norseman]

For years, no one mentioned Opera except to scoff in passing, but now that it's been bought out, suddenly it's the best thing since sliced bread.

But, thankfully, Opera was forked into Vivaldi for those of us who were concerned about the direction Opera is going/went.

At one point, years ago, I paid US$35 for Opera because it completely rocked -- it was and has been, ahead of the curve for years. Now, I dropped Opera and only run Vivaldi (except I have to use Chrome for some peculiar website shit but that's it Just one site, essentially).

Did I mention this better browser, Vivaldi, by chance?

Re:"Open too many tabs"

[mspohr]

I'm "the guy" who owns a 2010 MacBook Air. I realize that this was never a high performace machine and is now obsolete. I would buy a new Mac but the offerings from Apple are even more pathetic than in 2010.
I had abandoned the machine but dug it out to do my taxes and when the whole "get a VPN" thing happened, I decided to try Opera. I was amazed that the machine was useful again! Instead of endless bouts of soul sucking beach ball spinning, I could just use the machine and it rarely pegged the CPU or filled up the measely 2 Gig memory. It felt like a new computer.
So, if you are suffering from a slow,, memory hogging web browser, I highly recommend Opera.
P.S. If you couldn't tell, I am a cheap old geezer.

Re:"Open too many tabs"

[mspohr]

My MacBook was about $1000 and I'm still using it seven years later... so about $150/year.
Before I installed Opera, I retired the MacBook and bought a Chromebook which has much better performance... but it did cost $250.
I now use the Chromebook (Flip) as a tablet... works great. I'll keep using the MacBook until new improved software kills it again.

Re:Bullshit

[Trogre]

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.

Re:"Open too many tabs"

[Anubis IV]

Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.

I take it you're unaware that RAM prices are nearly twice what they were at this same time last year?

The fabs for two of the three major manufacturers are currently in the middle of transitioning to smaller manufacturing processes, resulting in the industry being unable to keep up with demand. The fact that the mobile market keeps asking for more and more of their attention doesn't help matters either. As such, prices are actually expected to keep going up until around the end of the year.

If you'd like to see the price tends over the last few years, PCPartPicker has some pretty good charts highlighting the issue. Suffice to say, picking up RAM is not so cheap as you suggest. Maybe next year.

Re:CHROME USES TOO MUCH RAM!!!

[pz]

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.