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Google Chrome is Freezing Intermittently With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Users Say (neowin.net)
Several users who have updated their computers to Windows 10 April 2018 Update are reporting that Chrome is freezing their machines. From a report: I have now used the April 2018 Update for nearly 24 hours and the same problem has presented itself no less than five times. For a machine - which was working perfectly prior to the update - with a Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, I naturally resorted to Reddit and Microsoft forum threads to see if others were experiencing the issue. It appears that several users on Reddit (spotted by Softpedia) with machines sporting varying configurations are experiencing the problem as well, and the only fix to it is the one I found too; that is, putting the laptop to sleep using the power button or closing the lid.
People let their browser open longer and longer on the same page, opening more pages...
And many web sites (Facebook to begin with) allocate objects, create circular references and don't break the reference cycle because "dropping" the object, leading to a cycle of objects (elements, functions and closures) which can't be freed by the garbage collect.
Don't blame the browser, blame the web sites creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.
Function A creates an element B and associate a function C to the "onclick" property of B before linking B to the DOM tree
C being created inside A, it inherits the closure of A in which you find a variable pointing to B
We have DOM -> B -> C -> closure -> B cycle created
When B is removed from DOM, the references loop still stays, every object keeps at least one reference to it and can't be freed by the garbage collect.
Propre way to do it is to clear the onclick of B when you remove it from the DOM to break the cycle... but most web sites don't care and this leads to browsers memory usage growing and growing.
Yes, flamebait subject. But hear me out... given the growing interest in data privacy and concern about the mining of our online activities, Chrome's horrendous tendency to take over all your computers' RAM and CPU, the latest Firefox being measurably faster than Chrome, aggressive and intrusive bundling of trojan Chrome installs into unrelated apps, and now Chrome pulling an IE in pushing proprietary markup that encourages the making of websites that ONLY work in Chrome, why are people still giving Google a pass and using an inferior/arrogant browser when there is a better option?
Full disclosure, I'm not the biggest Chrome fan, and not the biggest Google fan, either. However, I don't generally get caught up in browser wars; I don't generally tell Chrome users to use other browsers if they're happy with it and their sites load.
However, about a month ago, Chrome started acting really weird. Sites would time out, or take over a minute to load, on well-spec'd computers with no malware and wired network connections. After trying every tweak I could think of, I tried those same sites in Firefox and they loaded in the 2-3 seconds they were supposed to. Over the past month, that experience has repeated itself across users with nothing in common except Chrome, and "switching to Firefox" completely resolving their issues.
I'm sure the April update sucks; I'm hard pressed to point to a Win10 feature update that provided a useful feature that justified the update installation time. However, I'm hard pressed to not give Google at least some share of the blame when a number of users (some of which still using Windows 7) had issues with Chrome that were solved by switching to Firefox.
And guess what encourages this antipattern? jQuery. And guess what virtually every website on the Internet uses these days for virtually everything? jQuery.
Not that I'm saying jQuery isn't a godsend, it is, but you really wish the thing had been designed in a way that doesn't encourage closures for everything.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.