techradar.com/computing/edge… frankly don't get why people obsess over limiting the ram usage of a browser - ThreadSky

mary.my.id • 5 days ago

https://www.techradar.com/computing/edge/microsoft-just-gave-edge-a-great-new-feature-to-ensure-the-browser-doesnt-slow-down-the-pc-and-its-tempting-me-to-switch-from-google-chrome
frankly don't get why people obsess over limiting the ram usage of a browser

Comments

digifox.binaryden.net•5 days ago

Also this sounds an awful lot like it's just the Chrome tab suspend feature, but they are just making the memory pressure break points more explicit.

friendlychemist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeah, exactly. Why? Why RAM limiters in particular?

I suspect it's because it sounds better than "Automatic tab suspension". People always follow buzz words like "RAM limiter" or "optimiser"
This sort of feature, to me at least, doesn't make any sense. Why not just use tab suspenion or optimise V8?

friendlychemist.bsky.social•5 days ago

I don't have much experience in web development, or maintaining a giant project like Chromium for that matter, but:

I can't imagine how you would free up memory without discarding content (Like with tab suspension). Like, if it's not needed, why not just build that in as a default?

lunaynx.bsky.social•5 days ago

youtube, for one, has a serious memory leak problem in my experience

leave a tab open for a few hours and it is suddenly using over 2gb

my macbook unfortunately only has 8gb ram and i am also running minecraft at the same time

noahwhygodwhy.bsky.social•5 days ago

I'm on a desktop with 64gb of memory, and youtube is still a problem. It's a bit ridiculous

lanadivinorum.bsky.social•5 days ago

i would guess 20+ years of browsers eating up every bit of ram available has trained people to be very concerned about it

fishttp.website•5 days ago

love watching people with 64 gb of ram have a minor freakout that their browser has reserved 15 gb

flash.moe•5 days ago

as a firefox user i find it so funny/odd how chrome displays how much ram a tab is using when hovering over them in the top bar, like it feels like such a weirdly technical/specific thing to display so front and center by default

bell.moe•5 days ago

a lot of people who think they're tech-savvy like to have this information around for some reason

marypcbuk.bsky.social•5 days ago

I did have to very slowly close a who bunch of tabs yesterday because I was using 75% of ALL my RAM for open tabs but usually nah, have at it

floral-anvil.co.uk•5 days ago

Ram is there to be used, almost all "not enough ram" issues are poorly running swap partition issues. A fast SSD makes lack of ram a non-issue unless you're like REALLY low i.e. 4GB on a modern system causing hot data to be constantly swap'd.

lunish.nl•4 days ago

I have 128gb I couldn't care less

darkcoffee8.bsky.social•5 days ago

Their Canary version is experimenting with Manifest v3 and apparently blocking ad blockers. That's enough for me to stay away.

marypcbuk.bsky.social•5 days ago

No, the Edge date for removing manifest v2 is still TBD and they have had manifest v3 for about two years already

darkcoffee8.bsky.social•5 days ago

https://windowsreport.com/microsoft-edge-disables-ublock-origin-and-other-manifest-v2-extensions/

marypcbuk.bsky.social•5 days ago

that's bad (although you can re enable them); looks like it's inherited directly from Chrome with that error message and the roadmap hasn't been updated, so it's not clear if it's deliberate because I am surprised they've done it without an announcement

marypcbuk.bsky.social•5 days ago

also, I wonder how much of this is people who got the extension from the Chrome store (which you can do in Edge) rather than from the Edge store, because I've heard they behave differently: the v2 extensions from the Chrome store can't be turned back on again which may be because of the Chrome store

taidesu.bsky.social•5 days ago

I worked in a call center once in a support type role. Lady called me over. Told me her chrome was running slow…

See she has a lot of tabs open. Ask if she needs them anymore. She didn’t.

I went to close chrome and it goes are you sure you want to close more than 500 tabs. 🫠

taidesu.bsky.social•5 days ago

Every time they’d get a call the system would pop a new tab with the users profile.

She consumed 100% of her 32GB with chrome tabs.

It’s not for the average users that we need protections… it’s the extreme users 😆

das.moe•5 days ago

It always feels like Edge is just chasing the advancements of the other browsers, this time Opera

localcc.bsky.social•5 days ago

clearly smaller number more better

aly.ruffruff.party•5 days ago

It's useful on very RAM constrained systems Where you want to be using several applications at once. Many people are working with 8GB RAM or less

friendlychemist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Chromium, in order to make use of all V8 features, sandboxing, etc. requires a lot of memory. This is true for all browser engines (E.g. Gecko, chromium, etc.)

The RAM limit feature doesn't make much sense at all in my opinion. You cannot "limit" resources without automatically suspending tabs
1/2

friendlychemist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Automatic tab suspension (E.g. keeping it open, but discarding any cached/loaded content) is already a feature in Chromium.

This sort of feature, in my opinion, serves no purpose.

aly.ruffruff.party•5 days ago

Yes, tab suspend exists. This is a configurable setting that abstracts automatic tab suspension and other Edge power and memory saving tools (limiting resolution of video, etc). Among other things, it controls how aggressively to suspend and discard background tabs to meet a given RAM profile.

aly.ruffruff.party•5 days ago

Like that is the exact purpose it serves. If you're within the RAM limit, it won't suspend background tabs. As you approach it, it takes a number of measures to stay within that limit. It is actually quite useful to expose this and set it to lower than the total RAM you have available.

aly.ruffruff.party•5 days ago

you can still get craptops out there with 4GB RAM running Windows 12 and in that case uhh yeah do whatever.

tapesinside.bsky.social•5 days ago

basically you can get new computers with as much ram as windows requires to just boot

aly.ruffruff.party•5 days ago

*windows 11

i'm sure they will sell them with windows 12 tho lol

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