Re: Fwd: Firefox
On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 4:12 PM Nicholas Geovanis
<nickgeovanis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 11:37 AM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>
>> Max Nikulin [2025-02-13 09:04:38] wrote:
>> > On 11/02/2025 06:06, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> >>>> Web browsers are bloated monsters.
>> >>> Does anybody have a bookmark for an article with a balanced view on degree
>> >>> of responsibility of
>> >>> - web site developers,
>> >>> - users,
>> >>> - browser developers
>> >>> in respect to browser resource consumption?
>> >> Reminds me a "recent" rant of mine:
>> >> https://oldbytes.space/deck/@monnier/113290809168999071
>> > Thanks. I hope, somebody has wrote a more detailed article in this
>> > spirit. The idea is to adjust user expectations and suggest a way to use
>> > browsers when system resources are scarce.
>> > By the way, chromium may display memory footprint in tooltips for tabs. In
>> > some cases it is more prominent than about:processes in Firefox.
>>
>> But that still points to the resources used by the browser, whereas my
>> rant above is above displaying the resource requirements of the webpage
>> itself since I think.....
>>
>> >> When you view simple webpages,
>> >> Firefox is clearly bloated (I count 8 processes for a vanilla `firefox`
>> >> visiting my trivial last-century-style home page at
>> >> https://www-labs.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/, with an RSS of at least
>> >> 100MB).
>> > This page is a kind of a corner case nowadays. Notice that the mastodon link
>> > above is useless without JavaScript. I think most of users prefer faster
>> > reaction when they open webmail, video players, word processors, etc.
>>
>> Right, these are web applications, not web pages. There are still loads
>> and loads of web *pages* which *should* be like the "coroner case" but
>> instead are implemented as if they were web applications, loading and
>> running crazy amounts of Javascript code (mostly for nefarious purposes
>> such as propaganda and associated user tracking)......
>
> ..... and then.....
>>
>> Knobs in the browser can't help because (almost) all the logic that
>> controls resource usage (above the base 100MB) is in the downloaded
>> Javascript code. By the good ol' halting problem, the browser can't in
>> general know which piece of that Javascript code will control what.
>
>
> And I really hate uncontrolled non-determinism
> :-)
>
> Let's assume for now that the browser indeed has no influence over Javascript runtime behavior. We have plenty of infrastructure to control resource consumption by any process but almost no one uses it apparently: cgroups.
Disable JIT'd code. That should save on resources, and it stops about
half of browser bugs.
Wander into about:config, and make these changes:
javascript.options.baselinejit = false
javascript.options.ion = false
javascript.options.native_regexp = false
Also see <https://theprivacyguide1.github.io/about_config.html>.
Jeff
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