Now launch one (1) web browser and watch an elephant drop on your sofa.
The OS is no longer relevant to memory usage, really, not in the way it used to be. The amount of memory required for a usable desktop is peanuts compared to the amount required to run a few web-apps.
My guess is that 90% of the growth in browser bloat is to support bloated websites.
These days websites can be games, drawing applications, video players, etc. As a result, browsers have basically become operating systems. In addition, the browsers try to support even the most horribly written websites, but that means more bloat in the browser. Meanwhile faster computers mean that people developing websites are just doing more and more javascript, more and more animation, more and more mouse tracking, etc.
If you have an old device with an old browser, a lot of modern websites are completely unusable. I have an old iPad that’s too old to update, and it’s not actually possible to use browse Github anymore. It just ends up with javascript elements on the page that never finish loading. And Github isn’t some site thrown together by someone vibe-coding their first website or something.
Honestly, the whole model of "you can customize every detail of your page (and not the user) but you also have to implement basic accessibility and consider screen resolution/orientation, reduced-motion, prefers-color-scheme, etc., etc.), for each and every single webpage, is imho inherently broken.
The sad thing is, they could in most things (except reduced/animations) just not do that and the browser does accessibility & stuff for you and you have a lightweight site. But that’s not how businesses (and developer curiosity) work. Also, progressive enhancement instead of graceful degradation most don’t do.
Btw, to the Indieweb: you don’t have to define a text or background color: browser does that already. And you have to care for prefers-color-scheme now. Please keep CSS to layouting.
unless you’re using older, more limited hardware in which case you kinda need the OS to not use a shitton of resources so you can actually run programs that do.
i never upgraded the RAM in my thinkpad X230T past 4 GB because on linux with TDE i genuinely don’t need to. i can open multiple instances of waterfox and vivaldi and do a digital painting in krita all at the same time without having to worry about OOM at all.
the difference is night and day compared to trying to do the same on windows or even linux with a heavyweight DE, under which i can maybe get a few tabs open in a single browser before it just freezes.
Now launch one (1) web browser and watch an elephant drop on your sofa.
The OS is no longer relevant to memory usage, really, not in the way it used to be. The amount of memory required for a usable desktop is peanuts compared to the amount required to run a few web-apps.
One of the many reasons why we need a new and better browser without all the bloat.
That’s half the problem, the sites are the other.
And the third half is bad math
The fourth half is caching
The fifth is your mom.
My guess is that 90% of the growth in browser bloat is to support bloated websites.
These days websites can be games, drawing applications, video players, etc. As a result, browsers have basically become operating systems. In addition, the browsers try to support even the most horribly written websites, but that means more bloat in the browser. Meanwhile faster computers mean that people developing websites are just doing more and more javascript, more and more animation, more and more mouse tracking, etc.
If you have an old device with an old browser, a lot of modern websites are completely unusable. I have an old iPad that’s too old to update, and it’s not actually possible to use browse Github anymore. It just ends up with javascript elements on the page that never finish loading. And Github isn’t some site thrown together by someone vibe-coding their first website or something.
Honestly, the whole model of "you can customize every detail of your page (and not the user) but you also have to implement basic accessibility and consider screen resolution/orientation, reduced-motion, prefers-color-scheme, etc., etc.), for each and every single webpage, is imho inherently broken.
The sad thing is, they could in most things (except reduced/animations) just not do that and the browser does accessibility & stuff for you and you have a lightweight site. But that’s not how businesses (and developer curiosity) work. Also, progressive enhancement instead of graceful degradation most don’t do.
Btw, to the Indieweb: you don’t have to define a text or background color: browser does that already. And you have to care for prefers-color-scheme now. Please keep CSS to layouting.
I am skeptical that the browser is the problem.
Well, no, but the amount of browser-based apps due to their convinience in development is stupid.
Yes
unless you’re using older, more limited hardware in which case you kinda need the OS to not use a shitton of resources so you can actually run programs that do.
i never upgraded the RAM in my thinkpad X230T past 4 GB because on linux with TDE i genuinely don’t need to. i can open multiple instances of waterfox and vivaldi and do a digital painting in krita all at the same time without having to worry about OOM at all.
the difference is night and day compared to trying to do the same on windows or even linux with a heavyweight DE, under which i can maybe get a few tabs open in a single browser before it just freezes.