Posts Tagged ‘browser’

My alternative “concept” browser

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

As I keep spitting fire on current browsers as you can read through my last posts since all of them are real resource hogs consuming memory and resources like crazy, I announced the possibility of creating my own concept browser, meaning that I will base it’s core on an existing one (embedded) and just implement my concept of how a real browser should handle resources.

My first project went up in smoke using TEmbeddedWb (from bsalsa) which is based on IE because with every tab switch the memory grew with around 3-5 MB. Then I tried some others, based on gecko but I ran into other problems PLUS memory leaks (although smaller).

So I got back to TEmbeddedWB because I got an idea: why not also destroy the object instance? This should force a complete memory de-allocation. Partially true.

Then I did some research and found the following:

// force memory to be really de-allocated: http://www.bsalsa.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2551&postcount=19
SetProcessWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess, $FFFFFFFF, $FFFFFFFF);
{FROM MSDN: -1, -1: If both dwMinimumWorkingSetSize and dwMaximumWorkingSetSize have the value (SIZE_T)–1, the function removes as many pages as possible from the working set of the specified process.}
// also equivalent to EmptyWorkingSet

Which indeed now showed a very nice grow of “only” 1 MB per tab BUT, this time depending on the contents of the tab. So if you load a 10 mb tab and then a 1 MB tab, or load a 10 MB and then a 20 mb, you still only loose 2 MB instead of 6+

So I figured if this really dropped the memory usage for the IE based project, how about trying the gecko one, despite the other bad “habits” it has. After fiddling with it a bit I got it working and the test results showed a pretty similar pattern in “leaking” as the one with IE. So at least from leaking point of view, the gecko and IE based projects are similar.

As a weird side-note, (I’m on D7 here and now) even after enabling the OleCtrls memory leak fix and recompiling EWB the memory leaks remained the same. True, that I didn’t use any interface property references which would explain this, but I thought that internally, the component might use them. Oh well, nothing is lost but nothing is gain either.

Since the mozilla activex control that I use for the gecko implementation is a bit old and unmaintained and lacks a lot of needed features for a browser, I will go with TEmbeddedWB in implementing a very skeletical and bare-bone and minimalistic but very light and resource friendly tabbed-browser.

And maybe I can finish it before the end of the year 🙂

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Safari, yet another memory hog

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

So, I installed safari … what was I thinking…

Clean install. Removed all “top sites” bullshit that loaded there. Let it to “stabilize” for maybe 3 minutes. Conclusion? I didn’t even load a page and it eats 164MB ram and 151MB VM = 315MB memory. Obviously, I just uninstalled it.

Are there any sane programmers out there capable of writing normal applications?

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Why Chrome browser really sucks

Saturday, December 18th, 2010

I’ll probably repeat myself but here goes: EVERY single (major) browser today sucks.

So Chrome is now on the table specifically. I have 6 tabs open.:

– gmail

– ebay

– yahoo mail

– ebay

– a static html page on my site

– and http://www.coolest-birthday-cakes.com/tractor-cake.html

Now, there are 10 (TEN) chrome processes running with following memory consumption (ramn and VM:

– 1: 43MB/32MB

– 2: 49MB/36MB

– 3:  24MB/16MB

– 4: 30MB/20MB

– 5: 38MB/28MB

– 6: 7MB/3MB

– 7: 30MB/23MB

– 8: 26MB/17MB

– 9: 10MB/6MB

– 10: 19MB/11MB

Total: 10 process with 276MB ram and 192MB VM = 468 MB memory consumed. I repeat 6 (SIX) open tabs.

Firefox is currently eating up 54 open tabs and 178 MB ram and 354 MB VM = 532 MB memory.

That is a HUGE difference.

Also, when chrome updates, it downloads it’s entire kit and installs it “clean” also leaving the old installation folders there. So it also eats up harddrive space (not that I’m running low on that).

But just imagine, on my 2GB ram+2GB VM system, firefox and chrome alone eat up 1 GB. 25% of available memory. And I just fired up VMWare with a system allocated 384 MB ram and taht one eats up 437 MB ram and 17 MB VM so there you go: firefox + chrome + 1 VM eat up 37.5% of system resources. And I have 65 processes running right now amongst which are 4 IM applications, thunderbird for email, avast as AV and outpost as FW.

I’m going to ditch chrome (probably for good) pretty soon.

Ok, so I noticed opera 11 is out (for some time) so I thought I’d give it a spin. I opened 4 tabs:

– yahoo mail

– gmail

– feedburner

– internet banking from RBS

Memory consumption for opera is now 248MB ram and 253MB VM = 501MB memory… I opened another tab and the memory only grew with maybe 5 MB so this gets me thinking: what in the world does opera load in memory if 5 tabd consume aprox 30 MB memory? What’s the rest of 470MB ???? Especially since opera was running for less than 5 minutes and the settings (AFAIK) are set for low memory consumption (including disabled memory cache)

Seriously now, is it just me or todays browsers are really just very lame memory/resource hogs?

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Ditching opera

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

As I wrote here a while ago I become very unsatisfied with opera. Unilt recently it was “only” the huge memory consumption. But ever since version 10 (even 10.10) a lot of sites stopped loading as I wrote here
So finally I ditched opera. I migrated all my bookmarks and everything to firefox and the email and rss feeds to thunderbird. I had to install a tab manager and a speed dial plugin into FF to have my usual operation mode but now that’s done and I feel like “home”.
Sorry opera but instead of getting better you got worse.

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Weird IE6 bug

Monday, August 10th, 2009

I don’t use IE if I can help it but my internet banking does so ocne in a while I’m forced to.
Also, I don’t use automatic/windows updates at all. If tehre is some update that I really need, I try to get it manually. So my IE is outdated.
That being said, I noticed quite a while back that it happens that I start a new IE browser and no site will load. I disabled all add-ons and still nothing. However, I noticed that disabling an addon, closing browser,then enabling it back, again closing browser and starting the browser the 3rd time will sometimes make it work.
But this is an annoying workaround and it doesn’t work all the time.
Today I found another workaround: open a second browser window without closing the first one. From all my tries tilll now, this works all the time and is much more nicer and user friendly.

So, whomever is having this issue, I hope it will work for you 🙂

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Opera Browser huge memory consumtion

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

I am shocked. I have my opera 9.64 (latest stable at the moment) browser configured with no memory cache, 500 links in history with no saving of content, 20MB disk cache (reduced from 100), document checking at 5 min and img checking adn 5 hours.
With 127 tabs open, none are full flash site, maybe jsut advertisment falsh, it consumes over 1.2 GB of memory.
Holy-crap.
I’m going to test FF now.

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