Why are web browsers so resource hungry, What are they actually doing?

Orionaut

Orionaut

Orionaut

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As above really.

I have a couple of Gigabyte "Brix", I use them for office applications and they are nice and snappy with openoffice and the small number of other applications that I run on them.

But the internet is a total waste of time.

These are twin core 1.6Gig CPU's and yet, when I look in Task Manager, the CPU is maxed out loading a web page, and despite that it can still take a minute or more before the little round thing stops spinning.

What on earth are these browsers doing?? The data stream after all is only a tiny fraction of what a DL from an SSD would be (Which is handled with ease) :confused:

Are we really heading into a world where we need a supercomputer to look at a web page?? :(
 
Orionaut said:
As above really.

I have a couple of Gigabyte "Brix", I use them for office applications and they are nice and snappy with openoffice and the small number of other applications that I run on them.

But the internet is a total waste of time.

These are twin core 1.6Gig CPU's and yet, when I look in Task Manager, the CPU is maxed out loading a web page, and despite that it can still take a minute or more before the little round thing stops spinning.

What on earth are these browsers doing?? The data stream after all is only a tiny fraction of what a DL from an SSD would be (Which is handled with ease) :confused:

Are we really heading into a world where we need a supercomputer to look at a web page?? :(
Click to expand...


If I understand you rightly, you have a dual core 1.6Ghz cpu? That's very under powered specs.

The web is a very complex space now. Java script, video and images, multiple tabs etc... some websites such as mashable.com use Gb's of ram as you scroll the page.
 
Orionaut said:
What on earth are these browsers doing?? The data stream after all is only a tiny fraction of what a DL from an SSD would be (Which is handled with ease) :confused:
Click to expand...
There's just a lot more crap going on in web pages these days.

I prefer the internet from about 1997 (when I used it first) to 2007.
After that the internet has just gone downhill quite drastically. YouTube is getting slower by the day, Google is turning into SkyNet, governments trying to seize the internet, unworthy people being given internet access. The list goes on and it's just madness.

I'm glad OcUK is still looks like it did when I joined.
 
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asim18 said:
There's just a lot more crap going on in web pages these days.

I prefer the internet from about 1997 (when I used it first) to 2007.
After that the internet has just gone downhill quite drastically. YouTube is getting slower by the day, Google is turning into SkyNet, governments trying to seize the internet, unworthy people being given internet access. The list goes on and it's just madness.

I'm glad OcUK is still looks like it did when I joined.
Click to expand...

Have to say I agree. The only constant is OcUK, the rest of the net hasn't really improved with all the crud that comes with it.
 
nutcase_1uk said:
Have to say I agree. The only constant is OcUK, the rest of the net hasn't really improved with all the crud that comes with it.
Click to expand...

Since you mention it, OCUK seems to load quickly and without issues. /:

But I am still puzzled as to what the CPU is doing maxed out on a 5 meg data stream??

I could understand if pages were slow to load because there was loads of data and the transfer was slow, I do not however understand what all the CPU time is being used for??
 
Which browser are you using and which browsers have you tried?

Even on modern spec, you will notice the difference in webpage loading and processing speeds when you install an adblocker. I use uBlock Origin for Firefox on a netbook - while it's a similar spec to yours, installing this add-on really helped.
 
Why does ff not yet work with h/w acceleration , I though it was meant to benefit graphics courtesy of Webgl standard, does hw acc work in any browser to give a perfromance benefit.
Are the likes of flash/utube/silverlight plugins using hardware acceleration nonetheless

My take on web sites is that Unlike OC's which is frankly exemplerary and does not reference any other sites, that to build web sites cheaply people use toolkits from multiple vendors that might be robust and reliable but are by no means tuned for performance. Just looked at mashable and if my ad blocker was not intercepting it would be loading junk from

Allow mashable.com
Allow outbrain.com
Allow jwplatform.com
Allow optimizely.com
Allow connatix.com
Allow vrvm.com
Allow mshcdn.com

but seems to work fine with java from all these sites blocked.
 
If you build websites you know the client wants the latest 'all singing all dancing' stuff.
You know users don't want that - so you inform the client.
The client thinks they know better.
The users lose.
 
Make as many add-ons/plugins as you can 'click to activate'/'ask to activate'. Most importantly, Flash. Lots of pages use it for tracking you and it has to be loaded in and out very frequently (every page? not sure). Disable it and only turn it on for (the minority these days) of pages it's actually needed on.

You could try disabling javascript, might be acceptable depending on your browsing habits.

Finally try uBlock Origin as others have said, it's a lightweight blocker.
 
All these latest sites like Wordpress are a nightmare. They contain that much crap and that many Sedona it's getting stupid!

I'm in favour of these responsive websites as they load better than database back end stuff as there's less processing required.
 
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