I haven't carefully profiled memory use, but in my experience, Chromium is so much more performant than Firefox on ARM devices that any difference isn't worth it. If you're using a lot of tabs, it might lean in Firefox's favor, but overall performance so strongly favors Chromium that I've given up trying to use Firefox on anything but my high performance machines. I'm not sure where the performance delta is coming from, but the whole UI and JavaScript anything are much more responsive on e.g. A73 cores with 4GB RAM.
replyHave you tried a firefox fork like Librewolf? Not saying it makes a difference but it feels faster on my desktop compared to regular firefox.
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replyit's probably the "you only notice when it doesn't work" situation, but my experience with firefox on ram limit has been a lot about tabs forgetting the url in them
replyas in, I click "open in new tab", some time later I switch to them... only to get hit with "new tab", even though a moment ago it displayed tab name and I could right click -> bookmark to preemptively copy the address
Try the "Auto tab discard" extension. It allows me to have hundreds of tabs "open" and (in combination with Tree Style Tabs) largely blur the line between "browser sessions" and "bookmarks".
replyFar better than bookmarks.
replyBookmarks do not store click history, the trajectory you took to arrive at the page. With tabs, the contexts is a backbutton away.
Yeah, agreed. The built-in tab discarder only kicks in when there's actual memory pressure, so can sometimes be a bit precarious. Auto tab discard happens way before that, so tends not to be affected in the same way. I guess it uses more i/o in total, but it's not noticeable on a system with a fast-ish SSD.
replyIt can still be a bit iffy when memory's really tight, but even then a simple tab reload is usually enough to fix things.
Haven't had that happen, but what I have had happen is that I open in a new tab, and it just displays this spinner in the middle of the window while on the tab. It never loads. I take the URL from the address bar and drag it into yet a newer tab and there it loads. Then I close the original new tab. Sometimes I gotta do that a few times for the thing to load. I tend to open in new tab with middle click, if it makes a difference.
reply>[Firefox runs] proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete
replyAny familiarity with Safari and blocking performance? uBlock Origin Lite is a simple option, AdGuard can do more (injection?) though uBO feels more trustworthy still…
Funny I'm using Ubuntu 24 i3 with vs code on a black 2008 Macbook
replySeconding ad-blocking. I have a low-end phone (4GB ram, and a mediatek processor from 2018), and setting up DNS-based ad-blocking made a lot of sites go from unusable to usable.
reply... I haven't seen an ad in years, thanks to Brave, which is as of the last time I checked Chromium-based.
replyI was thinking about Brave too while reading this thread. I’m not on a memory constrained system exactly but Brave seems to be tons snappier due to its as blocking. I wonder too if Brave is a case where you can pull it off and still take advantage of chromium based.
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