It's frustrating that efficiency and being a good desktop citizen is such an afterthought for most browsers. Support for all the fancy web features imaginable is isn't worth much to me if means keeping my system pegged and destroying its battery life.
Afaik browsers are highly efficient and a lot of work goes into optimization. On the other hand, they're expected to run arbitrary code (JavaScript, Web Assembly) which can do all matter of terrible things. A couple years ago, it used to be Gmail/Google Voice websites would take nearly 1GB of RAM alone per tab and crash if you left them running a few days.
A website could just run <download big json blob and append to array> in a tight loop and the browser has to try to make decisions on not hosing website performance if the user wants to actually use the crappy website while simultaneously not hosing battery/machine performance.
Blink and Gecko don’t fare as well as WebKit does when it comes to efficiency which would suggest they’re making tradeoffs favoring things other than battery life.
things have improved a lot over time. I have one project involving json arrays that grew way out of hand. Sort of panicing about the need for a fast 80% rewrite while not having 10% time I tested a good number of devices. Crappy androids and low end iphones deal with the many thousands of objects incredibly fast. I still think its wrong I just have nothing to show for it.
ff a decade ago would just randomly die on me within 2 days.
