If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).
The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font, and you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal (not sure if they've fixed it yet).
Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
> The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font
No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website).
> you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above).
The GP to your original did set the bar at 70kB, mattmanser then explained that images and fonts easily exceed that, and then you called that poor resource management. Sounds like we're on the same page here, but you seemed to have missed the context of the comment you initially replied to.
> And I maintain that the difference cannot be explained by images and font cache alone.
It can't be explained by images and fonts alone, I agree, but images and fonts alone are still enormous compared to 70kB. On my screen an "e" on this site is 10*11 pixels. Subpixel positioning means we need at least 6 copies of each letter, subpixel antialiasing means we need three channel alpha (3 bytes per pixel), we have variations of bold, italic and bold-italic, 95 printable letters in ascii, that's a low-ball of 750kB for one size of one font. This comment page alone has 4 different sizes, I'd expect a chat app to have a few more.
Well even with your quite conservative calculations (you're realistically never gonna have all 95 characters in all weights for all font size, so the actual number is going to much significantly lower than the theoretical envelope) you end up with a size that is absolutely reasonable and negligible in a 100MB footprint.
How much? You typically don't want more than a few different fonts on a given document. And neither fonts nor web images should be bigger than hundreds of kilobytes. How do we get to gigs?
Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise.
What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple.
So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.
"What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies"
I never knew this open secret. In my day msft was very glamorous and I guess something like oracle played the role you're ascribing to msft now. I wonder what their strategy was? (I tend to doubt this was a careless/unexamined decision.) Maybe they figured that paying extra for individuals doesn't get you much if you have enough structure in place? A Bill Bellichik approach to hiring. Is the relationship you're making (FAANG salaries == better products) accepted as true?
I only have my own observations of their products and secondhand info but my understanding is Microsoft simply doesn’t care about engineering. They have a sales pitch (product idea), then they build and ship the MVP that can earn money. If something sells, they figure they can solve scaling by throwing enough money at it. Classic b-tier tech company (and startup) garbage. They never work out the unit economics, etc.
FAANG (at least the few I’m familiar with) tend to be engineering companies. They hire talented engineers who can work from first principles and build products with profitable unit economics that solve interesting new problems. I don’t think Microsoft even knows what software engineering would mean.
Good question. For a long time I think the justification was location: Microsoft is in Seattle, and it’s only the Bay Area that is getting inflated salaries.
I don't see mention of this in the discussion, so I will add: I think people also don't close tabs. And probably these LI tabs have been up for a long time. Maybe weeks or months.
I completely exit my web browser(s) at least 1x per day, and use bookmarks to get back to pages I need. As a result, I don't have issues with memory leaks or unbounded growth of RAM use. For me, its just the "proper" way to use a program like a web browser, but I'm old enough to be from the era that restarting programs and the OS could fix issues. I recognize that most people feel it is unreasonable to quit the browser, pretty much ever.
EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...