[kleiba]

I grew up in the C64 days - I still can't get my head around the fact that you need 3gb of RAM because 2gb is not enough to run a webbrowser these days.

I know that what's going on on a typical website these days requires an enormous amount of computational power, but I mean, come on. That shouldn't be the explanation, it's part of the problem.

[zitterbewegung]

Any content you see on the screen hasn't changed at all.

On a typical website all of the analytics are causing page bloat.

Sometimes there are frameworks like bootstrap but hypothetically those should be cached.

If you are looking at a web application then it has a framework that is a magnitude higher and the rest of it you see a significant increase.

[Mediterraneo10]

Website bloat isn't the explanation. Firefox on the original 2GB Pinephone board is painfully slow even if you have uBlock Origin and Noscript installed. It is slow even to open and browse to a minimalist text-only website with. I'm not sure how much of this is Firefox, and how much is the whole Mobian UI that depends on GNOME components that have not been optimized to save RAM.

It also has a lot to do with the fact that the Pinephone CPU is underpowered compared to anything from 2020 (or almost anything from 2015, really).

[megous]

Firefox on the original 2GiB pinephone runs just fine (Xorg/i3wm) even on a 1440p monitor with non-JS easy to compose websites (no complicated CSS filters, blur, etc.) with smooth scrolling.

It's only slowed down by storage access speeds mostly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ

And this demo is purposefully using both displays at once to stress the device more. With single display mode there's less demands on RAM, and more bandwidth is available to CPU.

Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqJOs0YwjwY

[jcun4128]

It is too bad (in the case of parsing) most websites have dynamic HTML structures... I wonder how hard it would be if you had some browser/wrapper that made most websites into wire-frame boxes, text to be simpler to render

[zitterbewegung]

You do realize if you use ublock Origin and Noscript that actually degrades your performance because it has to verify to not load that information.

[Mediterraneo10]

My apologies for not making myself entirely clear: even if you have no addons whatsoever, and you open Firefox and try to navigate to some bare-bones text-only website, even that is extremely slow on the 2GB Pinephone.

However, I would question whether uBlock Origin degrades performance – my own experience running Firefox on low-memory platforms like netbooks and the Raspberry Pi suggests that is not the case. Yes, addons use some amount of RAM, but if they prevent the device from loading a modern advertising-based webpage where the ads and analytics run into the many megabytes and the useless Javascript is CPU-intensive, it seems to work out as a net benefit.

[heavyset_go]

It isn't the Bootstrap-like frameworks that are causing bloat. It's that websites are written as apps these days by people with relatively beefy machines compared to consumers who don't usually buy top of the line hardware every year.

For example, compare Twitter or Facebook to their recent SPA rewrites in React. I can't use either without sacrificing GBs of residential memory. Loading anything on those sites now requires many more CPU cycles than they did before.

[girvo]

Reddit is the worst offender for me. I don’t know if they use react? But whatever they’ve done, it’s horrific. It’s bad even on my top of the line 2020 Intel 13” MacBook Pro (the i7 one)!

[heavyset_go]

Pretty sure they do, or at least they use another SPA framework. I would have mentioned Reddit, but forgot about its rewrite because old.reddit.com still works.

[hutzlibu]

I did not know, that in C64 days you had a browser, with x WebAPIs to do various networking stuff, p2p, soundAPI, database, payment processing, complex - hardware accelerated styling and composite of layout, plattform irrelevant assembler subset, with a integrated IDE etc. etc.

A Webbrowser these days is simply much, much more than a static document viewer, despite this might be, what you want it to be.

[Donckele]

I don’t think you need all that for the important stuff.

[hutzlibu]

But other people think different of "important stuff" thats why it is there.

And those who really want only simple HTMl rendering, I believe there are lightweight alternatives (?).

And if not, well then maybe there is simply not enough demand, because most people apparently want to be able to have a email client in the browser and do online banking, or edit Wikipedia articles in a rich html editor, or play games, or watch videos and share and comment them or even do video editing, ... all in the browser.

[boogies]

> And if not, well then maybe there is simply not enough demand, because most people apparently want to be able to have a email client in the browser and do online banking, or edit Wikipedia articles in a rich html editor, or play games, or watch videos and share and comment them or even do video editing, ... all in the browser.

IMO they largely just want to do all these things in an open core VM, without risking installing malware on the ridiculously insecure proprietary OS most of them use if/when they use desktop computers.

[hutzlibu]

Well yes and currently there is no alternative to a webbrowser which needs a lot of RAM for these tasks ... which was the main point, right? And not that we could do much better in theory. No doubt about that. But reality is the browser is usually the most pragmatic solution right now to most use cases. Which is good, when I can do online banking in a very niche project like pine, or do you think banks would port and certify their apps for the various linux distros?

[flubert]

I wonder if we could grade how much better a current system is vs something like the QNX 1.44MB demo disk.

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

[hutzlibu]

Thats easy: does the qnx meets the requirement of a modern browser?

No, then it is not.

Or do you mean in academical sense of functionaliy per byte? How useful is that?

[amelius]

Not to mention video.

[colejohnson66]

It’s interesting because the original iPhone from 2007 managed pretty well with a half a gigabyte of RAM (or was it a quarter?).

[ptx]

An eighth (128 MB) in fact, according to Wikipedia. The original Galaxy S had 512 MB though.

[colejohnson66]

Hasn’t Android always needed more though due to its use of an interpreter/JITer (JVM initially) instead of native code? That doesn’t explain why the PinePhone would need more than two gigabytes for a browser.

[pjmlp]

Android never used the JVM.

[thelittleone]

Reminds me of garbage bins. The larger the bin I have the more rubbish I find to fill it.

[op03]

Boat has sailed. Recently told an intern to setup a simple notification system at work between Linux desktops and Android phones. He ended up downloading 2 GB of Android tooling and 600 MB of kdeconnect to build basically a TCP connection.

[Dahoon]

Especially since on PC it doesn't even need 1gb. With 7 add-ons (one being an adblocker) and Firefox having spawned 9 processes in Win10 it still uses less than 1GB RAM for me (even though two tabs are chats, so background-active). Something is clearly either wrong in the Firefox he run, his add-ons or Phinephone.

[hutzlibu]

Or maybe that the os needs some ram, too?

And no, the firmware and drivers are sadly not memory optimized (or barely run at all), as ar as I know.