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by readittwice 1949 days ago
Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as well?
2 comments
markdog12 1949 days ago
Yep, was thinking of the same thing when I read it. I have 2 gmail tabs in Safari, each taking over 1GB. One twitter that's about 1GB, one Slack that's over 1GB. Some of this is shared memory.

Is it that they don't realize Safari is a multi-process architecture, and they're only measuring Safari's main process?

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antoniogermano 1946 days ago
I’ve tested Safari many times before comparing it to other browsers (and correctly including child processes) and it has always beaten every other browser by using varying degrees of resources less than its competitors. Sometimes a surprisingly large number, sometimes not too much.

But there’s something people need to take into account as well: there’s only so much browser developers can do to optimize the browser. Website developers need to do their part as well. And Google is by far the worst offender in this regard. Facebook isn’t much better.

Most Google-owned webpages you visit are going to use at least 500MB on Safari or 800MB on Chrome. This is nonsense! If they were to develop a native app with exactly the same features it would take at most 250MB of RAM for the largest pages (such as large spreadsheets) and it would be a lot faster.

Compare Google and Facebook webpages to almost any other webpage and you will see they use too much RAM. People are unfortunately getting used to thinking “oh, I have 8 tabs open, that’s too many” when in fact it shouldn’t be.

I know I’m a tab hoarder, I don’t deny that. But using Safari currently have over 13 windows open, each with at least 25 tabs, not to mention plenty of native software running and still have a very fast and functional Mac. It’s not like I have 2TB of RAM either: 16GB of RAM is more than enough to do that. About a year ago (before I upgraded) I did pretty much the same thing with a 8GB RAM 2013 Mac and still didn’t have issues.

The only tabs Safari ever tells me it has reloaded because it’s using too many resources are Google-owned websites. This doesn’t happen with any other website at all from the hundreds of tabs I have open.

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