[arendtio]

Doesn't sound like you tested it on a mediocre mobile phone, sounds more like a laptop/desktop.

However, regarding your question: For one thing, many pages are being build for mobile devices first nowadays. So you would not simply push 40k rows but use some kind lazy loading which is a lot harder to build and can easily degrade the desktop experience.

Furthermore, people often use libraries to get rid off the browser differences and if you use too many of them, use them inappropriately or just a few that are not optimized for performance you can easily ruin the performance. In addition, the whole npm ecosystem makes it very easy to load and combine libraries. Often you need only a few functions but if your tree-shaking doesn't work correctly you end up with a lot of code that has to be loaded even if it will never be used.

So frontend development is a messy place and it is easy to fuck up the performance. Even though that should be no excuse for any frontend dev to write crappy code...

[vaughan]

I wonder if pushing 40k rows to mobile is such a bad idea. Phones have tons of space now. HD video streaming pulls tons of data. I guess mediocre mobiles complicate matters. Usually there are other factors making it implausible. Such as not compressing/compacting the data on the server, and not being able to limit large blob data columns, unable to control the parsing of data, and lack of normalized relational caching on the client. Usually it’s a collection of backend and frontend frameworks that complicate all this. I’m feeling more and more we need thick efficient clients.

[skybrian]

A web page that uses too much memory will cause other browser tabs to be unloaded. If you were writing a comment in another tab, you lose your work.

[onion2k]

I'd have thought background tab would be written to it's domain-partitioned bit of the cache before being unloaded. I'm very surprised you lose the current state. To be honest, that sounds like a bug.

[skybrian]

Tab unloading is by design. The difference is that it happens more often on low-memory devices. I use Chrome, but it looks like they all do it:

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/tab-unloading-in-firefox-9...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/gidzwc/why_does_safar...