I hate it so much. So arbitrary and capricious. I would say this is currently the number one blocker for the web as a serious platform. And they're doing it on purpose.
I guess the policy is that tabs can use 100% of the available resources on low end devices, but only 10% of the available resources on high end devices.
I think the desktop policy might be better. In the tablets I've used, tabs sometimes get killed when I switch tabs and visit another website with a lot of ads. It's an annoying way to lose work in an unsubmitted form. It doesn't seem to happen for desktop.
That's because most (all?) phones don't swap to a pagefile whereas every desktop OS has swap enabled by default. The only practical solution is to buy a phone with more memory. IMO 6GB is the bare minimum in 2024
Ad blockers certainly shave off a few MBs, but in my experience the vast majority of RAM usage is not caused by ads. Unlike first party content, ads are automatically benchmarked by ad exchanges and penalized for using too much resources. I also don't think a 200gram phone is the kind of waste that we should be concerned about. Think bigger
> I also don't think a 200gram phone is the kind of waste that we should be concerned about. Think bigger
A lot of raw ore is processed to get those 200 grams in your hand.
That said, a quick search tells me the carbon footprint of producing a phone is around 55kg, which is about 320km of car travel; it's not trivial, but it's not as much of a bottleneck I thought it might be.
Video editors are a big one. I've heard of people crashing a browser tab with Figma as well.
For data exploration tools it's very easy to want to use 4GB+ of memory. I found the limit cumbersome while working on financial tools. It usually comes up in internal tools where you reliably have a fast internet connection; it's harder to reach the limit for public-facing tools because there the slowness of sending 4GB+ to the browser is the more limiting factor.
The annoying part isn't just that the limit is there, but that you can't really handle it gracefully as the developer -- when the browser decides you've hit the limit, it may just replace the page with an error message.
For a video editor, only a small portion of the video needs to be in memory at any given time. The rest can be squirreled away in an IndexedDB store, which has no hard size limits on most browsers.
It's one of our big barriers over at Figma. Creative tools in general hit this limit pretty quickly. For context, I was a very heavy user of Photoshop back in the day. Even a decade ago I remember hitting 20GB of active memory use for Photoshop.
Things get really big really quick, especially when you're storing uncompressed versions of raster elements in memory. To frame things in a different way, 4GB is 22 seconds of 1080p video if you're loading the raw frames into memory.