> HN frontpage and this entry opened in tabs: 386 MiB.
Am I the only one who still remembers when high-end desktop computers came with 128 MiB of RAM or less? Using three times that, with just a couple of tabs from a very light site like this one, feels like a lot of memory usage.
(I have used Firefox's ancestor on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM, so needing hundreds of megabytes just to start the browser already feels crazy to me in the first place.)
I do remember those times :-) and I guess back then, memory was a free-for-all wild west of direct access and no protections whatsoever...
Today, you're using a much more developed 64-bit architecture. On that, an OS that attempts to protect applications from each other (I'm thinking of ASLR but there are maybe more mechanisms). On that, a web browser that creates and manages multi-process working arenas (sandboxes) to protect tabs from each other. On that, add-ons that load in memory thousands of block rules (I mean uBlock), to protect users from commercial incentives of providers.
All that stack must be difficult to bring up with just 8 MiB of RAM :-) (probably the ad blocker alone needs more than that)
Am I the only one who still remembers when high-end desktop computers came with 128 MiB of RAM or less? Using three times that, with just a couple of tabs from a very light site like this one, feels like a lot of memory usage.
(I have used Firefox's ancestor on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM, so needing hundreds of megabytes just to start the browser already feels crazy to me in the first place.)