Re: firefox resource hog

[Mayuresh <mayuresh%acm.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Jan 07, 2023 at 09:03:59AM +0100, tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost wrote:
> (4Gb is considered huge by old men like me, but, nowadays, I even expect
> to see one day the BIOS/UEFI to refuse to start in such a "contrived"
> environement).

Resource availability growth is an exciting journey because it enables
solving of problems that were considered unsolvable before.

But resource usage growth because developers take resource availability
for granted is dooming of engineering spirit.

I am not sure who would put firefox in which class. To me it's in the
latter. (Sorry.)

While `resource rich' itself may sound subjective, it is the `minimum
required' tag that can bring some objectivity in it. E.g. to browse
internet a browser should expect how much of minimum RAM, etc.

On the other hand, same browser's performance on Linux asks us some
questions - as a community that takes pride in support for even obscure
hardware. Is it about some build-time options, and can we bring those in
pkgsrc? Or is it about some policies in the kernel that we may want to
look at?


Regarding alternatives:

A lot of my browser usage (reading news, common web searches) is in
elinks. But I also use firefox' marionette interface heavily to automate
100s of repetitive tasks. Have written many scripts for this purpose which
has created a sort of lock-in.

While I do not mind one time porting effort to free myself of firefox
lock-in, there is no such alternative in sight as yet. I do like netsurf,
arcticfox, dillo etc. but I need a browser that lets me script my
repetitive tasks.

-- 
Mayuresh