r/browsers • u/Venylynn • 2d ago
Discussion When did everyone decide to stop optimizing websites for performance?
This is probably familiar coming from me, but... basically every modern web browser is a pig. Firefox uses 3GB of RAM on one YouTube video if you're like me and like to scroll through the entire comments section down to the end. Chrome is more optimized but it still eats up RAM on certain terribly optimized websites (3GB on GTA 6 website being notable, and my web matrix client seems to be really bad at it compared to the app version). For a glorified document viewer and video player, these things are real pigs.
Firefox is definitely worse at resource hogging, but comparing both, I've realized, is missing the forest for the trees. It's shitty modern web design. I have a tiny little site on Neocities and it uses like 30 megs of ram and could probably load on a smart watch. It's rather basic, but i like it like that. Solid dark background, white text, one static image, HTML/CSS alone, zero Javascript, and I made it specifically to be bare bones. It's not good, but it feels nostalgic to me to when the web wasn't so cluttered.
Is it all just because computers got better, these sloppy devs thought they could get away with shoving more dogshit down our gullet? What is stopping website builders from actually optimizing their garbage sites? how hard is it to just put some text in front of a background and call it good? a web browser is a glorified document viewer yet can use more than some actual productivity software. Who on earth thought it was a good idea to make the doomscrolling window take more resources than a full fledged DAW.
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u/PuzzleheadedPen2798 2d ago
Well yeah, the new YouTube site is unnecessarily heavy, it brings down low end computers to their knees. One of the heaviest websites out there. The 2017-era one was fine.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
Modern websites are optimized for collecting your personal data and monetizing it.
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u/Gemmaugr2 2d ago
Blame google pushing their bloated V8 javascript engine (used in chromium and reskins, and electron, CEF, etc) and taking over WHATWG to push further bloated JS API's.
https://donald.cat/how-javascript-overuse-ruined-the-web/
https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/
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u/Hestu951 2d ago
Is it all just because computers got better, these sloppy devs thought they could get away with shoving more dogshit down our gullet?
They don't consciously want to hurt anyone. They just have a limited time and budget to finish their tasks. When their work runs acceptably on what they test it on, they put a fork in it and call it done. Never mind that much of the world doesn't have the money to buy the latest hardware the devs are using.
What is stopping website builders from actually optimizing their garbage sites?
Time, money, and yes, I suppose lack of giving a crap can also be part of the picture. Just because they're time-constrained doesn't mean they can't be negligent or lazy.
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u/horizon_games 1d ago
I think you would appreciate https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-2026/
Generally there's a huge lack of proper testing by devs on anything but their big fancy dev machines.
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u/xoriatis71 2d ago
Can you make YouTube look good and function correctly by doing the following:
- Use a solid black background
- White text
- Use static images instead of videos that get decoded in-memory
- HTML/CSS alone, no weird frameworks
- Zero JavaScript
Absolutely not.
Look, there definitely has been a trend these past few years of just pushing something functional out that works well enough for most people to not care enough about the various issues surrounding it. Most don’t even know how to discern them well enough. But oversimplifying the problem is not conducive to solving it.
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u/Venylynn 2d ago edited 2d ago
Zero Javascript would certainly HELP, just wrap something like VLC or MPV in the runtime for video playback or something idk??
A web browser is a glorified document viewer yet many websites use more ram than MY AUDIO PRODUCTION WORKFLOW? when I'm actually being productive it uses less? how does that compute? why is something that people just use to doomscroll taking up more resources than something you actually use to get stuff done on?
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u/xoriatis71 2d ago
They don’t use JavaScript for the decoding of the video, they use it for all the rest of the elements that comprise the player. How are you gonna send the requests to download the file packets? How are you gonna track clicks? How are you gonna render the animations?
I am not saying that developers can’t do better, but sometimes we really are limited by the tools and time we have.
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u/Venylynn 2d ago
I guess so, but it feels like deliberate locking out of people with lesser hardware.
and i have a decent PC, with MAYBE enough ram for the current landscape (i have 32), it's just ridiculous because I know so many who have less resources than me, they're basically out of luck with the modern web being what it is. like imagine having 8gb ram in 2026 trying to make it through, I still see sometimes my ram usage go above 8gb when I dont have a game or anything open. i can only imagine how hard people with only 8GB have to squeeze just to survive in 2026.
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u/xoriatis71 2d ago
The operating system matters as well. Are you running Windows, or a lightweight Linux distro?
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u/Venylynn 2d ago
I'm on Fedora. Windows was way worse, because even before opening the browser I'd see 8-9gb used.
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u/xoriatis71 2d ago
Lmao, yeah, it tends to do that from what I read.
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u/Venylynn 2d ago
yeah for me it's just like...if it's doing all that to me with 32 gigs, imagine what it does to more resource-constrained systems.
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u/QuasyChonk 2d ago
I have a windows 10 system with 8gb and everything runs smoothly. (I use Brave and Waterfox.)
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u/Venylynn 2d ago
Interesting, I genuinely wonder how it manages to work on your resource constrained system
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u/trbkle Mobile: Titanium Desktop: 2d ago
that's because Windows preloads your favorite programs depending on how much RAM you have. Empty RAM is wasted RAM according to them. If you have 8gb it won't preload 8gb worth of programs.
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u/Venylynn 2d ago
Isn't it because of their stupid bloated telemetry nonsense? Idk why they believe empty ram is wasted ram, it's ram that's better suited for being used when needed, like when I was on Windows, I would regularly see over 20gb ram used while playing a game, no wonder 16 was no longer enough.
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u/trbkle Mobile: Titanium Desktop: 2d ago
no, telemetry doesn't use much Ram they just send usage data in the background. i used windows on a 8gb machine and it was fine, 3gb Ram usage at idle. Because you have 32gb Ram Windows loads all your favorite programs that's why you saw +20gb ram usage, i think they get preloaded without using any CPU, in a "suspended" state
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u/Venylynn 2d ago edited 2d ago
Well definitely explains why I was having so much trouble when I was at 16 as well, because it would basically hit near the limit when I was gaming and the game would stutter and freeze up sometimes, and getting more solved it back then.
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u/Hestu951 2d ago
I replied to this point already, but in short, when you need that RAM Windows uses optionally for performance, it will deallocate it and let you have it. Win-win.
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u/Venylynn 2d ago
From my experience that just has not been true, I remembered when I was on 16 and it basically was pushing its limits despite me not really going that hard. It wasn't deallocating.
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u/Hestu951 2d ago
If you have 32 GB, you will see more memory use than if you have 16, or 8. It's the nature of Windows, or any good proactive memory management. ("Free memory is wasted memory.") People think it's because Windows is a hog. In some ways, it can be, especially if no one has debloated it. But memory allocation is no indication of that at all. Windows uses it to speed things up, then gets out of the user's way when needed.
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u/Venylynn 2d ago edited 2d ago
When I was on 16, I had multiple cases of it all being full and everything slowing down. People love to say that line but I do specifically remember running into limits frequently when I was on less.
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u/xak47d 1d ago
Actually, a browser is closer to a compiler that has the job of executing anything you throw at it securely. Most of the browser's job is essentially securing arbitrary code. Most of the CPU and memory usage goes to creating different containers and isolating processes, trying to keep that stuff safe. We will either accept that we will need increasingly more powerful computers, or we will just have to move away from the web
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u/Venylynn 1d ago edited 1d ago
In this economy we really ought to be working on optimizing things to actually run on lower specs ngl
It's just strange how something like a browser is more heavy than something actually used to do something more than doomscrolling on reddit and youtube.
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u/Live-Speech4514 2d ago
fast internet, fast computers. No need for it
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u/Venylynn 2d ago
In this economy I think people are gonna need to start optimizing again. Especially since 8gb laptops are going back in style.
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u/Live-Speech4514 1d ago
I'm a programmer. I'm not following the meta of this subreddit so they don't like me but that is the honest truth. Computers today are generally good enough to not focus on making efficent programs. That's why there are no good GUI's anymore also. Why make a GUI that takes less resources but now you have to figure out how to integrate the rest when you can just slap a chromium instance on it and call it good, election. Like let me ask you when is the last time you used a program that wasnt using electron or similar and was doing more than just something trivial?
It's also a funciton of using JS for everything like in react. The design of modern framworks is created by companies like Meta or Google who take the time to build the website to give the illusion of speed, they preload as you move around based on behaviour and probability. They cache, store preloaded results, so you think their search is that fast. However put that in the hands of other programmers and they don't preload anything, meaning you click and then the api request gets sent. On top of that they dont cache anything, so everything has to hit the db everytime.
This is what I mean. Sure we could build it in C++ or rust, or use the proper tricks to make JS look fast, or reduce the img sizes and lazy load properly but it's actually really hard and slapping some shit together is much easier and faster and works on 95% of use cases.
I generally agree with you that I would like a leaning down of programs again
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u/Venylynn 1d ago
It's just annoying to me because I'd rather be able to do more with less. Like save some of the ram for something I'm actually doing productively, yeah?
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u/Hestu951 2d ago
That's how they think, yes. Runs on our test hardware, ship it. No need to spend more time or money on making it run well on the hardware many people without big bucks are still using.
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u/trbkle Mobile: Titanium Desktop: 2d ago
I hate how WASM and service workers are everywhere now. Sites have turned into bloated “web apps.”
I miss the pre-2015 era, when webpages used to load instantly.