Not only is this false, but completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well.
The average consumer hardware improves at nowhere near exponential rate (although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points).
>completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well.
The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers (since a ten-year old computer in 2012 would have been from 2002). If you assume that a computer is less likely to be used the older it gets (and that this rate is roughly stable), then I am not ignoring older hardware at all.
>although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points
thus is the nature of all real-live long-term trends. If you pick a sufficiently small timeframe, they never work.
I'm saying that the performance of today's firefox on 2006 hardware is better than the performance of 2012's firefox on 2002 hardware. I consider that to be a better measure than to compare both releases on 2006 hardware.
Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy.
/edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistake. My "gaming" desktop is "only" 8 years old. It has a 4 core AMD processor. It's on par with current atoms.
An extremely low-energy atom, that runs at half the frequency might have about the same performance as a top-of the line 12-year old Pentium 4, but that's not a meaningful comparison in my eyes, considering that we still have high-end gaming PCs today.
A 11 year old Pentium 4 @3.4GHz has a passmark score of 401. A modern 2-core $40 Celeron G1840 @2.80GHz has a passmark score of 2984. And that's among the cheapest processors you can get as end-user.
>that's not a meaningful comparison in my eyes, considering that we still have high-end gaming PCs today.
It is meaningful when you consider what the average user is purchasing. Back then you had to purchase good stuff to run the latest office apps, etc. It was common that the only thing needed to get a friend into the gaming world was the purchase of a graphics card. Now most casual users do not have anything close to what is offered in high-end gaming PCs.
Right now buying anything that doesnt have an atom gets you a literal monster. I've had a "decent" laptop (entry level i3 and entry level discrete AMD spits with disgust GPU) from 2010 and anything for the same price in 2016 will get you an order of magnitude more powerful machine
Your 12 years old pentium 4 (or whatever) likely has 1 core and 1 thread, which is immensely noticeable even compared to the lower end modern 2 cores/4 threads machines (let alone 4/8 mid level modern desktops).
RAM available in mobile phones seems to grow exponentially [1]. Power efficency of processors also seems to grow exponentially [2] (does anybody have a source for ARM processors?).
Power usage has little to do with memory usage. In fact, if the browser is using more RAM as a cache, it won't hit persistent storage as much, which actually increases battery life.
If that exaggerated RAM use causes other more intensive apps and their data to be evicted, that can cause a much more significant load when the app has to spin up again and re-acquire or re-calculate its state.
The extra chips are not free. What we are seeing is bringing up the latest low power tech into the phones for now. Except RAM has hit maximum densities per chip already or is very close.
Remember that RAM has to be powered on for every refresh cycle...
It is "nothing" compared to screen or radios, but it is there. So you won't be seeing more than one Dram chip in there, footprint notwithstanding.
Browser are caching web content, not much persistent storage content... and the OS does persistent storage caching fine, typically no need to try to add your own (poor) layer to do that.
My hardware doesn't improve exponentially. In fact, my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) or previous desktop machine (also 16G). And it mostly works with Chrome, but I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines. That was somewhere in 2013, looks like it's even worse now?
> I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines
I don't think that's representative of how Firefox works. I used Firefox similarly in 2013 and didn't see those problems; the users supported by my company, mostly on 4GB machines, also didn't see them.
I have a 112 tabs open right now and Firefox has been running for a couple of weeks, which means thousands more have been opened and closed. It's using 4 GB of memory (EDIT: Which is more than usual, but it's fine with me).
Agree with you here - this is essentially the reason that I don't use Chrome on my desktop (aside from brief testing, or to load up something quickly that requires Flash).
Firefox is still a lot better at RAM and CPU usage when hundreds of tabs are present in the browser. This persists when using e10s.
I see your 112 and raise you a 875. FF worked just fine that too with just a less than 1 GB of RAM. I had to block flash, hand tune some of the cache sizes and have a tab uloader etc. No other browser seemed capable of handling my rather <cough> unique <cough> use case.
If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing that you have 875 tabs open? How are you able to keep track of what you opened, and where etc? I tend to feel anxious and unfocussed when I've got over a dozen or so open - at which point i'll dump some "I'd like to read this" articles into a bookmarks folder which I work through in my down-time, and clean out periodically.
There are extensions that can search the body of the open but out of view tabs.
I have commented at length why I use so many open tabs. Basically that's my cache-to-do-list. Once I revisit certain tabs enough times they get upgraded to a bookmark. What bookmarks don't do well but tabs do marvelously is preserve the trajectory and context of how I arrived at the page. Very useful to recreate the state when I visit it later.
Firefox has gotten much more stable over recent years in regards to having excessive amounts of tabs open. I can have over 300 tabs open and it's stable (I was using Waterfox when doing this in Windows though).
I have over 300 saved tabs in Firefox on my desktop, and it is stable, but I notice it runs quite a bit slower than when I only have a few open. I really need to start closing some tabs here and there...
It only loads the actual tab when you activate it though, so I don't think all the tabs are being stored in memory, just the ones you activate during a session. I probably actually load about 30 or so during a session, with many more being opened, looked at then closed.
That you for your evaluation of my buying decisions! With absolutely no information except one data point about memory side you were able to conclude they were bad, this is remarkable. Has nothing to do with the point in question (that memory capabilities aren't nearly growing exponentially, not lately) but still very remarkable insight.
I assumed your workplace made the decision and not you. Sorry for appearing to criticize your decisions. I'm still curious why you downgraded to a machine with less memory.
But this renders your original point moot. Memory is still growing, you just chose a lower end laptop. Obviously you would see it decrease. For me, my previous laptop had 8GB and the current one has 16GB. Exponential increase.
