(Over)loading Browsers (was Re: Who? Me?? Attacked???)

[Beartooth]

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:35:52 +0930, Tim wrote:

> Not in particular response to your actual problem, but...
> 
> Allegedly, on or about 23 April 2013, Beartooth sent:
	[....]
>> My guess is that Arora had well over a hundred, but well under two
>> hundred, tabs open when it crashed.
> 
> I really don't know how anybody does that, with any browser.  On any
> computer that I've ever used, including other people's, the thing grinds
> to a sludgey halt when anything more than about twenty tabs are open,
> often far less.  Especially with any pages that aren't just plain text.
> Scripts, Flash, even just lots of pictures, are the kiss of death.  And,
> no, my computer isn't paging out to swap.

	Well, I can tell you how it comes about, if you're asking that. 
Then maybe we can find out if any browser(s) tolerate it better than any 
other(s).

	Wikipedia is my usual downfall, because I try to treat it much as 
I would a physical encyclopedia, especially a big single-volume one -- in 
which case, having begun one article, I'd turn to related articles, 
insert scraps of paper, and go back.

	Say I start to read about aspirin. It's a short article, but as 
usual, there are several links. One or two will be short enough to click 
to, read, and return, without losing context. Others will turn out to be 
pretty long; go back, click this time to open in another tab, and resume 
reading about aspirin. Then still other links will refer to things I've 
long wanted to read about; again, open a background tab. And so on -- 
recursively.

	And if this sounds bad, be assured that when I had a carrel in 
the stacks of a big library (as I did for twenty years) it was an order 
of magnitude more onerous.

	The thing of it is, though, that it's so insidious. The row of 
tabs grows gradually, and the slowing down is also gradual, and it gets 
to be a little like quicksand. However, any time I'm not otherwise 
preoccupied, I can always read my way through a long and known to be 
interesting sites, closing tabs behind me. But don't do it with any 
browser that doesn't keep a current list of your tabs!

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck Not Quite Clueless Power User
Remember I have precious (very precious!) little idea where up is.