It does sort of suggest that from a UI standpoint, a chunk of users doesn’t really deal well with the traditional paradigm of “opening a document in an application consumes resources, and part of the job of the user is to manage those resources”. Like, maybe Chrome should just do the equivalent of, at least by default, converting a tab that hasn’t been viewed for some time into something akin to a bookmark, just reload it when it’s viewed. Or at least push the data into on-disk storage.
I don’t use Chrome, but Firefox does something vaguely-analogous to that for session storage — like, if Firefox dies unexpectedly, restored tabs won’t reload content until actually viewed, to avoid the thundering herd problem.
I remember when I first encountered mobile OSes auto-killing programs and stuff to try to manage memory for users. I thought that it was pretty insane. But…clearly some users have trouble with it, and maybe it’s a reasonable UI change for them. I know people who had difficulty, on various desktop OSes, understanding the significance of starting a program and the idea that a running program would consume memory and perhaps CPU time.
It’s definitely more a habit of people who’ve used a smartphone more than traditional PCs.
I’m older GenZ and my friend group is split pretty evenly between those of us who had laptops/desktops growing up and those who only semi-recently (like last 5 to 8 years) got their first actual PC for gaming.
And you’re right Firefox does handle memory usage better in general, which is why some of my more “hardcore tab-hoarder” friends use it. But Chromium, not so much Google Chrome but mainly OperaGX/Brave seem to be the choice of my generation…
It does sort of suggest that from a UI standpoint, a chunk of users doesn’t really deal well with the traditional paradigm of “opening a document in an application consumes resources, and part of the job of the user is to manage those resources”. Like, maybe Chrome should just do the equivalent of, at least by default, converting a tab that hasn’t been viewed for some time into something akin to a bookmark, just reload it when it’s viewed. Or at least push the data into on-disk storage.
I don’t use Chrome, but Firefox does something vaguely-analogous to that for session storage — like, if Firefox dies unexpectedly, restored tabs won’t reload content until actually viewed, to avoid the thundering herd problem.
I remember when I first encountered mobile OSes auto-killing programs and stuff to try to manage memory for users. I thought that it was pretty insane. But…clearly some users have trouble with it, and maybe it’s a reasonable UI change for them. I know people who had difficulty, on various desktop OSes, understanding the significance of starting a program and the idea that a running program would consume memory and perhaps CPU time.
It’s definitely more a habit of people who’ve used a smartphone more than traditional PCs.
I’m older GenZ and my friend group is split pretty evenly between those of us who had laptops/desktops growing up and those who only semi-recently (like last 5 to 8 years) got their first actual PC for gaming.
And you’re right Firefox does handle memory usage better in general, which is why some of my more “hardcore tab-hoarder” friends use it. But Chromium, not so much Google Chrome but mainly OperaGX/Brave seem to be the choice of my generation…