My wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!)
If you mean it showed the out of memory dialog, that wouldn't be caused by an app using 3GB. The dialog shows up at ~48GB swap space used on an 8GB Mac, or when you're out of disk space and can't write a swap file.
It’s a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I’ll get her a 64GB MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she so desires!
I do it myself and I'm sure a lot of people on HN do too. But I've tried to embrace the "zen" of closing all tabs lately and it's been nice. If I really want to find something later I can search my history or, like you said, just bookmark it.
More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping like that was destroying their drives really fast.
Don't these integrated ARM-based SoCs make much better use of RAM as opposed to old Intel-based boards? That's my understanding, anyway.
My wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!)
If you mean it showed the out of memory dialog, that wouldn't be caused by an app using 3GB. The dialog shows up at ~48GB swap space used on an 8GB Mac, or when you're out of disk space and can't write a swap file.
So Firefox was using 5gb? There's your problem.
It’s a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I’ll get her a 64GB MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she so desires!
Tabs as bookmarks, people keep falling into this trap, my wife included
I do it myself and I'm sure a lot of people on HN do too. But I've tried to embrace the "zen" of closing all tabs lately and it's been nice. If I really want to find something later I can search my history or, like you said, just bookmark it.
She shouldn't have to do anything. That's the browser's job.
What page? Azure portal is notorious for leaking memory in both chrome and firefox, that’s the only tab I’ve seen using 5+ gb ram.
Is it leaking or is it by design? As far as I remember Azure site is just all of the pages combined in one single massive DOM.
The benefits are in speed not capacity.
More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping like that was destroying their drives really fast.