Meh, my three year old phone has 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 8x cores clocked at over 2ghz. In the time it takes my brain to send signals to move my muscles to move my mouse to a different tab my computer has lived multiple lifetimes of operations. For handling unbelievable load at scale, sure processes will kill scaling. But for handling a user clicking and touching their inputs of dozens or hundreds of tabs.. I doubt anyone will notice on today's machines.
Processes use RAM, and a lot of people use a lot of tabs. This isn't to say that each website couldn't have a separate process (and this is true if you browse different websites already), but memory usage isn't something you can just freely ignore even on today's hardware.
Wait, what? You mean, you're claiming that browsers are aggressively written to minimize memory usage for a given unit of functionality? Because that would be a hard case to make.
I just opened example.com (a tiny, static site) in Chrome. Chrome's task manager says that tab is using 16 MB. You're saying that the minimal overhead that a new process would add is significant compared to that? Because I see numerous processes in the OS task manager right now with a significantly smaller memory footprint.
If you just dropped the /s, and I didn't get the joke, consider me whooshed :-p
I am a bit confused, the only thing I've claimed is that making processes isn't necessarily something you can do because they use up non-negligible amounts of RAM. Sure, for a small static site this amount may not be a lot, but for most websites a hundred MB or more is the norm per tab. When browsers first started going multi-process memory usage ballooned because of the overhead, and while improvements are continually being made keeping everything in the same process would still be of significant benefit to memory usage.
Yes, a tab might 100s of MB of RAM. The question is how much more a tab would use by virtue of being a separate process vs not. Do you have a figure for this, and a reason a process spawn inherently requires a significant amount as a percentage of what browsers are using anyway?
