I hate it so much. So arbitrary and capricious. I would say this is currently the number one blocker for the web as a serious platform. And they're doing it on purpose.
I guess the policy is that tabs can use 100% of the available resources on low end devices, but only 10% of the available resources on high end devices.
I think the desktop policy might be better. In the tablets I've used, tabs sometimes get killed when I switch tabs and visit another website with a lot of ads. It's an annoying way to lose work in an unsubmitted form. It doesn't seem to happen for desktop.
Video editors are a big one. I've heard of people crashing a browser tab with Figma as well.
For data exploration tools it's very easy to want to use 4GB+ of memory. I found the limit cumbersome while working on financial tools. It usually comes up in internal tools where you reliably have a fast internet connection; it's harder to reach the limit for public-facing tools because there the slowness of sending 4GB+ to the browser is the more limiting factor.
The annoying part isn't just that the limit is there, but that you can't really handle it gracefully as the developer -- when the browser decides you've hit the limit, it may just replace the page with an error message.
It's one of our big barriers over at Figma. Creative tools in general hit this limit pretty quickly. For context, I was a very heavy user of Photoshop back in the day. Even a decade ago I remember hitting 20GB of active memory use for Photoshop.
Things get really big really quick, especially when you're storing uncompressed versions of raster elements in memory. To frame things in a different way, 4GB is 22 seconds of 1080p video if you're loading the raw frames into memory.
whatshisface|2 years ago
skybrian|2 years ago
vicktorium|2 years ago
games?
3D?
Editing?
have you tried forking chrome and increasing this limit?
paulgb|2 years ago
For data exploration tools it's very easy to want to use 4GB+ of memory. I found the limit cumbersome while working on financial tools. It usually comes up in internal tools where you reliably have a fast internet connection; it's harder to reach the limit for public-facing tools because there the slowness of sending 4GB+ to the browser is the more limiting factor.
The annoying part isn't just that the limit is there, but that you can't really handle it gracefully as the developer -- when the browser decides you've hit the limit, it may just replace the page with an error message.
jjcm|2 years ago
Things get really big really quick, especially when you're storing uncompressed versions of raster elements in memory. To frame things in a different way, 4GB is 22 seconds of 1080p video if you're loading the raw frames into memory.
KeplerBoy|2 years ago
amelius|2 years ago