how does 6+ perform with lots of open tabs?

Constant reloading. Quick, but still annoying.

 

Pretty sure the Safari reloading thing is a software issue and not a hardware issue.

Open web pages simply don't take up that much space in memory.

 

I am not sure this is the case, but assuming it is, it's baffling Apple hasn't nipped this in the bud, what with this now being their seventh iPhone...

There is another browser, called atom, that actually saves the pages onto your SSD. It's seamless, I don't notice it running slower than Safari, and I can have many dozen tabs open at once. The free version is limited to 6 tabs, the paid ($1.99) is unlimited.

I should say I haven;t used it on a 6 or a Plus, since I don't have either yet, but I prefer it over Safari on my 5S, which has constant tab reloads. I don't so much have an issue with reloads on wifi, but it's a shame to spend more of my data allotment on page reloads when out and about. I take the train to work, during which time I spend browsing the web and often streaming music.

 

How do you become a victim of tab reload?

whats a common thing that happens?

Like you start composing a blog post and switch to a diff tab and when you come back it reloaded and lost the text?

 

The iPhone 5 allowed apps to use about ~600 MB or the 1GB of RAM for applications. Let's just assume this is about the same on the 6/6+ give or take a bit.

Let's assume the app itself needs 100MB (which is incredibly generous) just to be open with no tabs. That leaves 500MB of memory for web pages in tabs.

The average web page size is about 1246kb in 2014. So, you could fit nearly 500 of them in memory. Let's assume there's some lack of efficiency there, but still, there is more than enough memory available to applications to have several tabs open without reloading them. Thus, someone made a decision on the software side to limit this.

It may also have to do with when your app goes to the background since it no longer has that memory access. In this case, the app would have to write the open tabs to disk (solid state storage, in this case) in order to preserve the content. This is likely what the app you described is doing and probably is not a feature Apple has implemented in Safari. Even so, this would still point toward a software issue and not a lack of hardware.

 

Once again, the Apple blinders are on. The RAM issue is true, there is no conspiracy. There is much more at play than what you mention here. You're not accounting for actual RAM usage from the app itself - just because a webpage is 1246k does not mean Safari is only going to use that much. In fact, it could be double or tripe per tab, etc.
Also, Macrumors by itself transfers 2.5MB of data and that is a very small webpage compared to others. Heck, you can starve a desktop of memory with modern webpages.
Also, you have to account for other app's memory usage - there's always processes starting stopping in iOS and I've seen it first hand. There's so much more at play than the obvious here.

 

Clearly you didn't read my post and decided to go on the attack anyway. I gave the app itself 100 MB of space before any tabs.

Desktop Safari, with no open tabs, uses about 70MB. The mobile optimized version should use less than that, but I'm being conservative and giving it 100.

Also, if you understand the definition of "average," then you understand this means that some web pages use less than the average and some use more. So, yes, I'm sure you can find web pages that use 10MB of space, but that's not the average case, and I doubt many users have multiple tabs with huge amounts of data.

But, let's go with 10MB to be even more conservative. Then let's triple that to be super conservative and say 30MB. Even at 30MB, you're talking about 16 tabs before the app is out of memory. And these tabs are extreme cases.

Let's also remember that Apple compresses data before putting it into memory, so raw storage versus raw download sizes is an extra conservative approach to begin with.

So, there are no "apple blinders" about this - it's not a hardware issue. It's a software issue. I concur it's a problem, I simply don't agree about the source of the problem. As a software engineer myself, I 100% guarantee you this can be solved from a software perspective without adding any RAM.

 

30-40 open tabs is ridiculous. So few would need this.

 

I am not disagreeing with you here. I am saying that, if it decidedly is NOT a RAM issue, what the heck is Apple doing not fixing the reloading?

I will add that the atom browser that I use balloons in size pretty quicklywhen tabs are open. I have never seen it close to 1GB, but I have seen hundreds of mb. So whatever it's saving is certainly more than ~1264kb a page. This is with maybe half a dozen to maybe a dozen tabs open at a time.

You can try the free version (if you care). Open max tabs (six for free) and go into settings and scroll down to the app to see how much storage space it's using. That storage space changes as you open and close various tabs. I rather love the app and was worth the $2 for sure. I actually came across it here by griping about tab reloads. Who says complaining gets you nowhere?

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That's a decent example.

I simply don't like the fact that I have to reload a page that I have already loaded once, especially on mobile internet. Losing some info that I've input has rarely been bothersome (for me).

 

Likely a simple answer - the number of people complaining about it is not sufficient to expend the resources changing it.

 

I don't really buy that, open web pages on desktops take up a lot of memory I don't see how ios would be magically different.

 

Damn, that's a lot of tabs. I can barely tolerate having five or six tabs open; that would drive me up the wall.

 

Also op what android device are you using with that many tabs? Also how does it handle? I've been wondering how android handles multiple tabs but I can't find much on it, sorry for being slightly off topic but I'm very curious.

 

I'd be happy with 4 or 5 tabs staying active reliably. I prefer Safari for all of it's useful syncing capabilities with my Mac. If they can fix it with better caching to disk, fine. But it certainly would have helped to have more ram as well. Not much point in whining about it now though. Just fix it Apple!

 

Nothing magical about it. It depends on the efficiency of the browser. Chrome definitely isn't that bad. Firefox is a memory hog.

Point being is this - in almost all of those cases - it's the browser doing things inefficiently that's eating memory, not the actual web page and its assets. Additionally desktop applications are built differently. For example, they keep some of your recent history in memory rather than reloading it when you hit the back button. The mobile browser does not. Desktop apps assume you're going to have tons of memory at this point, so comparing the architecture of a desktop browser to a mobile browser is an apples and oranges comparison.

In the end, you can always keep the web page and its assets in memory for only a slight premium above what the actual weight of the page is. It's basic computer science. Safari could be made more efficient so as to alleviate tab refreshing without adding more memory. There's no two ways about it, that's a cold, hard fact.

The wrong solution in computer science is to throw more hardware at a software optimization problem.

 

So how is it that android phones do none of this to the extent the iPhone does? My note 3 didnt. And why hasn't apple fixed it? Isn't the common thing to accuse android of not being optimized like ios?

I always here people say this is a software issue but it's never fixed. So many ios updates have come and gone and has NEVER been fixed or even improved. One constant in this problem is the PATHETIC amount of RAM apple sticks in their devices, after all this time and no improvement I would say its far more logical to accuse the one constant area where apple objectively lags behind rather than say "it's software".

 

on my Galaxy S3 it maxes out at 16 tabs it wont let me open a new one how are you getting 30-40?

 

You're now confusing hardware and software and cross-OS issues. Android doesn't do it because it seems Chrome is differently optimized to deal with this scenario. Having more RAM is always good, but with the small number of tabs it takes for this to start manifesting in iOS, you can rest assured the problem is in the software.

Simple cost/benefit calculation. There's not enough users complaining about this to justify Apple's cost to refactor the core of iOS Safari to deal with it.

No offense, but this line of thought stems from your lack of understanding of computer science. I do see logically why you think this, but in reality it doesn't work that way. Comparing hardware specs for Android devices to iOS devices is an extremely apples and oranges comparison.

iOS can be highly tailored at the OS level to the hardware because Apple controls all of it. On the Android side, the OS cannot be that well optimized because it has to support numerous hardware configurations, drivers, etc. Because of that, you *need* more horsepower in the form of RAM and CPU to accomplish the same level of performance. Additionally, a large percentage of Android is running Java, which is substantially more memory intensive than C and the C-derivatives running on iOS. The garbage collection alone in Java means a meaningful percentage of memory is tied up at all times. 1GB of RAM is a very substantial amount of memory given the software and hardware control that Apple has.

So, again, this situation can absolutely be substantially improved without going with the "just throw more hardware at it" solution.

 

Safari reloads tabs. Chrome does not.

 

That's not my experience on Android tablets. I even have one of the newest Samsung models with 2GB of RAM and it reloads pages constantly, and the browser is so darn slow that it's a serious irritation.

 

Well then instead of being condescending and vague explain to me why and how :

"Android doesn't do it because it seems Chrome is differently optimized to deal with this scenario. Having more RAM is always good, but with the small number of tabs it takes for this to start manifesting in iOS, you can rest assured the problem is in the software."

That is the case? Also not all android devices use chrome. Samsung comes with their own browser and so do many other phones. Instead of you people who insist that it's software coming and spouting the same thing, explain why it's software? How is software going to free up more memory if my phone is using 938 megabytes from safari And the OS alone ( as an example) and it only has around 1000 available?

 

You are in the minority to say the least. Apple is not going to fix just for people who want 30-40 tabs open.

Good Luck!