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Safari is consuming more ram than Chrome

M

macedes

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 30, 2008
21
11
I am using Safari and Chrome in parallel and I have noticed that Safari is consuming much more ram than chrome or Firefox.
i have only two tabs open and the safari browser is consuming over 7 GB of ram.

Do you have experienced the same?

My hardware: MacBookPro 16 M1Pro


Screenshot:
Bildschirmfoto 2022-05-24 um 10.21.32.png
 
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I've said this multiple times, with many screenshots, and people still don't believe me. Safari does some wild stuff from time to time with it's caching and handling of video content, etc so I'm sure running Parallels is blowing its mind. There's a lot of browsers that seem to handle the resources of Apple silicon better than Apple itself but the same can be said for other software as well.
 
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When I use Safari with 2 tabs it only consumes 1gb ram but I have Intel i5 iMac so maybe Safari is less efficient on m1. Update your mac to Monterey if it isn't already, it should help a bit.
 
Diehard Apple fans won't believe you...
Chrome is not the old Chrome, it's much better optimized now. I personally use Brave, and it works perfectly on M1 Air.

The problem is, some diehard fans refuse to accept facts. They think Chrome is the same Chrome from 2-3-4 years ago. If you don't like Google that's fine, just use Edge or Brave.
 
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quaresma said:
Diehard Apple fans won't believe you...
Chrome is not the old Chrome, it's much better optimized now. I personally use Brave, and it works perfectly on M1 Air.

The problem is, some diehard fans refuse to accept facts. They think Chrome is the same Chrome from 2-3-4 years ago. If you don't like Google that's fine, just use Edge or Brave.
Click to expand...
Yup, I 100% agree.

These same diehard apple fans will say, “oh it's not safari, it's the website!!!!”
 
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Does anyone have a fix for high ram usage in safari on m1 macs?

I have 10tabs open all fairly boring no videos just forums & my emails.

M1 pro 10cores, the total ram usage is 10GB with 4GB in cached & 1gb in swap...
 
Yes it seems to be much worse on my new m1 pro macbook pro (10cores 16gb ram)
I had a 16" i9 intel one before and it wasn't an issue.

I also use chrome but sadly the icloud password plugin only works on windows... didnt even now you could lock down a plugin.
 
Do you experience any performance issues or high memory pressure? If not, then what’s the problem?
 
dopeytree said:
Does anyone have a fix for high ram usage in safari on m1 macs?

I have 10tabs open all fairly boring no videos just forums & my emails.

The total ram usage is 10GB with 4GB in cached & 1gb in swap...
Click to expand...
Do you have a 16GB configuration? That's not abnormal. MacOS will use whatever RAM it has as cache in order to improve your performance. It'll also pre-empively compress RAM and/or also evict it to swap.

8GB machines manage RAM more "efficiently" (uses less RAM), but because of that, the actual performance is much worse.

FWIW, I sometimes keep 100-200 tabs open. At 200+ tabs, it's 8GB of swap, but the performance is fine.
 
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dopeytree said:
Does anyone have a fix for high ram usage in safari on m1 macs?

I have 10tabs open all fairly boring no videos just forums & my emails.

The total ram usage is 10GB with 4GB in cached & 1gb in swap...
Click to expand...
Take a look at the sites. Have you had those tabs open for a long period of time. I regularly see 2GB for forums.macrumors.com after a day or so. This is on Firefox and on Chrome. If I checked it would probably happen for Safari, too. Gmail often grows very large and some other sites.
 
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I will never understand having 100+ tabs open, much less how a user can manage and find the one they need quickly. Are they managed via tab groups? Are they always kept open for some reason? Is it a particular workflow that requires this?
 
WildSky said:
I will never understand having 100+ tabs open, much less how a user can manage and find the one they need quickly. Are they managed via tab groups? Are they always kept open for some reason? Is it a particular workflow that requires this?
Click to expand...

I routinely have close to hundred of tabs open when researching stuff. Different sources to compare and quote for example. Sure, it gets confusing, but still much better than having to find the links again from scratch.

Then again, I never noticed any problems with RAM and this kind of workflow. SSDs are faster than a browser tab animation. You can have thousands of tabs open without incurring any noticeable performance penalty if the software side of things is handled properly.
 
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leman said:
I routinely have close to hundred of tabs open when researching stuff. Different sources to compare and quote for example. Sure, it gets confusing, but still much better than having to find the links again from scratch.
Click to expand...
So typically they're unbookmarked tabs?
 
Significant Memory usage in Safari is generally due to overloading the RAM memory with heavy web pages and tabs. A few of the easiest ways to fix this error is to force quit the Safari browser, clear browser cache, and closed the less useful tabs.
 
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ISmileTech said:
Significant Memory usage in Safari is generally due to overloading the RAM memory with heavy web pages and tabs. A few of the easiest ways to fix this error is to force quit the Safari browser, clear browser cache, and closed the less useful tabs.
Click to expand...
Agreed but the problem is Safari not knowing how to manage this. I’ve had as little as three tabs open, one playing a YT video and the others browsing the web only to see a memory warning. Check the activity monitor and Safari has open multiple/a dozen cached instances a long with the main processes running. Hell, I got a memory warning error just chatting with Apple support ha. Not sure if it’s an HTML5 issue or what but Safari has no idea what to do with interactive pages such as YT, Twitch, HBO, Chat instances, etc. You can also tell because when watching a movie on say HBO, the cursor won’t hide itself in the UI in full screen and literally no other browser does this.
 
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often what really leaks memory is background tracking scripts and ads, these are mostly bad written code and only ever tested on chrome, I recommend adguard for safari, it works well. I never had ram issues with safari, unlike chrome that I had to install and tab discard extension to prevent it from stealing all the resources.
 
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Sheepish-Lord said:
Agreed but the problem is Safari not knowing how to manage this. I’ve had as little as three tabs open, one playing a YT video and the others browsing the web only to see a memory warning. Check the activity monitor and Safari has open multiple/a dozen cached instances a long with the main processes running. Hell, I got a memory warning error just chatting with Apple support ha. Not sure if it’s an HTML5 issue or what but Safari has no idea what to do with interactive pages such as YT, Twitch, HBO, Chat instances, etc. You can also tell because when watching a movie on say HBO, the cursor won’t hide itself in the UI in full screen and literally no other browser does this.
Click to expand...
Some of those web pages may be opening a lot of frames and doing a lot of crappy stuff with JavaScript and ad libraries. I do use Safari for my home machine and never get memory warnings like that. I regularly watch YT and have a couple of dozen web pages open without issue. If those scripts are exhausting some specific resources like heap(?) you could get an error even if you have enough memory.

There was a time when the M1 Airs first came out that I would get memory warnings but that turned out to be an issue with those machines and Big Sur that was fixed in a couple of months. It was not really tied to browser though.
 
jav6454 said:
Sounds about normal.
Click to expand...
Deffo not normal. They need better suspend tab code. I don't need them to all remain active.

Can have loads more open on steamdeck which has 16GB ram although using chrome.

All I would like is for it to work the same as it works on iphone & ipad.
 
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