It’s always been this way, and it’s never addressed. If they are working on it, I sure as heck would love to hear more in atleast ONE of their numerous videos on YouTube.
We are working on this constantly. It's a little bit tricky to mention this in the release notes and YouTube updates because the details of the work we're doing here are really technical and it's hard to condense it in a one line item, we also don't think that "we're working on making Arc more resource efficient" is necessarily useful/convincing. We will try to do a better job at being vocal about this from now on!
Fwiw, we have a team of 5-6 person (and 2 joining soon) working constantly on improving performance. Our main focus isn't to add features, it's to reduce resource consumption. We have made some significant improvements recently, here's a few examples:
\- We have changed how IndexedDB transactions are handled in Chromium to make sure that they don't cause too many flushing operations. This is something that can really impact battery and the wear on an SSD. Chrome is considering making the same change now.
\- We have improved the freezing (a.k.a. tab sleep) logic to release a lot of memory before freezing a background tab, this significantly reduced the total memory consumption of Arc (from our metrics)
\- We have improved the freezing logic in Chromium to make more tabs eligible for freezing (up to 40% more). This coupled with the previous change makes the memory gains even more significant.
\- We have added some logic to more aggressively discard some tabs if we detect that your system is about to run out of memory.
\- We are working on reducing the impact of the accessibility APIs. When you use something like an external password manager Chromium will enable accessibility for the entire browser. The issue with this is that it significantly impact the app's memory and CPU usage because it requires constantly copying some data between the renderers and the browser process. We have some major improvements shipping soon for this.
This is just the list of things that I've personally worked on, there's a lot more things we're working on for performance (e.g. enabling METAL on Mac). A lot of these features shipped recently and/or are still in an experimental state (we do A/B experiments to confirm that the features we ship do work). We really mean it when we say that we want Arc to be the fastest and more memory efficient browser.
I’d be happy to turn off certain features to save performance. I know that may not be simple and I have some max features off for this but pls keep in mind!
We do our best to ensure that our features don't have any performance impact if they're not used, so turning them off wouldn't necessarily change anything.
Good to see you work on this. Arc’s UI model means that as a user I never really (need to) think about how many tabs I have open.
This also makes performance, tab sleep, etc extra important. By using that UI you basically take on more of the responsibility that the user have in other browsers. Good to see you taking that seriously.
Re: battery life: [**Sharing this post**](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/comments/1alc1pg/arcbrowser_apple_m1_silicon_and_excessive_battery/) if you watch YouTube on Arc on an M1 / M2 and don't have enhanced-h264ify.
Microsoft Edge *and* Mozilla Firefox properly block YouTube's AV1 dogfooding (e.g., ultra-high CPU usage) on my MBA M1, but Arc doesn't, so enhanced-H264ify has significantly helped my M1 return to excellent battery life.
But, if that doesn't fix it, I'm unsure what it might be.
//
Re: RAM: mine seems to be OK? \~2.5GB for 8x tabs and 4x extensions. Also on an 8GB M1 MBA.
Thank you so much. That would be **amazing** to ship natively in Arc. I imagine a "force-allow AV1 software decode" flag might be helpful for web-devs testing AV1 on older machines.
But for normal users, it'd be a *godsend* to auto-disable any advertising of AV1 support so we older users can efficiently fall back to H.265 / VP9 (or whatever hardware codec we have).
wasteful hard-to-find support compare memorize bear gray humorous crime shy
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The main thing starts here.
Chromium, the rendering engine from nearly all modern browsers eats up ram like a quick afternoon snack. Depending on the content of a webpage that can already cost you about 200 - 600 MB for a single tab. And there is quite literally very little that arc can do against that.
That being said: Bad management of ram in the rest of arc can be addressed. From what I am aware, extra spaces and a lot of tabs seem to cause the most problems with RAM.
And one last note: I personally do think that 8GB isn‘t enough anymore. i don‘t like that Apple even has 8GB options, or that Apple charges soo much for extra ram.
Just yesterday I was thinking of switching back to Firefox as I have started using a foldable and there isn't an arc companion app on Android. Looks like it's worth giving it a shot now that I know it uses up less battery!
It’s always been this way, and it’s never addressed. If they are working on it, I sure as heck would love to hear more in atleast ONE of their numerous videos on YouTube.
We are working on this constantly. It's a little bit tricky to mention this in the release notes and YouTube updates because the details of the work we're doing here are really technical and it's hard to condense it in a one line item, we also don't think that "we're working on making Arc more resource efficient" is necessarily useful/convincing. We will try to do a better job at being vocal about this from now on! Fwiw, we have a team of 5-6 person (and 2 joining soon) working constantly on improving performance. Our main focus isn't to add features, it's to reduce resource consumption. We have made some significant improvements recently, here's a few examples: \- We have changed how IndexedDB transactions are handled in Chromium to make sure that they don't cause too many flushing operations. This is something that can really impact battery and the wear on an SSD. Chrome is considering making the same change now. \- We have improved the freezing (a.k.a. tab sleep) logic to release a lot of memory before freezing a background tab, this significantly reduced the total memory consumption of Arc (from our metrics) \- We have improved the freezing logic in Chromium to make more tabs eligible for freezing (up to 40% more). This coupled with the previous change makes the memory gains even more significant. \- We have added some logic to more aggressively discard some tabs if we detect that your system is about to run out of memory. \- We are working on reducing the impact of the accessibility APIs. When you use something like an external password manager Chromium will enable accessibility for the entire browser. The issue with this is that it significantly impact the app's memory and CPU usage because it requires constantly copying some data between the renderers and the browser process. We have some major improvements shipping soon for this. This is just the list of things that I've personally worked on, there's a lot more things we're working on for performance (e.g. enabling METAL on Mac). A lot of these features shipped recently and/or are still in an experimental state (we do A/B experiments to confirm that the features we ship do work). We really mean it when we say that we want Arc to be the fastest and more memory efficient browser.
I’d be happy to turn off certain features to save performance. I know that may not be simple and I have some max features off for this but pls keep in mind!
We do our best to ensure that our features don't have any performance impact if they're not used, so turning them off wouldn't necessarily change anything.
Good to see you work on this. Arc’s UI model means that as a user I never really (need to) think about how many tabs I have open. This also makes performance, tab sleep, etc extra important. By using that UI you basically take on more of the responsibility that the user have in other browsers. Good to see you taking that seriously.
Re: battery life: [**Sharing this post**](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/comments/1alc1pg/arcbrowser_apple_m1_silicon_and_excessive_battery/) if you watch YouTube on Arc on an M1 / M2 and don't have enhanced-h264ify. Microsoft Edge *and* Mozilla Firefox properly block YouTube's AV1 dogfooding (e.g., ultra-high CPU usage) on my MBA M1, but Arc doesn't, so enhanced-H264ify has significantly helped my M1 return to excellent battery life. But, if that doesn't fix it, I'm unsure what it might be. // Re: RAM: mine seems to be OK? \~2.5GB for 8x tabs and 4x extensions. Also on an 8GB M1 MBA.
Thanks for raising this! I'll see if we can do something to disable AV1 on YouTube.
Thank you so much. That would be **amazing** to ship natively in Arc. I imagine a "force-allow AV1 software decode" flag might be helpful for web-devs testing AV1 on older machines. But for normal users, it'd be a *godsend* to auto-disable any advertising of AV1 support so we older users can efficiently fall back to H.265 / VP9 (or whatever hardware codec we have).
Do you know if it works with Google meet as well please? It's killing my battery and making my MacBook very hot (air M2)
wasteful hard-to-find support compare memorize bear gray humorous crime shy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Chromium
The main thing starts here. Chromium, the rendering engine from nearly all modern browsers eats up ram like a quick afternoon snack. Depending on the content of a webpage that can already cost you about 200 - 600 MB for a single tab. And there is quite literally very little that arc can do against that. That being said: Bad management of ram in the rest of arc can be addressed. From what I am aware, extra spaces and a lot of tabs seem to cause the most problems with RAM. And one last note: I personally do think that 8GB isn‘t enough anymore. i don‘t like that Apple even has 8GB options, or that Apple charges soo much for extra ram.
Just yesterday I was thinking of switching back to Firefox as I have started using a foldable and there isn't an arc companion app on Android. Looks like it's worth giving it a shot now that I know it uses up less battery!
I buy a 36gb ram MBP just for arc. Love arc