safari uses way too much memory

macbook air m1, ventura 13.4

safari uses a lot more battery recently, and chrome is much more efficient

but it has recently come to a point where it's more than double of chromium

here with only 3 tabs open: macrumors.com, macg.co , reddit , it consumes 4GB of ram ! where chrome consumes only 1.5

is it normal? how much does yours use ? what could be the issue? and is there a way to reset safari ?

Love-hate 🍏 relationship said:

macbook air m1, ventura 13.4

safari uses a lot more battery recently, and chrome is much more efficient

but it has recently come to a point where it's more than double of chromium

here with only 3 tabs open: macrumors.com, macg.co , reddit , it consumes 4GB of ram ! where chrome consumes only 1.5

is it normal? how much does yours use ? what could be the issue? and is there a way to reset safari ?

Click to expand...

Safari and Chrome and others all use substantial amounts of RAM. Some more than others but none really do a great job in limiting the amount of RAM used. I believe Opera at one time (maybe still does) have some controls you can put in place.

Just a general statement -
MacOS could help out in controlling app behavior where RAM is concerned but perhaps at a cost to performance.
Applications such as Safari should be able to put some controls in place or allow the user to make limitations but that too would cause perhaps performance degredation.
Websites who are the real villain here are not about to change for anyone unless they get a dramatic drop in visitors.

Love-hate 🍏 relationship said:

with only 3 tabs open: macrumors.com, macg.co , reddit , it consumes 4GB of ram ! where chrome consumes only 1.5

Opening the browsers with the exact same web pages what do you see?

HDFan said:

Opening the browsers with the exact same web pages what do you see?

Sorry I don't understand your question, what do you mean by "see"?

phrehdd said:

Safari and Chrome and others all use substantial amounts of RAM. Some more than others but none really do a great job in limiting the amount of RAM used. I believe Opera at one time (maybe still does) have some controls you can put in place.

Just a general statement -
MacOS could help out in controlling app behavior where RAM is concerned but perhaps at a cost to performance.
Applications such as Safari should be able to put some controls in place or allow the user to make limitations but that too would cause perhaps performance degredation.
Websites who are the real villain here are not about to change for anyone unless they get a dramatic drop in visitors.

Click to expand...

Doesn't explain why safari uses 2-3* as much memory as chrome though...I mean 4Gb for 3 sites ?

Safari uses 1,9 Go ± 0,5 over here for those 3 tabs.

einsteinbqat said:

Safari uses 1,9 Go ± 0,5 over here fo those 3 tabs.

Thanks

I just reset safari , which btw was a pain in the arse , and even more so on IOS .

With chrome you simply press a button and it resets it all, on safari you gotta do a lot of ****. Anyway

It now consumes way less , around 1.2gb (you might wanna do the reset as well, could help ! )

No idea what caused it, "it always work" my ass , when it doesn't work you can't debug it , and fixing the issues is complicated thanks to apple not providing you simple access to reset , cache deletion, etc .

I've never had any issue like this over 5y of chrome usage ! Blows my mind

And still, surprisingly enough, chromium and chrome have gotten soooo good at memory management (since months/last year) better than safari for sure. I hate to see everyone around claiming how less resources safari consumes whilst it's just not true , but apple is a religion after all sadly

Love-hate 🍏 relationship said:

Doesn't explain why safari uses 2-3* as much memory as chrome though...I mean 4Gb for 3 sites ?

I certainly won't challenge your experience with Safari but it would be of worth noting that there was a time when Chrome was a bigger offender than Safari. No matter as the problem is still the same across the board when browsers harvest websites that are happy to eat up a ridiculous amount of RAM.