On news sites like Huffpost, Salon, Fark and even the Straight Dope if I stay on the site for any length of time without exiting and re-entering memory use for that website will eventually very often spiral to over a gigabyte just for that site bringing my system to a crawl and I have to close the thread down using ALT-CRT-DEL for the task manager to kill the thread. And God forbid if you click on a link that looks like a news story but is really a clickbait site the memory consumption goes into overdrive.
This behavior happens on both my PCs. One is an older Pentium with win 7 and 4 gigs of RAM and the newer one is an i3 with 16 gigs RAM running win 10. Both running latest version of Internet Explorer for that windows version. I’m assuming this is due to ad scripts but that’s just a guess. Does anyone else have these issues? It makes some sites almost unusable. Google Chrome does not have these issues as much but there are some look and feel aspects of IE I have gotten used to and would like to use it if possible for some things.
A few questions -
Why does this happen? I get there are scripts going on in the background but why this insane level of memory use? Why do these background processes just keep gobbling spiraling piles of memory? What the hell are they doing that requires this?
Is this behavior not common? If this is happening to other people you would think there would be more complaints. It’s a big PITA.
Will ad blockers stop this or better just to give up on IE entirely?
I experienced the same problem on one of those websites, so I created a filter in Adblock Plus blocking s.huffpost.com.
I suspect the problem is a combination of incompetence and arrogance. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” seems to be lost on a lot of companies, and they love filling their old, dialup-friendly websites with bloated garbage.
You’ve got part of this backwards. In the dial-up days, everybody knew that bandwidth was precious, so professional website designers typically tried to make fast-loading websites. Now, essentially everybody has much faster speeds, so the designers load up their sites with all sorts of bandwidth-wasting scripts, images, and videos. (Half of which are ads, stat-counters, or cookies.)
The result is that many websites don’t load any faster than they did 10 years ago.
It’s definitely best to give up IE completely. It has sucky performance. Go with Chrome or Firefox or Opera + an adblocker (uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus). It’s mostly the ads and tracking services that slow down your browsing, not to mention possible malware.
If you absolutely have to stick with IE, at least switch to Edge (much faster) and something like http://www.edgeadblock.com/ or a “hosts file based ad blocking” solution – Google for them.