Comment Re:Who cares if Edge uses a lot of RAM? (Score 1) 62
> Why would I want to sacrifice performance by restricting how much memory my browser is using?
Your question presupposes a couple of things:
1. You are actually using Edge as your web browser. For a lot of people this is not the case.
2. Your computer actually has the necessary amount of physical RAM. On a lot of low-end systems (especially cheap laptops) this is not the case.
There are people out there who were scammed into trying to run Windows Ten on a system with 16GB of RAM. (I've even seen one system that had Windows Ten and only 8GB of physical RAM. I was appalled.) Used-computer sellers have been refurbishing/renewing secondhand computers that are appropriate for running Windows Seven, and of course they've been putting Ten on them instead, and a lot of budget-minded people are buying them like that. This results in a LOT of page swapping. Like, really a lot, even by nineties standards. Under these circumstances, a simple action like trying to access the Start menu, can easily lead to a 10-minute wait while virtual memory is shuffled around. It doesn't help that the virtual memory system in Windows Phone/Eight/Ten/Eleven is even more pants than the one in NT/XP/Vista/Seven. But when even the OS itself won't fit in physical RAM and then you're trying to run memory-hungry things like Edge, while simultanously there are endless system updates downloading and data indexing and whatnot forever happening in the background, a better VM system would only help so much; there's going to be a lot of swapping regardless. The only way to make performance any worse than that, would be to put the swap file in the cloud.
Eleven has somewhat more realistic specs for what your computer should have in order to run it, and it refuses to install if the system is too low-end. As near as I can tell, Eleven doesn't actually need more RAM than Ten needs; but it *knows* that it needs it, and so it is more realistic about telling people their systems don't have enough system resources and can't upgrade to the new version. If Ten had been similarly realistic about this, a lot more people would still be using Seven, or else they'd have spent more on their computers and got ones that could handle Ten better.
Your question presupposes a couple of things:
1. You are actually using Edge as your web browser. For a lot of people this is not the case.
2. Your computer actually has the necessary amount of physical RAM. On a lot of low-end systems (especially cheap laptops) this is not the case.
There are people out there who were scammed into trying to run Windows Ten on a system with 16GB of RAM. (I've even seen one system that had Windows Ten and only 8GB of physical RAM. I was appalled.) Used-computer sellers have been refurbishing/renewing secondhand computers that are appropriate for running Windows Seven, and of course they've been putting Ten on them instead, and a lot of budget-minded people are buying them like that. This results in a LOT of page swapping. Like, really a lot, even by nineties standards. Under these circumstances, a simple action like trying to access the Start menu, can easily lead to a 10-minute wait while virtual memory is shuffled around. It doesn't help that the virtual memory system in Windows Phone/Eight/Ten/Eleven is even more pants than the one in NT/XP/Vista/Seven. But when even the OS itself won't fit in physical RAM and then you're trying to run memory-hungry things like Edge, while simultanously there are endless system updates downloading and data indexing and whatnot forever happening in the background, a better VM system would only help so much; there's going to be a lot of swapping regardless. The only way to make performance any worse than that, would be to put the swap file in the cloud.
Eleven has somewhat more realistic specs for what your computer should have in order to run it, and it refuses to install if the system is too low-end. As near as I can tell, Eleven doesn't actually need more RAM than Ten needs; but it *knows* that it needs it, and so it is more realistic about telling people their systems don't have enough system resources and can't upgrade to the new version. If Ten had been similarly realistic about this, a lot more people would still be using Seven, or else they'd have spent more on their computers and got ones that could handle Ten better.