When Your Browser Uses More RAM Than Your OS

I really enjoy the user experience of Arc. The minimalistic design as well as its keyboard-centered approach have kept me as a user. Even after The Browser Company announced they would not actively be working on new features, I was still not looking to go back to Chrome immediately. My workflow in Arc is just something I didn't want to give up that fast.

However, I have noticed that my MacBook's battery life was going down significantly over the past months.

Today, I was looking on my system for a caffeinate process that I wanted to kill. But what I found instead was mind boggling.

After QEMU, which runs Linux VMs and is necessary for Rancher Desktop, almost all memory-hungry processes were related to Arc.

I wrote a little one-liner in nushell to figure out how much memory exactly Arc was using:

ps | where name == 'Arc' or name =~ 'Browser' | get mem | math sum

The result: 7.5 Gigabyte.

7.5 GB to run a browser with a handful of tabs! That is insanity. I actually restarted Arc earlier today. It's not like I was playing 20 YouTube videos simultaneously.

In any case, it's time to move on and find a new browser. I'll be looking for something that can match Arc's clean interface, but without the memory bloat.