Scrolling taking huge CPU resources

[Deanodarlo]

Just a general observation. I wondered why in this day and age some websites take a large amount of CPU simply to scroll a page? For instance:

http://www.planetf1.com/

I think it's mainly ones with multiple layers or are graphic intensive.

Can't it be sorted out? Surely browsers should have hardware scrolling or something linked to the graphics card. It feels like Windows does without hardware acceleration and before you install graphics drivers.

Disabling smooth scrolling in supporting browsers helps a lot, but webpages taking massive CPU resources just to scroll up and down (also some flash heavy ones are CPU intensive just for viewing static pages!) is puzzling and annoying on laptops. Kills battery life and causes fans to spins up - just for moving around a bit of graphics on the screen.

On dual core CPU's it isn't as much of a problem, but I was surfing on a single core machine and 2.2Ghz Athlon 64 wasn't enough to SCROLL some web pages without massive slowdowns!!!! That's just silly!

Is it just progress? Or webpages and browsers abusing and taking for granted the power of modern CPU's?

 

[Deanodarlo]

Having a read, it just appears Windows GDI takes a lot of CPU usage to scroll under certain situations and browsers, like when it has to update all lines frequently using silky smooth scrolling.

They may be trying to sort it out in Windows 7 and future browsers with Direct2D, shifting rendering to the graphics card which is better at this sort of thing.

 

[Emulex]

use chrome. disable flash. let us know how it goes.

if you are swapping to disk due to ram, that's another problem

 

[Albatross]

It`s a new Firefox feature...

 

[Emulex]

engadget is a killer for old browsers (ie8) on old cpu's - yet the sister site gizmodo is fast.

(with flash disabled!) - go javascript!