additional technical details regarding "retained display lists"

Posted Jun 30, 2018 8:14 UTC (Sat) by ehiggs (subscriber, #90713)
In reply to: additional technical details regarding "retained display lists" by jpnp
Parent article: Firefox 61

Sounds like Jevon's Paradox:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

"""
n economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.
"""

As browsers become more efficient, then web developers see that they can afford to do more work and then they end up using more resources in aggregate.

additional technical details regarding "retained display lists"

Posted Jul 2, 2018 6:41 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I'm sure this is part of it.

But I think it's much more that browsers have added all sorts of things (web workers etc) to enable persistently executing pages, and have not spent much time in features to limit resource waste of behalf of the user.

More or less it seems like innovation in web development is driven by making convenient features for developers, and as a bit of an afterthought, improving security. Making things more comprehensible and usable for users is not really on the list. If I could see the potential problems with resource theft 20 years ago, surely someone within the world of the w3c, microsoft, google, mozilla etc could have spotted it in the time between then and now, but here we are today with cryptojacking as a thing that happens.