# Surviving WhatsApp Web



## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 23, 2018)

Hi, 

I would like to share with you the only viable solution I found to use 
WhatsApp web and have a browser almost always  working. 
This thread is a companion to this other one that shows how to stabilize Chromium.

My solution is:
1] Use Chromium as regular borwser and open all hundreds tabs
you need to keep open, there. 

2] Start Firefox and run into it *ONLY* *Whatsapp*, than forget you have
Firefox up, just consider it to be a special purpose Whatsapp application. 

I tested all the day of yesterday, WhatsApp never crashed and, AFAICsay 
Firefox did not eat too much memory, I see two processes with 350M. Stable.

Chomium worked all the day. And occasionally hanged, as usual on some
specific pages. But no problem, kill that tab and reload. It will reload correctly
with very high probability. 

RATIONALE:
1] Don't use Firefox as default browser, it is superfast, and personally 
i like it, but it has some problems with memory management. 
2] Don't use Chromium for WhatsApp web, it hangs super frequently there.
3] I tried other browsers,especially Iridium, but since last package version
of Chromium then hang rate of Iridium and Chromium is now comparable. 
4] I prefer to stay with "popular browser" because I am doing web development
for large part of my days so I need absolutely to see pages as a large chunk
of people is seeing them.


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## aragats (Mar 23, 2018)

I do use Firefox as a default browser, and yes, never had a problem with WhatsApp.
However, today I discovered that FF refuses to display certain HTML5 videos (h264). Not sure whether that happened with the recent update to 59.0.1...


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 24, 2018)

aragats said:


> I do use Firefox as a default browser, and .....



Have you observed issues in memory management using FF ? 

If I remember well my problem with FF was: 
1] I open many windows and tabs, and use them 
2] At some point memory gets full and swap begins to work
3] So I start to kill many windows and tabs, but Firefox does not
free memory untill I fully kill the application. 

*] There are some info about memory management in FF pkg-info, 
but there is not direction to do any fix, e.g. 
how to install mozjemalloc ? => After a while i gave up, but it is a pity
because FF is really fast.

IMO FreeBSD foundation should invest some money into having
1-2 popular browser fully working in FreeBSD. I may suggest
Firefox ESR, for a long run investment. 
[hey, maybe they do already it ;P ]


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 24, 2018)

Highly unlikely a not-for-profit organization calling out for funds is giving money to another not-for-profit organization also calling out for funding.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 24, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Highly unlikely a not-for-profit organization calling out for funds is giving money to another not-for-profit organization also calling out for funding.



umm, I don't mean to give FreeBSD foundation money to Mozilla, (even because I already donate also to Mozilla) I mean FreeBSD foundation could hire a programmer to stabilize at least one popular browser to work well in FreeBSD. 

P.S. I am completely ignorant on the internal working of FreeBSD foundation so I may have suggested something completely nonsensical.


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 25, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti FreeBSD is not an application development company and what people they do pay to work there are not sufficient as it is due to lack of funds.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 25, 2018)

drhowarddrfine , I am not convinced by your argument. If "XEN xxx" can be submitted  as a Google Summer of Code project funded mentored by FreeBSD. Then, also "harden XXXX browser for FreeBSD" could be.


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## aragats (Mar 25, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti said:


> Have you observed issues in memory management using FF ?
> 
> If I remember well my problem with FF was:
> 1] I open many windows and tabs, and use them
> ...


That happened to me a lot in the pas, however, when Firefox has changed significantly starting from version 57, I don't see serious issues with it.
At my workplace I use it every day with ~20 tabs open. However, as I mentioned, it have issues with certain videos (rarely though) and Google maps is always in "light" mode, refuses to switch to "full".
At home I use Palemoon, which, IMO, is much better, but like you mentioned, Nicola Mingotti , sometimes it's better «to stay with "popular browser"» for this or that reason.


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## drhowarddrfine (Mar 25, 2018)

Nicola Mingotti Google Summer of Code is funded by Google and is a Google project to support open source software. If you have information that FreeBSD contributes money to it, I've not seen it and it's not on the link you supplied.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 25, 2018)

drhowarddrfine, you are right, what i wrote is inaccurate. I will correct right now. It seems Google is paying, FreeBSD is mentoring only.

The point anyway remains, F.F. could mentor a web browser stabilization project IMO.

I guess the only public source you can see the FreeBSD economical situation are the financial documents, see here.  They are useful to have an idea.

CAVEAT.
I am not an accountant, but I see there would be the resources to found  $6,000, even from the FreeBSD foundation.


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## ronaldlees (Mar 26, 2018)

I think the Foundation has stuck to its mission statement for the lifetime of the project, plus or minus a few excursions in the distant past. They are interested in the kernel and base distribution, and consider everything else to be a third party port.  This third party definition includes even the implementation of a GUI interface like X (although there was a one-time excursion).  

The main emphasis for FreeBSD is as a server, and I doubt that is going to change.  It's not a matter of money.  It's a matter of philosophy.  Some other OS (say  - Debian) may include a larger-than-base distribution, a GUI, and have its developers working on IceWeasel (mainly that is just to rebrand it) - but even they provide most of  the software via third party ports.

Part of the Unix philosophy is doing "one-thing-well" - and the Foundation has chosen its thing. They're doing pretty well with it.


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## Nicola Mingotti (Mar 26, 2018)

ronaldlees I see your point.

By one side I recognize the idea and admire the consistency of focusing on the "base" system.

On the other side, my impression is that the browser will be X Window of the next decade. A large chunk of sofware is moving there: mail clients, spreadsheets, editors, chats, drawing programs (not always, or not still, with mirable results we may say; ok, agreed)

=> If they made an exception for (say) X Windows, another exception is probably worth for the Browser. too much important, in my opinion.


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