3 ms·

It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?

by hanoz 7y ago

eropple 7y ago
It was, anecdotally, faster-feeling until maybe a year and a half ago. The lack of sufficient parallelization meant that Firefox would feel sluggish and constantly freeze at the UI layer from a misbehaving website. I switched back around then, because now it's fantastic.
- dnautics 7y ago
  Hm I have a different anecdote... Although chrome was way faster when it first came out, I switched off of chrome when writing the wrong JavaScript in chrome would cause Linux to lock up, and Firefox was sufficiently fast to not suck anymore. That was about six years ago.
zerkten 7y ago
The cost was huge, but Firefox is much more competitive than it was. Chrome was faster for a pretty long time and was heavily marketed. It was bundled with lots of common utilities on Windows. Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past. It's amazing how just a few years pass and the next wave of developers are oblivious to what came before. My move to the latest (quantum?) Firefox has been beset by horrific energy use problems on macOS. Those have only just been fixed, but things are much better now. I hope the FF team keep their focus because with Microsoft and Opera giving up on their engines we need Mozilla more than ever.
- tekknik 7y ago
  > Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past. Not all developers. In fact I remember quite a few meetings where I couldn’t convince product that Safari and Firefox should be supported and ended up leaving the meeting yelling “Fine I’ll support them myself”. To this day I still test in all 3 hoping one day I can stop testing in Chrome.
jimclegg 7y ago
Chrome is glorified spyware, simple truth. When $GOOG gets squeezed, they always find new ways to use your data for commercial purposes.

It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?

by hanoz 7y ago

It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?

It was, anecdotally, faster-feeling until maybe a year and a half ago. The lack of sufficient parallelization meant that Firefox would feel sluggish and constantly freeze at the UI layer from a misbehaving website. I switched back around then, because now it's fantastic.

dnautics 7y ago
Hm I have a different anecdote... Although chrome was way faster when it first came out, I switched off of chrome when writing the wrong JavaScript in chrome would cause Linux to lock up, and Firefox was sufficiently fast to not suck anymore. That was about six years ago.

zerkten 7y ago

The cost was huge, but Firefox is much more competitive than it was. Chrome was faster for a pretty long time and was heavily marketed. It was bundled with lots of common utilities on Windows. Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past. It's amazing how just a few years pass and the next wave of developers are oblivious to what came before. My move to the latest (quantum?) Firefox has been beset by horrific energy use problems on macOS. Those have only just been fixed, but things are much better now. I hope the FF team keep their focus because with Microsoft and Opera giving up on their engines we need Mozilla more than ever.

tekknik 7y ago
> Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past. Not all developers. In fact I remember quite a few meetings where I couldn’t convince product that Safari and Firefox should be supported and ended up leaving the meeting yelling “Fine I’ll support them myself”. To this day I still test in all 3 hoping one day I can stop testing in Chrome.

jimclegg 7y ago

Chrome is glorified spyware, simple truth. When $GOOG gets squeezed, they always find new ways to use your data for commercial purposes.