11 ms·

Chrome 80 Is 30% Slower Than Chrome 75

282 points by leeoniya 7y ago

tartoran 7y ago
Perfect timing to switch browsers!
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Firefox is even worse on DOM microbenchmarks and in many others. It really only shines in WASM performance. [1] It's unlikely that you will notice the difference anyway, few websites manipulate that many DOM elements at interactive rates. Those would be much better off with Canvas, which is also way slower on Firefox. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-80-benchmarks&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-8...
  - leeoniya 7y ago
    > This round of tests was under an Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot in my experience, both browsers performed very differently under Windows than under Linux (Manjaro). both mozilla and google clearly spend more time optimizing for the overwhelmingly more common user (Windows).
    - gridlockd 7y ago
      In my experience, these differences I mentioned exist on Windows as well, I just don't have any other numbers readily at hand.
- azhenley 7y ago
  Any suggestions? Brave comes to mind but it seems to have some controversy around it.
  - enumjorge 7y ago
    Firefox?
  - zelly 7y ago
    Brave is Chromium with a different settings page.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      Wrong: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... -- and that is just what we strip and stub. We add other value, but in any case, your "... with a different settings page" statement is on its face false.
  - eganist 7y ago
    The only controversy around Brave is around Eich and his own personal beliefs. But honestly, if you can get past that, the team backing it is one of the strongest and most pro-user browser teams today. I'm particularly biased in favor of their security engineering. That said, I still prefer Firefox because Firefox isn't Blink.
    - TimTheTinker 7y ago
      Is there still controversy surrounding Eich? I thought (hoped?) that was over years ago.
      - eganist 7y ago
        People dig it up from time to time on Twitter.
        101404 7y ago
        Scary times we live in.
      - 7y ago
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I spent an hour yesterday with two different websites trying to place an order on Firefox (to name and shame, CVS and shutterfly). I eventually gave up and used Chrome to place an order, but sent a note telling CVS that they lost my business because their website is broken on Firefox. Please, more people switch to Firefox. Chrome is breaking the internet.
  - Scarbutt 7y ago
    Is likely they know this and the costs of supporting firefox doesn't outweigh the benefits for them.
    - diag 7y ago
      What's the benefit of breaking services for a subset of your customers? I can't think of any.
      - snazz 7y ago
        They’re not intentionally breaking anything, they’re just making it work exclusively with Chromium by not testing under Firefox. It saves them time and money.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Something I realized recently is that all of these sites have analytics. They can see exactly what percentage of their users are on Firefox, and that will directly drive their dev priorities. Using Firefox isn't just a symbolic gesture; it's a direct vote in its favor.
    - dexen 7y ago
      >all of these sites have analytics. The analytics is most likely blocked by common adblock rules. And present-day Firefox users are quite likely to be advanced users, running adblock. Thus Firefox ends up being under-represented in the analytics.
- sdegutis 7y ago
  I generally use Safari for everything and Chrome+Safari+Firefox when developing. When on Mac, Safari just feels the smoothest and seems lightest on battery.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    I actually tried Safari last night (tried it for a day or two a couple of months ago as well). Is it just me or has everything about the extensions changed? They're only available from the App store? I tried to install Bitwarden but got sent to download the desktop app. And overall the extension landscape looks highly bleak. What are the recommended adblockers? I found Ghostery Lite (which according to the reviews seems quite disappointing) and a number of paid adblockers... From my test some while back there at least seemed to be a decent number of extensions out there but now it's different. Why? Edit: The Bitwarden extension seems to have been installed automatically along with the desktop app.
    - spurgu 7y ago
      And re: extensions in the App store, it doesn't seem to have a search function...
    - sdegutis 7y ago
      I don't use any Safari extensions. Regarding ad blockers, my solution has just been to stop using the internet so much. I almost exclusively use it for work now. So I run into almost no websites with ads. I heartily recommend going internet free except during work hours, and using the library for the rest. It's been such an amazing life improvement for us, we wish that on everyone.
      - spurgu 7y ago
        Had you said that 6 months (or even 6 days) ago I would've laughed it off but right now I actually agree. Laughing foremost because I'd certainly be asking the wrong guy as I'd expect most HN guys to be power users. Not laughing because I recognize the huge potential of waste of time the internet brings along, that I hadn't really seriously considered until recently, had just figured it's half necessary to keep myself up to speed with things. We really don't need to be up to speed with things, outside of work at least, and if work is stressing us to the point where it becomes uncomfortable we should simply just change our work. I do however like to be efficient in whatever I do so I would still like a convenient way of browsing the web, but... in the big picture it's not that important, especially if you leave out the time consuming stuff. Then it's mostly looking up stuff, which you can do using whatever tools. In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it. For work I simply use Chrome and will keep it that way. Simple, easy, compatible, not fighting the mainstream. For private browsing though I would prefer to use something more.. personal. Brave works fine, currently trying out Cliqz. And I've tried out Next and Qutebrowser the last two days. Being a geek/ADHD I guess. There are more important things in life. Meditation helps. So does sailing. And not ranting on HN.
azhenley 7y ago
Would be interesting to see this graph for all releases of Chrome. Honestly, I'd love to see visualizations of benchmarks like this for all big open source projects!
warpech 7y ago
The chart is messed up... Bonus mess points for choosing 1 instead of 0 as the starting poing on the vertical axis. My best guess to understand it is: - On the horizontal axis, we have consecutive Chrome releases. - On the vertical axis, we have total time of benchmark execution, relatively to Chrome 75 The source of the data is the "js-framework-benchmark"[0] run in a controlled environment in Chrome[1] [0]: https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark [1]: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2020/table_chrome_80.html https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2020/table...
- cl3misch 7y ago
  If the y axis is relative benchmark time, it has to start at 1.
  - warpech 7y ago
    Why? What if Chrome 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 were faster than 75? The line needs space to go down.
    - cl3misch 7y ago
      It would go down if the data point lay there.
      - warpech 7y ago
        Fair enough :)
  - davrosthedalek 7y ago
    While the data has to start at 1 (or 100%), the axis absolutely does not.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    What happens during the first second of time before reaching 1?
aj7 7y ago
And I bet it still doesn’t show Captchas all the time.
ajross 7y ago
So... a meta point: this is another example of a submitted story that absolutely flies up the rankings, currently sitting right at the top of HN after 20 minutes, despite no particular reason to be there. It's not a rigorous test, there's no data on other browsers or earlier versions, it's a github issue on one particular js/DOM benchmark detailing a likely regression. There aren't any details I can see on what hardware is tested. Even if you wanted to start researching chrome performance, this is a bad place to start. So why is it up so high after just a few minutes and 54 upvotes?
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I think the number of comments factors in, and maybe even viewership. It also seems like the rate of upvotes matters; I've seen single-digit posts rise to the front page. For better or worse the algorithm seems to prioritize posts that people are interested in, not necessarily posts that people have indicated to be high-quality.
  - keanzu 7y ago
    There's a 'overheated discussion detector' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.
- meredydd 7y ago
  A reliable way for an article do do well on social media is to be fun to argue about, or to be supporting evidence in a broader ongoing argument. In this case, there is a broad ongoing argument about Google and its products [jumping the shark/being evil]. That argument is so much fun that, as I write this, almost every single top-level comment in this thread is a salvo in that argument, only tenuously connected to the OP. This article is just a convenient place to have the argument. (I have a personal learning experience here: The first article of mine that hit the HN front page was a writeup of a PyCon talk entitled "To Make the World Better, Remove Some Javascript from it"[0]. It also shot to the top within minutes, and was [defensibly] flagged off the front page very quickly, because the title alone immediately turned it into a place to argue about JS [not] being evil, rather than discuss the Python-to-Javascript compiler I was talking about. Suffice it to say that subsequent articles have been more modestly titled!) [0] https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk
moneromoney 7y ago
Instead of improving the browser, Google team wastes their time to find a way to stop uBlock Origin and other AdBlockers. However, very soon they will face competition from Microsoft, because they also switched to Chromium Engine, so they will not have any compatibility issues anymore and can improve their browser much faster than before.
- TheFiend7 7y ago
  I agree, it has been so intolerable I've been using firefox because it just feels faster. I'm getting really fed up with google projects as of late just being abandoned. Like GMail is awful[https://medium.com/@boriscoder/peeking-under-the-hood-of-redesigned-gmail-dd84b532e0f5 https://medium.com/@boriscoder/peeking-under-the-hood-of-red...] and chrome is on its way.
- kadoban 7y ago
  I don't think two browsers with the same backend are really the pinnacle of competition, unfortunately.
- Jyaif 7y ago
  If you take a second (ok, 4 hours to download the repo) to take a look at the git history of the chromium repo, you'll notice that 100% of the hundreds of commits per day are for things that are unrelated to uBlock Origin and AdBlockers.
- Slashbot 7y ago
  "they will not have any compatibility issues anymore and can improve their browser much faster than before" ?? You'd would like to believe... Microsuck ? those idiots? You think they are going to make a better browser? for all the money they have they seem to hire morons to developer there shit software.. Edge? crap Vivaldi 10x better
zyang 7y ago
Chrome dev tool also starts to lock up if you reload while on a breakpoint. The dev tool was the main reason I started using Chrome. Really sad to see it degrade.
- mttyng 7y ago
  That’s what’s happening? Oh man, that really started to be prevalent for me in the last week or two. Very frustrating.
- pier25 7y ago
  Something I noticed recently is that some CSS animations stutter heavily when Chromium dev tools are open. Doesn't happen on Firefox nor Safari.
- digitarald 7y ago
  Wonder if Firefox works better on your projects, as a lot of work went into debugging quality and performance. Have you tried it out lately?
- strictnein 7y ago
  That's funny. Because it used to have a related/sort of opposite problem: If you were on a breakpoint and you reloaded the page, the code execution was resumed. Didn't realize it did that until I saw network traffic that was generated by code after the breakpoint.
- brink 7y ago
  I'm so glad to hear that I'm not the only person this is happening to. I had to switch to Firefox for debugging as Chrome would lock up completely on breakpoints.
SeanFerree 7y ago
Why does Chrome have to update so much?
- andrewguenther 7y ago
  Chrome's release strategy is actually quite interesting. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/process/release_cycle.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs... They release often for the same reasons you would do continuous deployment. Release a little, but often. It helps them to better isolate regressions in the field and deliver non-critical security fixes quickly. I know I say that it helps them prevent regressions and this post is talking about regressions, but it's also work keeping in mind that Chrome telemetry is insanely extensive. I'd wager that in the field, to the typical user, that Chrome 80 is actually faster than 75.
eh78ssxv2f 7y ago
AFAICT, the author does not explain it, but why did the author chose this benchmark? Is it a good approximation of what webpages do in the wild?
- leeoniya 7y ago
  well, it creates a lot of DOM and executes a lot of JS, which stresses both JS and GC. it also uses the full bootstrap build to stress CSS & layout...which "modern" websites definitely (and unfortunately) do.
gok 7y ago
…on a set of contrived microbenchmarks.
- leeoniya 7y ago
  nice handwavey dismissal. to call these microbenchmarks (especially when viewed collectively) for the purpose of dismissing the results is dishonest at best. each datapoint on the graph represents a lot of internal metrics (GC, JS, DOM, layout/css). these aren't some one-liner JS loops. when you have a diverse set of "microbenchmarks", and they all show the same trend, you can be pretty sure the results are not "contrived".
amazingbrowser 7y ago
So... Netscape all over again? :D
pier25 7y ago
I didn't know krausest also did browser benchmarks. It's a great idea considering he has all those test cases.
hastes 7y ago
Been on Firefox since Quantum came out and I have to say I don't miss Chrome one bit. The only honest to god thing that I wish Firefox had was the rounded edges of the top bar design like Chrome.. Devtools are great, performance is great, battery life on MacBook 16in is great, Nightly is awesome (has its ups and downs). I honestly only ever use Chrome to double-check if my CSS styling is cross-browser. Although I have been using Edge a lot more for this use case, because I can't stand Google.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  > The only honest to god thing that I wish Firefox had was the rounded edges of the top bar design like Chrome I did this myself using userChrome.css :-)
  - hastes 7y ago
    > userChrome.css THANK YOU. I had no idea this existed, I will be looking into this.
    - solarkraft 7y ago
      You're welcome :-) You have to enable it manually nowadays, but it opens up a ton of possibilities - you can theme virtually everything (find out which elements to theme using the browser toolbox).
  - webpaymentsguy 7y ago
    There ought to be a setup guide that suggests ways to customize style and other things when you first install Firefox
    - severine 7y ago
      Well, there's https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
My first requirement for a browser is that it works with Bitwarden. My second requirement is that it allows vertical tabs. That's really the biggest asks for me. So I started trying out some new browsers recently, and really like Brave for the out-of-the-box privacy focus. The crypto stuff is novel and I'd be interested to see where that goes. Also tried Vivaldi and absolutely love it. Reminds me of the old Opera (absolute favorite), it's got configurations for everything. Vertical tabs are a built-in! I use Firefox from time to time too, but find the interface less polished (at least on MacOS).
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Firefox fits both of your requirements perfectly, I use both all of the time. Not only are tabs with the Firefox extension vertically aligned, but trees (I don't know whether this is the case, I avoid using Chromium-based browsers)!
  - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
    Like I said, I use Firefox with the exact setup as you said, but I find the interface isn't as slick as Vivaldi or Brave (that's pretty nebulous but so are most opinions). At least for Vivaldi, I think most people who fondly remember Opera know what I'm talking about. I don't mean to denigrate Firefox, I quite like it.
Medicalidiot 7y ago
I recently started using Safari over Chrome. I feel like it has better privacy than Chrome but doesn't have the performance issues that Firefox does. Even with the recent attention Firefox has gotten on Mac it still is a dumpster fire compared to Safari in terms of battery life and performance.
- andai 7y ago
  I get way better battery life with Safari than either Chrome or Firefox. I like how pinned tabs are there in all windows (otherwise.. what's the point?) But the extension ecosystem and lack of customizability makes me sad.
  - kemayo 7y ago
    Amusingly(?), pinned tabs being in all windows is one of the most annoying things to me about Safari. I use them in Firefox/Chrome to signal that they're tabs I definitely want to always keep open, and which I expect to open a lot of other tabs from. It's a whole different use case from wanting them available on every window.
- rramdin 7y ago
  The uniformity across all devices is great in Safari too. Synced passwords between my work laptop, home laptop, phone, and iPad is such a convenience. Also great if I'm reading an article at home and then want to bring it up on the phone for my commute and then my work laptop when I arrive--totally seamless.
  - _xoo 7y ago
    Firefox supports these features too.
- ddavis 7y ago
  Do you have a recommended adblocker for Safari?
  - 7y ago
Waterluvian 7y ago
I had a recent experience that forced me to better understand the development process of Chromium. My OpenLayers mapping application suddenly got VERY slow. tl;dr: Chromium team had made an optimization change to canvas `getImageData` which slowed it to ~1/40th performance in some cases. It was frustrating to have to convince them this is a problem at all. But what frustrated me more was how they came to decide to sacrifice performance in one way to benefit it in another. I'm sure they came to the conclusion somehow, but it ended up just utterly breaking apps that are already out there. One teacher struggled with a school-board-wide course that just didn't function because the main software was broken by this. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1001845 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100184...
- kevingadd 7y ago
  getImageData and other canvas APIs randomly regressing in performance is a common occurrence, sadly. Google frequently makes changes to the 2D graphics stack and they don't test a wide set of scenarios, just particular cherry-picked ones. Back when I still maintained some games using canvas it was pretty typical to see my framerates shift wildly every 6 weeks when a new release rode the trains. Two other scenarios that will often change in performance is canvas-to-canvas draws and canvas<->WebGL interop, because how those are implemented is complex. In the past particular behaviors would instantly disable hardware acceleration for a given canvas, tanking your performance.
- strictnein 7y ago
  > I'm sure they came to the conclusion somehow My money would be on that it improved performance on something google related: maps, youtube, etc
Ajedi32 7y ago
Chrome used to rely on fixed synthetic benchmarks like this for guiding their performance optimizations, but quickly realized they aren't a great indicator of real world performance and ditched them in favor of instead evaluating Chrome's performance against a collection of popular, real-world websites. See https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance for a discussion of their bench marking methodology.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- CarelessExpert 7y ago
  Why not both? Something about babies and bathwater...
  - CarelessExpert 7y ago
    Apparently some people don't understand what I'm driving at, so I'll explain: V8 could choose to look at both microbenchmark performance and real web performance, as both are useful signals for how V8 performs in general. The only reason to not use microbenchmarks is because you think they will somehow lead you astray and cause you to optimize things such that user experience actually gets worse. But, frankly, I find that incredibly unlikely, and I'd love to see actual examples of such a thing. Otherwise, this just seems like, and now I'm going to return to that idiom: throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, here, simply because someone somewhere decided that microbenchmarks are universally "bad" while website performance tests are universally "good". Of course, this presupposes that this is, in fact, what the V8 team is doing.
    - dwild 7y ago
      > The only reason to not use microbenchmarks is because you think they will somehow lead you astray and cause you to optimize things such that user experience actually gets worse. That's not the only reason. It's about putting the effort where it's matters. Sure gaining 30% speed in synthetic benchmark seems great, but if in real world scenario theses things doesn't happen that often (and spoiler alert, they don't), it will means actually much less than 30% of the speed gains. That's not a good metric to go toward. It's simply about investing the development time that you got, where it matters for the user. If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.
khana 7y ago
they can't leave well enough alone. Chrome 80 idling at 45% cpu on Windows. tired of these twits
wwwigham 7y ago
I haven't confirmed it with hard numbers yet, but I think these perf regressions may also be affecting node; node 13.1 executes our test suite in about 5 minutes on my workstation, while a canary build of node running the latest v8 (which I was trying because it fixed a perf regression in debug stepping performance which first appears in node 13.2) seems to take almost 7 minutes. Now, I thought it was just maybe a consequence of it being a prerelease build; but seeing this, if it's actually just indicative of broad perf regressions in v8... I'll be honest, I'd be surprised, since every v8 release blog is always talking about perf _improvements_.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  If it's important for you, you can try to find commit which degrades performance by using bisect.
- leeoniya 7y ago
  > while a canary build of node running the latest v8 keep in mind that canary builds might not be compiled with all the typical release optimization flags turned on.
jjordan 7y ago
I officially gave up on Chrome when they stupidly axed the "Close other Tabs" feature. They brought it back a version or two later, but that was the straw for me. I'm not sure what's going on in the Chrome team, but it appears to have lost its original vision and direction.
- rafaelvasco 7y ago
  Yeah. Right now, I'm using primarily Edgium, then Firefox, as Edgium is blazingly fast; As Chrome was when it started...
brobot182 7y ago
The one thing I wish Firefox had was a download bar at the bottom like Chrome’s. It seems hard to justify their current design
butz 7y ago
Nowadays all browsers are extremely fast, but unoptimized and 3rd party script ridden web apps/sites are causing them to feel slow.
qwerty456127 7y ago
Funny. I always regularly update Chrome in hope it's going to become faster as they improve the code in newer versions. What a waste. I'm going to stop updating it now.
rafaelvasco 7y ago
Noticed that some Canvas operations, specially pixel manipulation, is like 30~40% slower on latest Chrome compared to latest Firefox;

282 points by leeoniya 7y ago

tartoran 7y ago

Perfect timing to switch browsers!

gridlockd 7y ago
Firefox is even worse on DOM microbenchmarks and in many others. It really only shines in WASM performance. [1] It's unlikely that you will notice the difference anyway, few websites manipulate that many DOM elements at interactive rates. Those would be much better off with Canvas, which is also way slower on Firefox. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-80-benchmarks&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-8...
- leeoniya 7y ago
  > This round of tests was under an Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot in my experience, both browsers performed very differently under Windows than under Linux (Manjaro). both mozilla and google clearly spend more time optimizing for the overwhelmingly more common user (Windows).
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    In my experience, these differences I mentioned exist on Windows as well, I just don't have any other numbers readily at hand.
azhenley 7y ago
Any suggestions? Brave comes to mind but it seems to have some controversy around it.
- enumjorge 7y ago
  Firefox?
- zelly 7y ago
  Brave is Chromium with a different settings page.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    Wrong: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... -- and that is just what we strip and stub. We add other value, but in any case, your "... with a different settings page" statement is on its face false.
- eganist 7y ago
  The only controversy around Brave is around Eich and his own personal beliefs. But honestly, if you can get past that, the team backing it is one of the strongest and most pro-user browser teams today. I'm particularly biased in favor of their security engineering. That said, I still prefer Firefox because Firefox isn't Blink.
  - TimTheTinker 7y ago
    Is there still controversy surrounding Eich? I thought (hoped?) that was over years ago.
    - eganist 7y ago
      People dig it up from time to time on Twitter.
      - 101404 7y ago
        Scary times we live in.
    - 7y ago
neltnerb 7y ago
I spent an hour yesterday with two different websites trying to place an order on Firefox (to name and shame, CVS and shutterfly). I eventually gave up and used Chrome to place an order, but sent a note telling CVS that they lost my business because their website is broken on Firefox. Please, more people switch to Firefox. Chrome is breaking the internet.
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Is likely they know this and the costs of supporting firefox doesn't outweigh the benefits for them.
  - diag 7y ago
    What's the benefit of breaking services for a subset of your customers? I can't think of any.
    - snazz 7y ago
      They’re not intentionally breaking anything, they’re just making it work exclusively with Chromium by not testing under Firefox. It saves them time and money.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Something I realized recently is that all of these sites have analytics. They can see exactly what percentage of their users are on Firefox, and that will directly drive their dev priorities. Using Firefox isn't just a symbolic gesture; it's a direct vote in its favor.
  - dexen 7y ago
    >all of these sites have analytics. The analytics is most likely blocked by common adblock rules. And present-day Firefox users are quite likely to be advanced users, running adblock. Thus Firefox ends up being under-represented in the analytics.
sdegutis 7y ago
I generally use Safari for everything and Chrome+Safari+Firefox when developing. When on Mac, Safari just feels the smoothest and seems lightest on battery.
- spurgu 7y ago
  I actually tried Safari last night (tried it for a day or two a couple of months ago as well). Is it just me or has everything about the extensions changed? They're only available from the App store? I tried to install Bitwarden but got sent to download the desktop app. And overall the extension landscape looks highly bleak. What are the recommended adblockers? I found Ghostery Lite (which according to the reviews seems quite disappointing) and a number of paid adblockers... From my test some while back there at least seemed to be a decent number of extensions out there but now it's different. Why? Edit: The Bitwarden extension seems to have been installed automatically along with the desktop app.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    And re: extensions in the App store, it doesn't seem to have a search function...
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    I don't use any Safari extensions. Regarding ad blockers, my solution has just been to stop using the internet so much. I almost exclusively use it for work now. So I run into almost no websites with ads. I heartily recommend going internet free except during work hours, and using the library for the rest. It's been such an amazing life improvement for us, we wish that on everyone.
    - spurgu 7y ago
      Had you said that 6 months (or even 6 days) ago I would've laughed it off but right now I actually agree. Laughing foremost because I'd certainly be asking the wrong guy as I'd expect most HN guys to be power users. Not laughing because I recognize the huge potential of waste of time the internet brings along, that I hadn't really seriously considered until recently, had just figured it's half necessary to keep myself up to speed with things. We really don't need to be up to speed with things, outside of work at least, and if work is stressing us to the point where it becomes uncomfortable we should simply just change our work. I do however like to be efficient in whatever I do so I would still like a convenient way of browsing the web, but... in the big picture it's not that important, especially if you leave out the time consuming stuff. Then it's mostly looking up stuff, which you can do using whatever tools. In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it. For work I simply use Chrome and will keep it that way. Simple, easy, compatible, not fighting the mainstream. For private browsing though I would prefer to use something more.. personal. Brave works fine, currently trying out Cliqz. And I've tried out Next and Qutebrowser the last two days. Being a geek/ADHD I guess. There are more important things in life. Meditation helps. So does sailing. And not ranting on HN.

azhenley 7y ago

Would be interesting to see this graph for all releases of Chrome. Honestly, I'd love to see visualizations of benchmarks like this for all big open source projects!

warpech 7y ago

The chart is messed up... Bonus mess points for choosing 1 instead of 0 as the starting poing on the vertical axis. My best guess to understand it is: - On the horizontal axis, we have consecutive Chrome releases. - On the vertical axis, we have total time of benchmark execution, relatively to Chrome 75 The source of the data is the "js-framework-benchmark"[0] run in a controlled environment in Chrome[1] [0]: https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark [1]: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2020/table_chrome_80.html https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2020/table...

cl3misch 7y ago
If the y axis is relative benchmark time, it has to start at 1.
- warpech 7y ago
  Why? What if Chrome 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 were faster than 75? The line needs space to go down.
  - cl3misch 7y ago
    It would go down if the data point lay there.
    - warpech 7y ago
      Fair enough :)
- davrosthedalek 7y ago
  While the data has to start at 1 (or 100%), the axis absolutely does not.
- dylan604 7y ago
  What happens during the first second of time before reaching 1?

aj7 7y ago

And I bet it still doesn’t show Captchas all the time.

ajross 7y ago

So... a meta point: this is another example of a submitted story that absolutely flies up the rankings, currently sitting right at the top of HN after 20 minutes, despite no particular reason to be there. It's not a rigorous test, there's no data on other browsers or earlier versions, it's a github issue on one particular js/DOM benchmark detailing a likely regression. There aren't any details I can see on what hardware is tested. Even if you wanted to start researching chrome performance, this is a bad place to start. So why is it up so high after just a few minutes and 54 upvotes?

_bxg1 7y ago
I think the number of comments factors in, and maybe even viewership. It also seems like the rate of upvotes matters; I've seen single-digit posts rise to the front page. For better or worse the algorithm seems to prioritize posts that people are interested in, not necessarily posts that people have indicated to be high-quality.
- keanzu 7y ago
  There's a 'overheated discussion detector' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.
meredydd 7y ago
A reliable way for an article do do well on social media is to be fun to argue about, or to be supporting evidence in a broader ongoing argument. In this case, there is a broad ongoing argument about Google and its products [jumping the shark/being evil]. That argument is so much fun that, as I write this, almost every single top-level comment in this thread is a salvo in that argument, only tenuously connected to the OP. This article is just a convenient place to have the argument. (I have a personal learning experience here: The first article of mine that hit the HN front page was a writeup of a PyCon talk entitled "To Make the World Better, Remove Some Javascript from it"[0]. It also shot to the top within minutes, and was [defensibly] flagged off the front page very quickly, because the title alone immediately turned it into a place to argue about JS [not] being evil, rather than discuss the Python-to-Javascript compiler I was talking about. Suffice it to say that subsequent articles have been more modestly titled!) [0] https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk

moneromoney 7y ago

Instead of improving the browser, Google team wastes their time to find a way to stop uBlock Origin and other AdBlockers. However, very soon they will face competition from Microsoft, because they also switched to Chromium Engine, so they will not have any compatibility issues anymore and can improve their browser much faster than before.

TheFiend7 7y ago
I agree, it has been so intolerable I've been using firefox because it just feels faster. I'm getting really fed up with google projects as of late just being abandoned. Like GMail is awful[https://medium.com/@boriscoder/peeking-under-the-hood-of-redesigned-gmail-dd84b532e0f5 https://medium.com/@boriscoder/peeking-under-the-hood-of-red...] and chrome is on its way.
kadoban 7y ago
I don't think two browsers with the same backend are really the pinnacle of competition, unfortunately.
Jyaif 7y ago
If you take a second (ok, 4 hours to download the repo) to take a look at the git history of the chromium repo, you'll notice that 100% of the hundreds of commits per day are for things that are unrelated to uBlock Origin and AdBlockers.
Slashbot 7y ago
"they will not have any compatibility issues anymore and can improve their browser much faster than before" ?? You'd would like to believe... Microsuck ? those idiots? You think they are going to make a better browser? for all the money they have they seem to hire morons to developer there shit software.. Edge? crap Vivaldi 10x better

zyang 7y ago

Chrome dev tool also starts to lock up if you reload while on a breakpoint. The dev tool was the main reason I started using Chrome. Really sad to see it degrade.

mttyng 7y ago
That’s what’s happening? Oh man, that really started to be prevalent for me in the last week or two. Very frustrating.
pier25 7y ago
Something I noticed recently is that some CSS animations stutter heavily when Chromium dev tools are open. Doesn't happen on Firefox nor Safari.
digitarald 7y ago
Wonder if Firefox works better on your projects, as a lot of work went into debugging quality and performance. Have you tried it out lately?
strictnein 7y ago
That's funny. Because it used to have a related/sort of opposite problem: If you were on a breakpoint and you reloaded the page, the code execution was resumed. Didn't realize it did that until I saw network traffic that was generated by code after the breakpoint.
brink 7y ago
I'm so glad to hear that I'm not the only person this is happening to. I had to switch to Firefox for debugging as Chrome would lock up completely on breakpoints.

SeanFerree 7y ago

Why does Chrome have to update so much?

andrewguenther 7y ago
Chrome's release strategy is actually quite interesting. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/process/release_cycle.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs... They release often for the same reasons you would do continuous deployment. Release a little, but often. It helps them to better isolate regressions in the field and deliver non-critical security fixes quickly. I know I say that it helps them prevent regressions and this post is talking about regressions, but it's also work keeping in mind that Chrome telemetry is insanely extensive. I'd wager that in the field, to the typical user, that Chrome 80 is actually faster than 75.

eh78ssxv2f 7y ago

AFAICT, the author does not explain it, but why did the author chose this benchmark? Is it a good approximation of what webpages do in the wild?

leeoniya 7y ago
well, it creates a lot of DOM and executes a lot of JS, which stresses both JS and GC. it also uses the full bootstrap build to stress CSS & layout...which "modern" websites definitely (and unfortunately) do.

gok 7y ago

…on a set of contrived microbenchmarks.

leeoniya 7y ago
nice handwavey dismissal. to call these microbenchmarks (especially when viewed collectively) for the purpose of dismissing the results is dishonest at best. each datapoint on the graph represents a lot of internal metrics (GC, JS, DOM, layout/css). these aren't some one-liner JS loops. when you have a diverse set of "microbenchmarks", and they all show the same trend, you can be pretty sure the results are not "contrived".

amazingbrowser 7y ago

So... Netscape all over again? :D

pier25 7y ago

I didn't know krausest also did browser benchmarks. It's a great idea considering he has all those test cases.

hastes 7y ago

Been on Firefox since Quantum came out and I have to say I don't miss Chrome one bit. The only honest to god thing that I wish Firefox had was the rounded edges of the top bar design like Chrome.. Devtools are great, performance is great, battery life on MacBook 16in is great, Nightly is awesome (has its ups and downs). I honestly only ever use Chrome to double-check if my CSS styling is cross-browser. Although I have been using Edge a lot more for this use case, because I can't stand Google.

solarkraft 7y ago
> The only honest to god thing that I wish Firefox had was the rounded edges of the top bar design like Chrome I did this myself using userChrome.css :-)
- hastes 7y ago
  > userChrome.css THANK YOU. I had no idea this existed, I will be looking into this.
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    You're welcome :-) You have to enable it manually nowadays, but it opens up a ton of possibilities - you can theme virtually everything (find out which elements to theme using the browser toolbox).
- webpaymentsguy 7y ago
  There ought to be a setup guide that suggests ways to customize style and other things when you first install Firefox
  - severine 7y ago
    Well, there's https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/
- 52-6F-62 7y ago

gnusty_gnurc 7y ago

My first requirement for a browser is that it works with Bitwarden. My second requirement is that it allows vertical tabs. That's really the biggest asks for me. So I started trying out some new browsers recently, and really like Brave for the out-of-the-box privacy focus. The crypto stuff is novel and I'd be interested to see where that goes. Also tried Vivaldi and absolutely love it. Reminds me of the old Opera (absolute favorite), it's got configurations for everything. Vertical tabs are a built-in! I use Firefox from time to time too, but find the interface less polished (at least on MacOS).

solarkraft 7y ago
Firefox fits both of your requirements perfectly, I use both all of the time. Not only are tabs with the Firefox extension vertically aligned, but trees (I don't know whether this is the case, I avoid using Chromium-based browsers)!
- gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
  Like I said, I use Firefox with the exact setup as you said, but I find the interface isn't as slick as Vivaldi or Brave (that's pretty nebulous but so are most opinions). At least for Vivaldi, I think most people who fondly remember Opera know what I'm talking about. I don't mean to denigrate Firefox, I quite like it.

Medicalidiot 7y ago

I recently started using Safari over Chrome. I feel like it has better privacy than Chrome but doesn't have the performance issues that Firefox does. Even with the recent attention Firefox has gotten on Mac it still is a dumpster fire compared to Safari in terms of battery life and performance.

andai 7y ago
I get way better battery life with Safari than either Chrome or Firefox. I like how pinned tabs are there in all windows (otherwise.. what's the point?) But the extension ecosystem and lack of customizability makes me sad.
- kemayo 7y ago
  Amusingly(?), pinned tabs being in all windows is one of the most annoying things to me about Safari. I use them in Firefox/Chrome to signal that they're tabs I definitely want to always keep open, and which I expect to open a lot of other tabs from. It's a whole different use case from wanting them available on every window.
rramdin 7y ago
The uniformity across all devices is great in Safari too. Synced passwords between my work laptop, home laptop, phone, and iPad is such a convenience. Also great if I'm reading an article at home and then want to bring it up on the phone for my commute and then my work laptop when I arrive--totally seamless.
- _xoo 7y ago
  Firefox supports these features too.
ddavis 7y ago
Do you have a recommended adblocker for Safari?
- 7y ago

Waterluvian 7y ago

I had a recent experience that forced me to better understand the development process of Chromium. My OpenLayers mapping application suddenly got VERY slow. tl;dr: Chromium team had made an optimization change to canvas `getImageData` which slowed it to ~1/40th performance in some cases. It was frustrating to have to convince them this is a problem at all. But what frustrated me more was how they came to decide to sacrifice performance in one way to benefit it in another. I'm sure they came to the conclusion somehow, but it ended up just utterly breaking apps that are already out there. One teacher struggled with a school-board-wide course that just didn't function because the main software was broken by this. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1001845 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100184...

kevingadd 7y ago
getImageData and other canvas APIs randomly regressing in performance is a common occurrence, sadly. Google frequently makes changes to the 2D graphics stack and they don't test a wide set of scenarios, just particular cherry-picked ones. Back when I still maintained some games using canvas it was pretty typical to see my framerates shift wildly every 6 weeks when a new release rode the trains. Two other scenarios that will often change in performance is canvas-to-canvas draws and canvas<->WebGL interop, because how those are implemented is complex. In the past particular behaviors would instantly disable hardware acceleration for a given canvas, tanking your performance.
strictnein 7y ago
> I'm sure they came to the conclusion somehow My money would be on that it improved performance on something google related: maps, youtube, etc

Ajedi32 7y ago

Chrome used to rely on fixed synthetic benchmarks like this for guiding their performance optimizations, but quickly realized they aren't a great indicator of real world performance and ditched them in favor of instead evaluating Chrome's performance against a collection of popular, real-world websites. See https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance for a discussion of their bench marking methodology.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
CarelessExpert 7y ago
Why not both? Something about babies and bathwater...
- CarelessExpert 7y ago
  Apparently some people don't understand what I'm driving at, so I'll explain: V8 could choose to look at both microbenchmark performance and real web performance, as both are useful signals for how V8 performs in general. The only reason to not use microbenchmarks is because you think they will somehow lead you astray and cause you to optimize things such that user experience actually gets worse. But, frankly, I find that incredibly unlikely, and I'd love to see actual examples of such a thing. Otherwise, this just seems like, and now I'm going to return to that idiom: throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, here, simply because someone somewhere decided that microbenchmarks are universally "bad" while website performance tests are universally "good". Of course, this presupposes that this is, in fact, what the V8 team is doing.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > The only reason to not use microbenchmarks is because you think they will somehow lead you astray and cause you to optimize things such that user experience actually gets worse. That's not the only reason. It's about putting the effort where it's matters. Sure gaining 30% speed in synthetic benchmark seems great, but if in real world scenario theses things doesn't happen that often (and spoiler alert, they don't), it will means actually much less than 30% of the speed gains. That's not a good metric to go toward. It's simply about investing the development time that you got, where it matters for the user. If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.

khana 7y ago

they can't leave well enough alone. Chrome 80 idling at 45% cpu on Windows. tired of these twits

wwwigham 7y ago

I haven't confirmed it with hard numbers yet, but I think these perf regressions may also be affecting node; node 13.1 executes our test suite in about 5 minutes on my workstation, while a canary build of node running the latest v8 (which I was trying because it fixed a perf regression in debug stepping performance which first appears in node 13.2) seems to take almost 7 minutes. Now, I thought it was just maybe a consequence of it being a prerelease build; but seeing this, if it's actually just indicative of broad perf regressions in v8... I'll be honest, I'd be surprised, since every v8 release blog is always talking about perf _improvements_.

vbezhenar 7y ago
If it's important for you, you can try to find commit which degrades performance by using bisect.
leeoniya 7y ago
> while a canary build of node running the latest v8 keep in mind that canary builds might not be compiled with all the typical release optimization flags turned on.

jjordan 7y ago

I officially gave up on Chrome when they stupidly axed the "Close other Tabs" feature. They brought it back a version or two later, but that was the straw for me. I'm not sure what's going on in the Chrome team, but it appears to have lost its original vision and direction.

rafaelvasco 7y ago
Yeah. Right now, I'm using primarily Edgium, then Firefox, as Edgium is blazingly fast; As Chrome was when it started...

brobot182 7y ago

The one thing I wish Firefox had was a download bar at the bottom like Chrome’s. It seems hard to justify their current design

butz 7y ago

Nowadays all browsers are extremely fast, but unoptimized and 3rd party script ridden web apps/sites are causing them to feel slow.

qwerty456127 7y ago

Funny. I always regularly update Chrome in hope it's going to become faster as they improve the code in newer versions. What a waste. I'm going to stop updating it now.

rafaelvasco 7y ago

Noticed that some Canvas operations, specially pixel manipulation, is like 30~40% slower on latest Chrome compared to latest Firefox;