11 ms·
> Most people switch browsers for one reason: speed. Is that true? Maybe it is and I'm out of the loop but I can't remember the last time someone complained ab
by have_faith 11mo ago
> Most people switch browsers for one reason: speed.
Is that true? Maybe it is and I'm out of the loop but I can't remember the last time someone complained about browser speed. The bottleneck seems to be website bloat more than anything else. Would love to see this argument quantified.
- freehorse 11mo agoI have definitely switched in iOS to orion for the support of firefox and chrome extensions. Have not the slightest idea how different browsers in mobile compare in speed. But if it was abysmally slow I would have had seconds thoughts about it probably.
- TingPing 11mo agoOn iOS its all WebKit anyway (for most regions).
- hombre_fatal 11mo agoOr seconds to think about it
- freehorse 11mo agoTrue. I could probably catch more typos if I had to wait looking at a comment for 2 minutes before finally getting posted.
- hombre_fatal 11mo agoI wasn't correcting you, it's just how I read it and I realized it worked just as well.
- esafak 11mo agoIt is. That's why I dropped Firefox.
- ivell 11mo agoHave you tried it out recently? On Mac and Android it is now very good. It used to be slow for me, but now on the same hardware it is fast enough that I don't see any difference compared to chrome.
- mhitza 11mo agoBrave is still faster on Android. It probably helps that it has adblocking built-in, instead of a separate extension.
- seplox 11mo agoRecently as in the last 8 years when they overhauled it. It really was slow as heck back in 2016, but the e10s effort really, really paid off in terms of performance. It runs noticeably faster than chrome on my 12 year old laptop. Plus, it isn't riddled with invasive tracking garbage.
- esafak 11mo agoIt was definitely slower than Chrome with numerous tabs when I switched (again) some time in the last two years.
- hedora 11mo agoEven before then, 99% of the difference came down to whether chrome and firefox were properly using gpu acceleration. (Both could be easily misconfigured.) I never saw a situation where the actual engine performance mattered in real world scenarios. These days, all the engines are comparable, except that Google sabotages safari and firefox on its own sites.
- NaomiLehman 11mo agoi definitely feel that notion and google ai studio are lagging on firefox and not on chrome. I'm on a mac if that matters
- zipping1549 11mo agoUnless it's ungodly slow, to the point where it's beyond being noticeable, speed is the last thing I care about when it comes to browser. Most of the options available are reasonably fast and differences are not huge enough.
- wyldberry 11mo agoGentle reminder that if you're commenting on hacker news articles you are likely the outlier in the "why people switch browsers" reasoning. Friends and family constantly surprise me with their tech choices and how they interface with the digital world whenever I'm home on holidays.
- d1sxeyes 11mo ago“My friend told me Chrome was faster”
- sedatk 11mo agoIt was true, and it was what made Google Chrome popular in the first place. Internet Explorer and Firefox were dead slow to start at the time while Chrome started instantly. We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.
- eddythompson80 11mo agoThat was a funny period of time because you could very transparently see the clear application of a corporate team that was tasked with improving the “startup speed KPI”. During that time IE startup time went from a dozen or so seconds to also instantaneous. It was even faster than chrome sometimes. But that was just the startup. The application wasn’t ready to accept any user input or load anything for another 10 or 15 seconds still. Sometimes it would even accept input for a second then block the input fields again. It’s the same mentality all those insanely slow webapps do when they think some core react feature for a “initial render” or splash screen etc will save them from their horrific engineering practices.
- sedatk 11mo agoGoogle did a great job communicating Chrome's improvements over speed (both with startup and prefetch) and reliability (isolated and sandboxed tabs) during its launch. When you saw it, you knew that it was basically game over for any browser that had chosen to stagnate until then. They destroyed the competition.
- nurettin 11mo agoIt wasn't just the startup time. They published regular updates to v8 speed which sparked the nodejs project.
- yencabulator 11mo ago> During that time IE startup time went from a dozen or so seconds to also instantaneous. As I recall they cheated by actually starting IE at login time. Window creation is easy to make quick...
- GeekyBear 11mo ago
- eviks 11mo agoBrowsers are slow to startup, that's a common complaint for various browser-based apps, you must've heard that?
- embedding-shape 11mo agoApplications that use browser engines for rendering tend to be a bit sluggy compared to native applications, yes. But I don't think a common complaint is that a web browser as a standalone application is particularly slow either running or starting up. People tend to say stuff gets slow once they have a ton of tabs open, which makes sense.
- eviks 11mo agoDon't know how common it is, after all, people are used to all the slow stuff out there, maybe they don't even complaint when it's less frequent actions like opening a browser. Though at least for a ton of tabs, there are hibernating solutions, so very annoyed people can at least find a workaround, unlike with the unfixable startup delay
- vitorgrs 11mo agoThey are? My Linux PC have horrible perf (a 2014 Core M, 4gb RAM), and yet, Firefox opens instantly.
- handsclean 11mo agoIt was the primary motivating factor behind the previous major browser shift, though there were also other large factors. Remember that users often don’t correctly figure out which part of the stack is causing something. I’m guessing people generally don’t ID the browser as the performance bottleneck unless they’re familiar with browsers of significantly differing speed, and when not it comes out as asking for faster internet, faster websites, or a faster computer, all of which we hear constantly.
- butz 11mo agoNowadays users switch browsers to escape from AI nonsense. But in all seriousness, just enabling an ad-blocker significantly increases the speed of the browser, because, as you correctly noticed, website bloat is the largest bottleneck. And usually "raw" website content is only small fraction of all other stuff that gets loaded from various remote sources to show you ads and track you better. And to take speed point even further - disabling JavaScript does wonders to website speeds, you won't believe how quickly some websites are loading. Logging in to banking website might not work at all, though.
- yannickburky 11mo agoOrion already weighs 100 MB less than Chrome. You will probably already feel this difference every time you launch it.
- traceroute66 11mo ago> You will probably already feel this difference every time you launch it. How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ? It is also a moot point with modern processors and modern OSs. Even more so in Orion's target macOS market where you can leave an app open without any windows open (not minimized, I mean not open at all) , so its ready to go at a click.
- cricalix 11mo ago> How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ? Every morning / day across multiple machines. I don't leave them sleeping or hibernated. Don't think I'd notice a slightly faster browser start; a 50% faster start would be nice though.
- hombre_fatal 11mo agoWhen all my windows are in one big stack (Windows, macOS), then multiple windows just get in the way and I’d agree. But over the last couple months using better window managers like sway or niri, I tend to open new app/browser windows next to the windows they are related to. It’s pretty nice for mental organization.
- Tagbert 11mo agoFrom my perspective, all browsers are fast enough and within a couple of percent the same performance. I value features, privacy, etc. More than raw speed.
- nxpnsv 11mo agoI switched to zen browser. It was not for speed but feel. It feels nice.
- whazor 11mo agoWebsite bloat also slows you down cognitively, not just in load time.
- NaomiLehman 11mo agoI switched from Firefox to Chromium because of speed.
- rock_artist 11mo agoI wouldn't say it's only speed. I've been Firefox for years, but eventually ended up surrendering Apple eco-system. with Apple silicon, Firefox at least then wasn't sleeping that well, and the tab sync of FF between my devices was also less than I've desired. So performance is general is more like it... that includes not hurting my battery life.
- dmix 11mo agoI've used all 3 browsers (chrome/safari/ff) daily doing web dev for years now and I'm convinced Safari just feels faster as a cohesive Mac app, with the animations and what not, but isn't in general when using the internet day-to-day. FF is little different than Chrome/Safari. Also as a dev Safari is becoming the new IE. I've had a whole suite of Safari-only bugs in the past 2yrs and lots of browser crash reports from users.
- dotancohen 11mo agoI haven't had these issues with Safari. What types of applications are you writing? What web technologies are they relying on?
- freeandclear 11mo agoIt is definitely the features that draw me to trying new browsers. The difference in a few milliseconds is not a big deal to me.
- ksec 11mo agoA lot of people switched away from Firefox / IE to Chrome when it launched. Orion is faster than Safari on the same Mac. And it isn't rendering speed, but basic UI interface, multi-tabs usage. It is annoying because you see what Webkit is capable of and somehow Apple is not doing such as great job for Mac Safari. The difference is especially true on x86 Mac.
- biztos 11mo agoI switch browsers a couple times a day for one reason: compatibility. That’s how often I find myself having to do something in a web app that only supports Chrome. Meet the new IE, same as the old IE…
- crossroadsguy 11mo agoI switch(ed) for simplicity and privacy. Haven't found any yet. Camino and Firefox used to be that; and the browser on ElementaryOS (which IIRC was just a cleaned Firefox but not sure). Not anymore. Stopped using ElementaryOS, and every other browser collectively decided to aspire for FUBAR. Now I think I'll just keep switching until there's one decent browser left which hasn't been AIed.
- seriocomic 11mo agoI use Kagi as my daily driver on mobile, and have it constantly as my second browser (next to FF Dev) on desktop for the same reason I use Kagi Search, support of the concept. It doesn't hurt that the browser is pretty good performance and experience-wise.
- turnsout 11mo agoThe last time most people changed browsers, it was to Chrome, and it was related to speed. But that was over a decade ago.
- port11 11mo agoHmm, I did switch to Safari from Firefox because I couldn't put up with how slow everything felt. Ironically I now find Safari quite laggy, whereas Orion or Brave with uBlock make for a better experience. I do agree most people either don't switch browsers or switch to something they heard is good. Maybe Kagi have better intel than us. (Safari with adblocker, of course.)
- xnx 11mo agoPeople switch browsers because they are accidentally tricked by a dark pattern in Windows 11 to do so.