5 ms·

> I left Firefox mainly because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin) I have no idea what your experience was, of course

> I left Firefox mainly because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin) I have no idea what your experience was, of course. Many people said this for years while Firefox consistently won or tied in objective comparisons. Having dealt with end-user complaints for years, I've learned to doubt reports that rely on subjective perceptions of things like 'speed'. Sometimes the new, cool thing feels faster. Perhaps Firefox should pump in some fake engine noise.

moe 12y ago
Those "objective comparisons" then probably compared the rendering engines or some other micro benchmarks. My main problem was the GUI, not the rendering (though the latter probably played its part in slowing the GUI down). Opening/closing/moving tabs was sluggish. Just opening Firefox with my ~20 tabs open would take many times as long as opening Chrome with the same number of tabs. You didn't need a stopwatch to see the difference.
- scholia 12y ago
  Of course, things have changed since then....
sliverstorm 12y ago
I was one of the small group suffering (I think back around Firefox 24). It indeed was winning reviews & praise- but it was also completely unresponsive on my high-end machine. Several seconds of unresponsive, as if it/I were having problems with interrupts. I realize most people didn't have that problem; it was probably a freak corner case on my machine.
jlarocco 12y ago
I switched to Chrome primarily because of that doubting. For a while a pretty good chunk of people were complaining about Firefox's speed and memory usage, and the dev team stuck their head in the sand and blamed plugins, extensions, slow hardware, OS problems, malware, and everything under the sun except Firefox itself. At some point people just said, "Fuck it, I'm not even trying to convince them any more, I'm just switching to Chrome." Also note that Firefox was "winning" objective benchmarks on things that didn't matter. Rendering speed doesn't mean much to me if it takes 10x longer to open the tab before rendering begins.
marcosdumay 12y ago
There was a time where Firefox was slow, used lots and lots of memory, and crashed all the time. And yet, developers doubted that was true at bug discussions. It took some time, but the developers finally convinced themselves that the problem existed, and started fixing it. It also took some time to fix most thing, but now Firefox is stable and fast. Nowadays Chrome it is slow and too "smart". Anyway, complete comparisons of megabyte-sized sofware, with gigabyte-sized states must take longer than the age of the Universe to run. Anything smaller is not complete enough to exclude bugs.
- eropple 12y ago
  YMMV, but--after switching over to Firefox recently--I have it space out at random. Chrome has problems (its penchant for lighting my laptop on fire being the biggest reason I switched) but I don't have it just stop in the middle of my day. The toss-up between junk battery life thanks to badly designed attempts to shoe-horn an application model into a document model (and Google employs plenty of the worst offenders, my biggest perf suck under both Firefox and Chrome is GMail!) and random stops is disgusting. Gary Bernhardt's right: we put up with entirely too much bullshit in this part of our lives.
smacktoward 12y ago
Or the users were comparing a Firefox profile that had years' worth of extensions and history data with a Chrome profile that was empty...
cortesoft 12y ago
When the V8 javascript engine came out for Chrome, it was objectively faster than the other browsers. I was a web developer at the time, and it was night and day. Then, the other browsers made their new engines, and the leading performer has gone back and forth since. It wasn't subjective perception. You could run the same javascript code in multiple browsers, time it, and see the results quite clearly. Since javascript was (and is) such a huge part of most websites, this speed difference was very noticeable during regular browsing.
SL61 12y ago
The reason I quit using Firefox wasn't because pages loaded slowly. It was the overall responsiveness of the interface. Tab management, opening menus, pressing buttons, and even scrolling were (and are) incredibly sluggish in Firefox on my computer. I think most people who say Firefox is "slow" are actually referring to this, and not the things benchmarks measure. Chrome's interface is perfectly snappy. This is with no extensions on either, and brand new profiles. Every once in a while I go through a free software stage and switch back to Firefox, but I always end up going back to Chrome.

moe 12y ago

Those "objective comparisons" then probably compared the rendering engines or some other micro benchmarks. My main problem was the GUI, not the rendering (though the latter probably played its part in slowing the GUI down). Opening/closing/moving tabs was sluggish. Just opening Firefox with my ~20 tabs open would take many times as long as opening Chrome with the same number of tabs. You didn't need a stopwatch to see the difference.

scholia 12y ago
Of course, things have changed since then....

sliverstorm 12y ago

I was one of the small group suffering (I think back around Firefox 24). It indeed was winning reviews & praise- but it was also completely unresponsive on my high-end machine. Several seconds of unresponsive, as if it/I were having problems with interrupts. I realize most people didn't have that problem; it was probably a freak corner case on my machine.

jlarocco 12y ago

I switched to Chrome primarily because of that doubting. For a while a pretty good chunk of people were complaining about Firefox's speed and memory usage, and the dev team stuck their head in the sand and blamed plugins, extensions, slow hardware, OS problems, malware, and everything under the sun except Firefox itself. At some point people just said, "Fuck it, I'm not even trying to convince them any more, I'm just switching to Chrome." Also note that Firefox was "winning" objective benchmarks on things that didn't matter. Rendering speed doesn't mean much to me if it takes 10x longer to open the tab before rendering begins.

marcosdumay 12y ago

There was a time where Firefox was slow, used lots and lots of memory, and crashed all the time. And yet, developers doubted that was true at bug discussions. It took some time, but the developers finally convinced themselves that the problem existed, and started fixing it. It also took some time to fix most thing, but now Firefox is stable and fast. Nowadays Chrome it is slow and too "smart". Anyway, complete comparisons of megabyte-sized sofware, with gigabyte-sized states must take longer than the age of the Universe to run. Anything smaller is not complete enough to exclude bugs.

eropple 12y ago
YMMV, but--after switching over to Firefox recently--I have it space out at random. Chrome has problems (its penchant for lighting my laptop on fire being the biggest reason I switched) but I don't have it just stop in the middle of my day. The toss-up between junk battery life thanks to badly designed attempts to shoe-horn an application model into a document model (and Google employs plenty of the worst offenders, my biggest perf suck under both Firefox and Chrome is GMail!) and random stops is disgusting. Gary Bernhardt's right: we put up with entirely too much bullshit in this part of our lives.

smacktoward 12y ago

Or the users were comparing a Firefox profile that had years' worth of extensions and history data with a Chrome profile that was empty...

cortesoft 12y ago

When the V8 javascript engine came out for Chrome, it was objectively faster than the other browsers. I was a web developer at the time, and it was night and day. Then, the other browsers made their new engines, and the leading performer has gone back and forth since. It wasn't subjective perception. You could run the same javascript code in multiple browsers, time it, and see the results quite clearly. Since javascript was (and is) such a huge part of most websites, this speed difference was very noticeable during regular browsing.

SL61 12y ago

The reason I quit using Firefox wasn't because pages loaded slowly. It was the overall responsiveness of the interface. Tab management, opening menus, pressing buttons, and even scrolling were (and are) incredibly sluggish in Firefox on my computer. I think most people who say Firefox is "slow" are actually referring to this, and not the things benchmarks measure. Chrome's interface is perfectly snappy. This is with no extensions on either, and brand new profiles. Every once in a while I go through a free software stage and switch back to Firefox, but I always end up going back to Chrome.