7 ms·

I'm willing to give Spartan a chance, honestly. The ModernIE initiative taken by Microsoft the past few years feels like Microsoft gave IE to a team of competen

I'm willing to give Spartan a chance, honestly. The ModernIE initiative taken by Microsoft the past few years feels like Microsoft gave IE to a team of competent engineers and told to run with it. They dropped support for older versions of IE and upgraded the technology behind it. Firefox is too slow. As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. I may be an outlier but I think most people who spend a lot of time on browsers will notice even small differences in load times. I've long switched from Chrome as my main browser, disliking the direction Google has been going with several of their products. I might be an outlier, but I'll give Spartan a chance to impress. [As a side note, it's amazing how crippling to your reputation bad technology decisions are. IE 6-9 gutted respect for Microsoft]

morninj 12y ago
What browser do you use now? I agree with your points, but I've stuck with Chrome because of the range of extensions.
- badloginagain 12y ago
  I don't use much extensions, so that's never been too big of a deal for me. I'm using Opera although currently trying Vivaldi[0] Vivaldi has a cool story, former Opera guys that want to make a browser for the power user, not your mom- which is basically the only browser that actually targets me as it's intended audience. The downsides are it's only in technical preview mode and they pretty openly admit to tracking your usage [at least their openly admitting it, everyone else does the same expect maybe Old Man Firefox] [0]https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com
  - Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
    Try Otter Browser too, it also follows the philosophy of the old Opera but it's free software and cares about your privacy. It's also in an incomplete alpha stage though (it has quite a bunch of features but still doesn't have some convenient stuff, remarkably autocompletion in the address field). http://www.otter-browser.org http://www.otter-browser.org
joshuapants 12y ago
I agree. Have you fired up the Windows 10 preview and enabled the new rendering engine in IE? It's a pretty good step forward so far, and I'd imagine the next build will be even better. AFAIK, Spartan itself should be in the next build.
bhauer 12y ago
I too will give Spartan a chance, and in likelihood will use it predominantly on my tablets and laptop (since I use IE 11 in those contexts today). On the desktop, I presently remain a Mozilla partisan, sticking with Firefox through thick and thin. But I have acknowledged that in terms of pure page user interface and interaction speed on a Windows PC, nothing can compete with IE. Its use of GPU acceleration for 2D page rendering makes things like CSS transitions shockingly smooth and fast. The CSS transitions for gradients are particularly delicious; I still have an optional subtle animation in the background of my blog using the gradient transitions. I used to have more animation in my blog (before readers convinced me it was annoying), and IE made Firefox and Chrome look as if they were running on clunky hardware from 5 years ago. IE is the only browser that—even when rendering typical web sites—reminds me that my workstation is a 3770K with a high-spec nVidia GPU. In Firefox and Chrome, I can easily forget how powerful my PC is until I fire up something that kicks off some 3D. I am hopeful that Spartan will continue to lead in that area of so much importance to me: perceived performance. If it improves its actual JavaScript performance and CSS capability versus IE 11, which I expect it will, I'll likely be quite impressed.
- badloginagain 12y ago
  That's actually a really good insight. I've always owned mid-high range computers, but browsing has always been much slower than my computers relative processing power. It's odd how I've come to accept that slow browsing is acceptable just because no one has "figured it out" yet.
  - ploxiln 12y ago
    Everything gets faster: computers have 4x the memory and processing power of 10 years ago, browsers are easily 10x faster than they were 10 years ago. However it appears that the average web page has gotten more than 40x slower. (They're also not really pages, they're "apps".) People my age or a bit younger (early 20s) say craigslist and hackernews look "hideous" but dammit this is how web pages are supposed to be.
    - 12y ago
lsdafjklsd 12y ago
What's the word with Firefox performance? My company's app is critically slow in JUST Firefox. It's an Ember app, but we use D3 and Immutable.js. We aren't doing anything weird AFAIK
- girvo 12y ago
  What has profiling turned up? Because in my experience, Firefox is faster on the apps I work on for Javascript performance, so I'm really curious what sort of performance profile your app has.
  - rspeer 12y ago
    I've noticed that SVG performance in Firefox is about 10x slower than Chrome -- is that what d3 is using?
    - warbastard 12y ago
      Yes, D3 uses SVG
- elpool2 12y ago
  My company's app is slowest in Firefox too. Most noticeably its the CSS3 transitions that are slow and chunky compared to all the other main browsers. It doesn't really affect the usability too much, but it still annoys me that I can't get the transitions to be nice and smooth like they are in Chrome or IE.
wantab 12y ago
>Firefox is too slow. Despite all the evidence to the contrary? >As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. No you don't. As a web developer, I personally can attest that's not true.
- piyush_soni 12y ago
  Oh you can easily figure out render performance differences in milliseconds with your eyes. Try that. For example, a difference of 300 milliseconds is noticeable by me. I don't know what are you 'attesting' there. I'm not a web-developer, but just 'a developer'. Also, what evidence you have that says Firefox can't be slow(even with all the add-ons it supports). In fact, those hundreds of bugs will be quite a sufficient evidence that it indeed is for many people. (It's coming from someone who still hasn't converted to Chrome)
  - minitech 12y ago
    When you say “I notice millisecond differences”, that means “one millisecond”. If you meant something more on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, you should probably clarify that.
    - Agathos 12y ago
      I can survive on milliseconds of sleep every night. Preferably 27 to 28 million milliseconds, if you have to be so picky.
      - mryan 12y ago
        Exactly, that's the point minitech was making. Your statement is accurate. Saying you survive on a single millisecond of sleep each night would be clearly impossible - as is noticing single-millisecond differences in page rendering times. You might dismiss it as pedantry, but there is a clear linguistic difference between "I notice millisecond differences" and "I notice differences of 300ms".
shmerl 12y ago
> Firefox is too slow. Really? I didn't notice. Mozilla are working on the new generation of browser engine anyway (Servo), which is much more performant. However Firefox itself is nowhere slow.
- tkubacki 12y ago
  I think "firefox is slow" partialy comes from people using css3 animations eg. this http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored works smooth on my MBP as well as on my Ubuntu desktop whereas seems sluggish on FF (on both platforms)
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Looks pretty smooth to me in the latest Firefox (Debian testing), but if somewhere it's a bottleneck, to improve that Firefox should fully implement OMTC.
- andreypopp 12y ago
  Also try using apps which use flexbox intensively — FF triggers exponential slowdown when handling deeply nested flexbox layouts[0]... [0]: https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs/issues/8 https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs/issues/8
  - shmerl 12y ago
    I'm not sure why it's reported somewhere on Github and not in Firefox Bugzilla. If reporter cared about the bug he had to report it in the right place.
badsock 12y ago
I think you're being too mild in your side note. The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed. It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people are willing to forgive them, considering what bad actors they've been up until recently.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  I don't care who does it or why - I just want higher quality software platforms. I'm glad that Microsoft didn't immediately give into the "open web" because it's a horrible mess of designed-by-committee compromises. I wish someone would just make a new browser that lets people browse a mix of native apps and web pages so we can stop bolting more crap on top of HTML/JS/CSS.
  - badsock 12y ago
    Sure, you can decide to just spectate, but like it or not we all have to share this tech ecosystem. If there's no consequence for companies or people that behave in ways that harm the whole industry, we're all going to suffer.
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      What gives you the idea that am I spectating? I'm a developer who votes with my choices and I've been in this industry for over 20 years. I just don't have a problem with Microsoft's tactics because I'm not an idealogue like you. You on the other hand are being completely impractical by expecting Microsoft to just roll over and work towards a goal that they don't agree with technically and philosophically. I wonder how you feel about Apple and their choices? So go use your other browsers and don't use anything from Microsoft. It's funny that you even have a choice since Microsoft is apparently in control of the whole industry!
- FireBeyond 12y ago
MichaelGG 12y ago
I'll give it a chance as soon as I can add simple extensions (like ublock, vim bindings, etc). And when they make the UI not look unfinished. Maybe it's silly, but those ugly square tab things look like a prototype before the design team had their turn. Petty as that is, I really find it annoying. Also not a fan of sharing the address bar with tabs, but that's minor in comparison. (I used IE for a long time, until well after Chrome was shipped, so I'm not inherently biased.)
e12e 12y ago
> As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. No you don't. Or if you do, it's a strange definition of notice. A millisecond is one tenth of how fast the centisecond counter on stopwatches change -- while one can obviously see that change, could you tell the difference between two different counters going ten times as fast, but at a difference of a couple of milliseconds? I don't think so. One light-millisecond is ~300 km, or roughly the distance to the horizon at a height of 1000 moh, for another frame of reference.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hunyeti 12y ago
I'm willing to give Spartana a chance, as long as they release it as open source and i will be able to run on linux without wine.

morninj 12y ago

What browser do you use now? I agree with your points, but I've stuck with Chrome because of the range of extensions.

badloginagain 12y ago
I don't use much extensions, so that's never been too big of a deal for me. I'm using Opera although currently trying Vivaldi[0] Vivaldi has a cool story, former Opera guys that want to make a browser for the power user, not your mom- which is basically the only browser that actually targets me as it's intended audience. The downsides are it's only in technical preview mode and they pretty openly admit to tracking your usage [at least their openly admitting it, everyone else does the same expect maybe Old Man Firefox] [0]https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com
- Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
  Try Otter Browser too, it also follows the philosophy of the old Opera but it's free software and cares about your privacy. It's also in an incomplete alpha stage though (it has quite a bunch of features but still doesn't have some convenient stuff, remarkably autocompletion in the address field). http://www.otter-browser.org http://www.otter-browser.org

joshuapants 12y ago

I agree. Have you fired up the Windows 10 preview and enabled the new rendering engine in IE? It's a pretty good step forward so far, and I'd imagine the next build will be even better. AFAIK, Spartan itself should be in the next build.

bhauer 12y ago

I too will give Spartan a chance, and in likelihood will use it predominantly on my tablets and laptop (since I use IE 11 in those contexts today). On the desktop, I presently remain a Mozilla partisan, sticking with Firefox through thick and thin. But I have acknowledged that in terms of pure page user interface and interaction speed on a Windows PC, nothing can compete with IE. Its use of GPU acceleration for 2D page rendering makes things like CSS transitions shockingly smooth and fast. The CSS transitions for gradients are particularly delicious; I still have an optional subtle animation in the background of my blog using the gradient transitions. I used to have more animation in my blog (before readers convinced me it was annoying), and IE made Firefox and Chrome look as if they were running on clunky hardware from 5 years ago. IE is the only browser that—even when rendering typical web sites—reminds me that my workstation is a 3770K with a high-spec nVidia GPU. In Firefox and Chrome, I can easily forget how powerful my PC is until I fire up something that kicks off some 3D. I am hopeful that Spartan will continue to lead in that area of so much importance to me: perceived performance. If it improves its actual JavaScript performance and CSS capability versus IE 11, which I expect it will, I'll likely be quite impressed.

badloginagain 12y ago
That's actually a really good insight. I've always owned mid-high range computers, but browsing has always been much slower than my computers relative processing power. It's odd how I've come to accept that slow browsing is acceptable just because no one has "figured it out" yet.
- ploxiln 12y ago
  Everything gets faster: computers have 4x the memory and processing power of 10 years ago, browsers are easily 10x faster than they were 10 years ago. However it appears that the average web page has gotten more than 40x slower. (They're also not really pages, they're "apps".) People my age or a bit younger (early 20s) say craigslist and hackernews look "hideous" but dammit this is how web pages are supposed to be.
  - 12y ago

lsdafjklsd 12y ago

What's the word with Firefox performance? My company's app is critically slow in JUST Firefox. It's an Ember app, but we use D3 and Immutable.js. We aren't doing anything weird AFAIK

girvo 12y ago
What has profiling turned up? Because in my experience, Firefox is faster on the apps I work on for Javascript performance, so I'm really curious what sort of performance profile your app has.
- rspeer 12y ago
  I've noticed that SVG performance in Firefox is about 10x slower than Chrome -- is that what d3 is using?
  - warbastard 12y ago
    Yes, D3 uses SVG
elpool2 12y ago
My company's app is slowest in Firefox too. Most noticeably its the CSS3 transitions that are slow and chunky compared to all the other main browsers. It doesn't really affect the usability too much, but it still annoys me that I can't get the transitions to be nice and smooth like they are in Chrome or IE.

wantab 12y ago

>Firefox is too slow. Despite all the evidence to the contrary? >As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. No you don't. As a web developer, I personally can attest that's not true.

piyush_soni 12y ago
Oh you can easily figure out render performance differences in milliseconds with your eyes. Try that. For example, a difference of 300 milliseconds is noticeable by me. I don't know what are you 'attesting' there. I'm not a web-developer, but just 'a developer'. Also, what evidence you have that says Firefox can't be slow(even with all the add-ons it supports). In fact, those hundreds of bugs will be quite a sufficient evidence that it indeed is for many people. (It's coming from someone who still hasn't converted to Chrome)
- minitech 12y ago
  When you say “I notice millisecond differences”, that means “one millisecond”. If you meant something more on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, you should probably clarify that.
  - Agathos 12y ago
    I can survive on milliseconds of sleep every night. Preferably 27 to 28 million milliseconds, if you have to be so picky.
    - mryan 12y ago
      Exactly, that's the point minitech was making. Your statement is accurate. Saying you survive on a single millisecond of sleep each night would be clearly impossible - as is noticing single-millisecond differences in page rendering times. You might dismiss it as pedantry, but there is a clear linguistic difference between "I notice millisecond differences" and "I notice differences of 300ms".

shmerl 12y ago

> Firefox is too slow. Really? I didn't notice. Mozilla are working on the new generation of browser engine anyway (Servo), which is much more performant. However Firefox itself is nowhere slow.

tkubacki 12y ago
I think "firefox is slow" partialy comes from people using css3 animations eg. this http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored works smooth on my MBP as well as on my Ubuntu desktop whereas seems sluggish on FF (on both platforms)
- shmerl 12y ago
  Looks pretty smooth to me in the latest Firefox (Debian testing), but if somewhere it's a bottleneck, to improve that Firefox should fully implement OMTC.
andreypopp 12y ago
Also try using apps which use flexbox intensively — FF triggers exponential slowdown when handling deeply nested flexbox layouts[0]... [0]: https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs/issues/8 https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs/issues/8
- shmerl 12y ago
  I'm not sure why it's reported somewhere on Github and not in Firefox Bugzilla. If reporter cared about the bug he had to report it in the right place.

badsock 12y ago

I think you're being too mild in your side note. The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed. It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people are willing to forgive them, considering what bad actors they've been up until recently.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
I don't care who does it or why - I just want higher quality software platforms. I'm glad that Microsoft didn't immediately give into the "open web" because it's a horrible mess of designed-by-committee compromises. I wish someone would just make a new browser that lets people browse a mix of native apps and web pages so we can stop bolting more crap on top of HTML/JS/CSS.
- badsock 12y ago
  Sure, you can decide to just spectate, but like it or not we all have to share this tech ecosystem. If there's no consequence for companies or people that behave in ways that harm the whole industry, we're all going to suffer.
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    What gives you the idea that am I spectating? I'm a developer who votes with my choices and I've been in this industry for over 20 years. I just don't have a problem with Microsoft's tactics because I'm not an idealogue like you. You on the other hand are being completely impractical by expecting Microsoft to just roll over and work towards a goal that they don't agree with technically and philosophically. I wonder how you feel about Apple and their choices? So go use your other browsers and don't use anything from Microsoft. It's funny that you even have a choice since Microsoft is apparently in control of the whole industry!
FireBeyond 12y ago

MichaelGG 12y ago

I'll give it a chance as soon as I can add simple extensions (like ublock, vim bindings, etc). And when they make the UI not look unfinished. Maybe it's silly, but those ugly square tab things look like a prototype before the design team had their turn. Petty as that is, I really find it annoying. Also not a fan of sharing the address bar with tabs, but that's minor in comparison. (I used IE for a long time, until well after Chrome was shipped, so I'm not inherently biased.)

e12e 12y ago

> As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. No you don't. Or if you do, it's a strange definition of notice. A millisecond is one tenth of how fast the centisecond counter on stopwatches change -- while one can obviously see that change, could you tell the difference between two different counters going ten times as fast, but at a difference of a couple of milliseconds? I don't think so. One light-millisecond is ~300 km, or roughly the distance to the horizon at a height of 1000 moh, for another frame of reference.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hunyeti 12y ago

I'm willing to give Spartana a chance, as long as they release it as open source and i will be able to run on linux without wine.