5 ms·

I don't really notice whether a page renders .1 seconds faster. But I do notice when a browser starts up quickly, and how smooth its responses are. And while I

by noarchy 17y ago

I don't really notice whether a page renders .1 seconds faster. But I do notice when a browser starts up quickly, and how smooth its responses are. And while I love Firefox to death, it is falling short of the mark in those areas of everyday use, compared to Chrome and Safari. If it were not for the addons, I would have dumped it by now. It makes me sad to even type that :(

jimmybot 17y ago
I don't know if it's rendering or if it's disk access or what's going on, but I installed the Django docs locally expecting it to be pretty much instantaneous to access. With Chrome, it is. With Firefox there is a very noticeable and very annoying delay.
- sidmitra 17y ago
  Is firebug turned off. I've sometimes mistakenly left it on and there's a huge performance penalty there.
electromagnetic 17y ago
IMO it's usually the longest wait that is most irritating. It was never the 1 second load in games that annoyed the crap out of me, it was the 2 minute load to initialize everything. Every subsequent load in the session felt like the first, regardless of length. I know full well that the .1 second that Chrome may be faster is negligible, and largely irrelevant. It's that IE took forever and Firefox wasn't significantly better, Chrome however was a dream, any load or delay from that point on was never associated with the original painstaking load.
sid0 17y ago
I consider this notion of speed being the only important factor pretty stupid. No amount of speed matters when a browser's UX sucks. Firefox is the only browser where it's actually _possible_ to get a decent UX (vertical tabs and a way to quickly search through tabs are absolute necessities).
- dylanz 17y ago
  I think it depends on what kind of "browser" user you are. I spend most of my time online, and only use my browser for viewing web pages, and sometimes testing during development. I rarely ever bookmark anything, and if I do, it's a link I "really" go to a lot and just put it in the bookmark toolbar. Basically, I use tabs and hot-keys. In a nutshell, start up speed and browsing speed is most important to me. Take it with a grain of salt though, as I don't mind viewing documents online in lynx/w3m/etc.
  - sid0 17y ago
    I usually have around 200 tabs open, and any other browser is a nightmare to use. Firefox + Tree Style Tabs + Ubiquity is the only way I can maintain some degree of sanity. Since I keep my browser open all the time, I don't particularly care about startup speed. Hell, forget about admittedly niche things like vertical tabs. Chrome gets so many basic things wrong, from scrolling to text selection, that it's just a poor joke of a browser.
    - derefr 17y ago
      If I may ask, why do you have 200 tabs open? Are you really using the tab bar as a random-access array of pages, or are you using it more like a queue?
      - sid0 17y ago
        I'm just in the habit of opening tabs and forgetting about them for a few days, then coming back to them when I have time, so I guess it's more like a queue. I'm not saying it's desirable or optimal for everyone -- it's just how I work, and I find it quite effective, and I treasure my workflow a lot more than I care about "speed". I also usually have lots of tabs with API documentation open, so it's important to maintain state such as the position of the scrollbar. Keeping tabs open is a much easier way to maintain this state than creating bookmarks for every function in the API.
        17y ago
dylanz 17y ago
Well said, and my sentiments exactly.
aidenn0 17y ago
You may not notice when a page renders 100ms faster, but google certainly does, and speeding up a page with their ads on it improves clickthrough. Assuming that other browser makers try to keep up with chromium's speed, then that's what is funding the chromium development.
Confusion 17y ago
You think you don't really notice it. However, Google has measured that rendering even 100 ms. faster increases the number of pageviews (and hence a add views). Moreover, it has been established that snappier website feel snappier, even if you don't notice the difference in each snap.
ErrantX 17y ago
> If it were not for the addons, I would have dumped it by now. It makes me sad to even type that I was with you for a long long time. But I think Chrome avoiding addons for so long was a brilliant move. I haven't really missed them since moving exclusively to chrome (which was a shock to say the least!) and I think a big "performance boost" exists there too.

by noarchy 17y ago

jimmybot 17y ago

I don't know if it's rendering or if it's disk access or what's going on, but I installed the Django docs locally expecting it to be pretty much instantaneous to access. With Chrome, it is. With Firefox there is a very noticeable and very annoying delay.

sidmitra 17y ago
Is firebug turned off. I've sometimes mistakenly left it on and there's a huge performance penalty there.

electromagnetic 17y ago

IMO it's usually the longest wait that is most irritating. It was never the 1 second load in games that annoyed the crap out of me, it was the 2 minute load to initialize everything. Every subsequent load in the session felt like the first, regardless of length. I know full well that the .1 second that Chrome may be faster is negligible, and largely irrelevant. It's that IE took forever and Firefox wasn't significantly better, Chrome however was a dream, any load or delay from that point on was never associated with the original painstaking load.

sid0 17y ago

I consider this notion of speed being the only important factor pretty stupid. No amount of speed matters when a browser's UX sucks. Firefox is the only browser where it's actually _possible_ to get a decent UX (vertical tabs and a way to quickly search through tabs are absolute necessities).

dylanz 17y ago
I think it depends on what kind of "browser" user you are. I spend most of my time online, and only use my browser for viewing web pages, and sometimes testing during development. I rarely ever bookmark anything, and if I do, it's a link I "really" go to a lot and just put it in the bookmark toolbar. Basically, I use tabs and hot-keys. In a nutshell, start up speed and browsing speed is most important to me. Take it with a grain of salt though, as I don't mind viewing documents online in lynx/w3m/etc.
- sid0 17y ago
  I usually have around 200 tabs open, and any other browser is a nightmare to use. Firefox + Tree Style Tabs + Ubiquity is the only way I can maintain some degree of sanity. Since I keep my browser open all the time, I don't particularly care about startup speed. Hell, forget about admittedly niche things like vertical tabs. Chrome gets so many basic things wrong, from scrolling to text selection, that it's just a poor joke of a browser.
  - derefr 17y ago
    If I may ask, why do you have 200 tabs open? Are you really using the tab bar as a random-access array of pages, or are you using it more like a queue?
    - sid0 17y ago
      I'm just in the habit of opening tabs and forgetting about them for a few days, then coming back to them when I have time, so I guess it's more like a queue. I'm not saying it's desirable or optimal for everyone -- it's just how I work, and I find it quite effective, and I treasure my workflow a lot more than I care about "speed". I also usually have lots of tabs with API documentation open, so it's important to maintain state such as the position of the scrollbar. Keeping tabs open is a much easier way to maintain this state than creating bookmarks for every function in the API.
      - 17y ago

dylanz 17y ago

Well said, and my sentiments exactly.

aidenn0 17y ago

You may not notice when a page renders 100ms faster, but google certainly does, and speeding up a page with their ads on it improves clickthrough. Assuming that other browser makers try to keep up with chromium's speed, then that's what is funding the chromium development.

Confusion 17y ago

You think you don't really notice it. However, Google has measured that rendering even 100 ms. faster increases the number of pageviews (and hence a add views). Moreover, it has been established that snappier website feel snappier, even if you don't notice the difference in each snap.

ErrantX 17y ago

> If it were not for the addons, I would have dumped it by now. It makes me sad to even type that I was with you for a long long time. But I think Chrome avoiding addons for so long was a brilliant move. I haven't really missed them since moving exclusively to chrome (which was a shock to say the least!) and I think a big "performance boost" exists there too.