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The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

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Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#101

Post by anexprogrammer »

riprowan wrote: post #5

I've always held that power (features) trumps speed unless we're talking about OLTP. Machines will get faster quickly. Providing a strong platform is more important than being the fastest, today. YMMV.

I've been waiting 30+ years for computers to get subjectively faster. They don't. Ever.

Every new machine or processor is dragged down by the increased bloat and inefficient coding of the new OS to go with it. It'll be quicker starting up, only until you've installed a few basics, then it'll take as long as it always did.

They feel too slow always. Always have. Movies show things happening instantly - I now believe that will never happen. The Matrix should have included 1m "Loading" dialogues. :)

I get annoyed waiting for websites to load on multi Mbps broadband just like I did in the 90s with a dialup connection.

Sure things are doing more, but I'd like the cycle to include making that "instant" future please.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#102

Post by tajen »

masklinn wrote: post #39
sydneysider wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the adblock extension on safari makes it freeze up for a second when I open a new tab. apart from that, soooooo much snappier than chrome. (desktop, not mobile ofc)

extensions in general are a huge issue for all browsers, it's easy to install a bunch of them and not notice your performances going down until a few months later, at which point you blame the browser (even for developers, evaluating the performance impact of extensions can be difficult). That's especially true for content-alteration extensions like ad-blockers as it's very easy to implement them in ways which work w…

One shouldn't let an extension with access to all the pages run continuously. I wait for the day a famous extension like Awesome Screenshot will be pirated and publish everyone's bank account credentials...

Of course, between "should" and the reality, there's room for tolerance.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#103

Post by lorenzhs »

anon1385 wrote: post #97
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On mobile devices you can rarely switch browsers without losing access to major parts of the OS You mean "on iOS", not on mobile devices in general. On Android at least all such integration is done with Intents, a broadcast message from the OS or one app to another, and those Intents can be remapped to target whatever app a user wants, meaning a third-party browser can be as integrated into the OS as Chrome. You can…

>You mean "on iOS", not on mobile devices in general. Also on FirefoxOS and ChromeOS where third party browsers aren't possible at all.

The first of which is discontinued and the second not an OS for mobile devices (phone/tablet)

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#104

Post by _greim_ »

Joeri wrote: post #81
Klathmon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29 has most popular benchmarks across most JavaScript eninges on multiple platforms Edit: actually this view is probably better for people who don't care about JavaScript engine internals: https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=31

The focus on JS benchmarks is becoming ludicrous. By far the biggest performance issue is DOM/CSS layout. JS is so fast on all browsers that the performance differences don't matter at all anymore, except for initial load (and if you're loading that much code on initial page load, you should re-evaluate your architecture).

Modern frameworks have worked hard to mitigate DOM bottlenecks, thus pure JS bottlenecks are now a thing. Especially data-rich applications. Reflow and paint performance is still an issue but the focus on JS is worthwhile.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#105

Post by Klathmon »

awakeasleep wrote: post #93
zajd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several hundred tabs? Dear god

Aka The User is Wrong

AKA the software was not written with that use case in mind.

Just because the way he/she uses software doesn't work well with chrome doesn't make chrome bad software, and it doesn't mean the user is wrong. It just means that it's not a good fit for that person.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#106

Post by jacobolus »

Klathmon wrote: post #105
awakeasleep wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aka The User is Wrong

AKA the software was not written with that use case in mind. Just because the way he/she uses software doesn't work well with chrome doesn't make chrome bad software, and it doesn't mean the user is wrong. It just means that it's not a good fit for that person.

I definitely am not claiming that Chrome is “bad software”. All I said was that it can’t handle my browsing style, while Safari can.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#107

Post by BackPropagate »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #77
wahsd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much describes the archetypal difference between Apple and Google, end-user experience vs engineers developing for engineers ... and those pesky end-users if we must.

Wat. Safari ios is the most obtuse browser regarding to standards, makes devs life miserable in every conceivable way, breaks every standard web interaction since 199x (like a top fixed navbar), has it's own opinion on transform origin, handles differently than every other pseudo elements positioning parent and to top it all when it crashes because it gobs more memory than the os can handle spits a message vague enou…

Bingo. This is just a rant from a Mac Apologist who's bitter because his browser isn't everyone's darling.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#108

Post by dheera »

Mobile Safari doesn't go anywhere near the top of my rankings until they can make it simple to disable the silly rubber-band scrolling for mobile apps. Every CSS solution I've tried only works 95% of the time, never 100%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkwZbi3AslY

The rubber band stuff is downright annoying, but what's shocking is 0:14 where AFTER the top part of the app got rubber-banded once, the bottom part of the page would refuse to scroll further down for another several seconds until 0:19 where it resumes scrolling further down. Then after proper scrolling of the bottom part resumes, the navigation bar just disappears into nowhere (!?).

This is why HTML5 just isn't there yet. Mobile Chrome on the other hand renders this page perfectly, 100% of the time, without any CSS hacks.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#109

Post by masklinn »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #94
jnem wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suprised by all this safari love in 2016. Working in front end web development, Safari has become the IE of today. Compatability and support for otherwise common web technologies is just plain broken.

Safari is slow to adopt new features, yes, but the features it has work properly and everything runs snappily.

> the features it has work properly

You may want to avoid that blanket statements around developers who've worked with indexeddb, safari's implementation is famously awful, so much so that caniuse makes special note of it.

Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Joeri wrote: post #78
update wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear this conversation is as old as time --- or at least Firefox & Chrome. person 1: "Firefox is slow now i'm moving back to Chrome" person 2: "interesting! I find the complete opposite and am moving back to Firefox!" :)

Those people should throw away and recreate their profile, including the server-side backup, which is exactly what switching browsers does.

[deleted]
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