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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

#111

Post by eridius »

FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #3

I don't know about that Safari ranking. I get a super-fun rainbow wheel at least 2 or 3 times a day on Safari with only 3 or 4 tabs, and I rarely get that through chrome with upwards of 30. Before you give a score to every browser, why don't you back it up with something objective?

Which sites are you loading in the tabs?

These days Safari actually shows that rainbow spinner when the background process that runs the tab is hanging, even though Safari.app itself is perfectly responsive. This usually is indicative of a problem with a site loaded in one of the tabs in the window (I believe Safari does process separation per-window), as opposed to a problem with Safari or WebKit itself.

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

#112

Post by Klathmon »

jacobolus wrote: post #106
Klathmon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I didn't mean to imply that you did, just that the person I replied to did.

Your explanation there is a great example of what I personally want to see more of. A clear concise reason why you prefer one browser to another.

So often its just "X is faster" or "Y uses less memory" without any other details. And those kinds of complaints help nobody.

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

#113

Post by eridius »

coverband wrote: post #96

I refuse to use Safari on iOS until they stop hiding the full URL on every web site. Shouldn't take too long, someone will soon figure out how to abuse it for successful phishing attacks.

How can you abuse that for phishing attacks? The whole reason for it to only show the domain is specifically to avoid common phishing attacks.

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

#114

Post by mixedCase »

zipwitch wrote: post #69
Razengan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome was (probably still is) the only usable browser left on Windows, but I never used it or had to use it ever since I switched to Macs a few years ago. Aside from the plugins ecosystem (which I don't need) Safari works infinitely better (loads faster, uses less resources, even with 100s of tabs, and has nice little features like the Reading List, Reading Mode, Force-Touch Peek and so on) and fits into the OS X lo…

The PaleMoon fork of Firefox is still quite useable.

Absolutely not, it has really fallen behind on features and the devs aren't competent nor numerous enough to keep the pace. They may get back on track with the new fork they're planning, but I'm betting they're going to fall behind again after that.

Maintaining an entire modern browser on your own is no joke.

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

#115

Post by Macha »

takno wrote: post #49
therealmarv wrote: post #45

Messing for the last several months also with mobile browsers on my Android devices. Especially because mobile scare-/malware was bothering me too much in recent times ( harmless example you could open on Android: https://shkspr.mobi/vibratescam/ ). Compared them all (Chrome, Chrome beta, Firefox, Firefox beta, Opera, Brave) and realized that Firefox+uBlock, especially since Firefox 45, is reasonable fast and good to…

I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong. FF45 on a fast Android phone for me is almost unbearably laggy both on loading and scrolling pages. I mean to the point where I can't really understand how anybody is using it. I've tried this with and without a couple of ad blockers and ghostery

Been using Firefox on Android since they switched over from their initial UI to the natively built one. Used it on a HTC Desire HD, One M7, Nexus 7 and Nexus 5X. Only site I really have issues on are the Wikia family of sites. Just checked, they're better but still not a pleasant experience on Chrome either.

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

#116

Post by Macha »

masklinn wrote: post #109
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or even I have a CSS issue to look into in Safari soon where a combination of tables, max-width, width and overflow properties is behaving oddly on Safari only (even IE gets it right). This is CSS2 stuff..

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

#117

Post by Joeri »

_greim_ wrote: post #104
Joeri wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you measured this? Do you actually build or use specific apps where the dominant factor is JS execution time and not layout or network time?

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

#118

Post by alexvoda »

henrikschroder wrote: post #98
speeder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a CRT monitor, and Windows 8 font rendering is overall TERRIBLE on it, as in, heavily aliased AND full of colour fringes. So I installed MacType, only to find that Chrome has two ways to render fonts, and both are extremely wonky, I spent like 30 minutes tweaking MacType to my tastes, and then 3 hours re-tweaking it to make Chrome behave properly, it was a serious pain.

> I have a CRT monitor Sorry, I have to bite. Why?!?

Is it a Sony GDM-FW900 ?

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

#119

Post by Illniyar »

jacobolus wrote: post #84
LoSboccacc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Safari is also the only desktop browser that can handle my "power user" web browsing style. Chrome completely falls over after a few dozen tabs are opened. Firefox holds up better, but still starts starts stuttering when it gets to 80–100 tabs. Safari keeps going fine with several hundred tabs. Edit: For the folks who are apparently offended by my browser use, I’ll elaborate: Why would anyone want a large number of t…

I can't imagine opening 10 tabs, let alone hundreds of tabs without tree-style-tabs.

And only firefox has the infastructure to support such changes to its UI.

I would say that the only broweser that supports your use case is firefox, not safari.

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

#120

Post by ksec »

And yet people here https://twitter.com/nolanlawson/status/709456732381175808 and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuHCHHuWL1s&feature=youtu.be...

Complain, or hate Safari, as if it were the IE 6.

I dont do web development much any more. I did in the era of IE6, so someone please enlightened me. In the IE6 era, even the simplest, basic function and table layout ( Tables :O ) wouldn't look the same in Netscape, Opera or IE. DHTML requires different script for different browsers.

Today we have likely 10x+ amount of standard features working across all browsers.

And we continue to introduce new features, many of them either dead in the water or got replaced by better alternatives.

To me, echoing Stripe Medium post, Chrome tends to introduce the features and left it as is. Developers get new toys to play around with it. And try to implement as much as possible. On the other hand Safari is slow to adopt, carefully picking what work best, refine it before it is landed. And Apple's focus for Safari is Web "Pages", or make it as beautiful as PDFs, while Chrome want the Web to be "Apps". These two different focus has often lead to a very different selection of features.

Personally, I like the way Safari works much better. Putting in a features is easy, taking one out is hard.

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