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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

#121
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It specifically ranks chrome and chrome mobile seperately (both poorly), then talks about mobile development later in the article.

Well, were "later" is 80% of the article...

Including comparing mobile Safari to desktop Chrome, so I think its all part of one argument.

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

#122

I've always liked this article by one of Stripe's interface designers: https://medium.com/@bdc/chrome-is-the-new-ie-1a21c1efc133#.3... >Chrome is unfortunately contributing to the web’s bad reputation by caring more about developers than end-users. Mobile Safari can easily handle, say, a Photos.app-like interface with a translucent navigation bar, native-like swipe gestures and smooth animations. Chrome handles none…

I'm a Windows user, and one thing I dislike about Chrome on Windows is the text rendering. Here is a screenshot of some text from the Google Play store rendered in IE, Firefox and Chrome. Click the image to see it in its full size: http://imgur.com/yYKSNBB Firefox looks the best to me; Chrome the worst. IE is not great either, but it is better at larger font sizes than Chrome (IMO). You might argue that the differenc…

I'm pretty sure this is because Chrome uses Skia (Android's vector graphics system) instead of the native DirectWrite like Firefox and IE do.

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

#123
post #108

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 th…

In what case do you need it to be off?

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#125

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 see this critique now and then, and it always makes me wonder what is wrong with your Chrome installation.

I typically have somewhere between 200 and 400 tabs open, and I work on a wimpy little 11" MacBook Air. The vast majority of those tabs are heavy things like Google Docs. Chrome seems to barely notice.

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

#126
I've shipped a Cordova app for iOS that utilized heavy touch interaction. We found that GPU-rendered elements were best kept at the top of the DOM and had to do some serious restructuring of the app to get everything to perform "well enough" on the iPhone 4.

Weird thing is, when we went native, the users didn't seem to care too much. Comparison tests repeatedly left us with users that didn't notice/care about a lagging touch interaction or a screen that took too long to load. This was the case for both in-house tests and overall app usage metrics.

In our case (dating app), I think we noticed something akin to the weather app phenomenon: if an app tells you it's going to rain, and it doesn't, you feel lucky. If the app tells you it's not going to rain, and it does, you blame the app.

Most people either don't notice, assume they need to upgrade their device, or believe there's some technical problem that's out of their control (which it is) and that their experience only depends on what the app does, not how fast it does it. If the app does what it says it will do, albeit slowly, they'll still use it. This isn't to say that buggy apps won't lose users, but rather, slow apps aren't as bad as we might think.

(Note: on the flip side, I've made performance improvements on large scale consumer web sites that saw noticeable increases in user activity/revenue)

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

#127
post #49

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

weird. I'm running ff + ublock on a 2.5 year old nexus 5 and it works fine.

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

#128
post #108

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 th…

In what case do you need it to be off?

Look closely at 0:14 - 0:18 where there are a couple of major UI hiccups in the midst of the rubber band scrolling, especially 0:16 - 0:17 where it refuses to scroll beyond a certain part of the page despite there being content further down. This resolves itself automatically at 0:19 but then the navigation bar disappears.

Also, from a UI design standpoint, to maintain consistency with everything else in the ecosystem, the navigation bar (i.e. the "entire page") should NEVER scroll or have rubber-band effects for a web app. Only scrollable divs should scroll. Yes, you can disable this in Safari with CSS, but it will still hiccup ~5% of the time.

HTML5 is supposed to be a convenient way to develop Android/iOS in one go. But it's these things that make people say "to hell with it, let's just write native iOS/Android versions" because the native UI widgets don't have these hiccups.

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

#129

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…

My firefox is doing fine with several hundred tabs (on Windows though).

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

#130

My Nexus chrome browser is magnitudes faster than a fresh Firefox install. I don't know what this person is talking about.

You need to compare to Safari and iOS devices to see the real difference.

Will do.
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