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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

#141

Post by Chris_Newton »

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.

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

Assuming we’re still talking about mobile Safari on iOS here, unfortunately that isn’t true in all areas. For example, the way iOS Safari handles HTML5 media elements is essentially to play them through a plug-in. We had to implement a whole new authentication mechanism for a site I work on that serves video content to logged in users, because it wasn’t actually Safari requesting the video resource so we weren’t seeing the user’s ID cookie. There are numerous other problems with how iOS Safari handles video content that make it difficult or impossible to implement other functionality or UI behaviour that would make our site better for our users.

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

#142

Post by tachion »

wpietri wrote: post #25
coldtea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Machines will get faster quickly. Perhaps you missed the memo about Moore's Law officially dying, and the fact that speed (as opposed to transistor) wise, we haven't seen any real increase in the past 5+ years and we are not expecting anything much either... http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/moores... https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/2016/02/15/moores-l... http://fossbytes.com/intel-moor…

Yeah, as an industry I think we're in denial about this. Since the dawn of time, we could keep doing whatever we were doing and things would just magically get faster. That era is over. But we're still mostly using languages and techniques that aren't well suited for where the future's going.

Still? I'd thought we've already used the languages (and thus tools and techniques) designed to squeeze all the available performance from the hardware - it's called assembler ;) My grandfather, who was a programmer and to his last days used to write in asm was mocking me every time when I tried to convince him to anything higher level than asm, be it Python or C. Perhaps he was right and we'll be going back to such tools?

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

#143

Post by SquareWheel »

update wrote: post #44
thenomad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly, I have recently found Firefox so slow - particularly on YouTube where for some reason it's unusable - that I'm considering a full-fledged switch to Chrome.

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!" :)

It often seems like this is because has dozens of old, forgotten extensions running in the background. They suck up memory and generally slow things down. Switching to erases this problem! For a few years, anyway... And then the cycle repeats.

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

#144

Post by zaroth »

coldtea wrote: post #12

Since nobody in the comments seems to have read TFA thoroughly: it's specifically about the mobile Chrome and Safari.

Amen. Probably just spending too much time on HN lately but I'm getting increasingly frustrated at the number of comments which are orthogonal or oblivious to the OP.

Yesterday's worst offender I think was PriceZombie where fully half the commenters didn't realize it was the Affiliate program not the Pricing API they got kicked off and so many "they could just scrape the data", "but no what about CFAA" back and forth.... And you read it and just shake your head :-(

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

#145

Post by j_s »

jsolson wrote: post #125
jacobolus wrote: post #84

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 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.

Extensions can impact performance dramatically.

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

#146

Post by kbrosnan »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #92
athenot wrote: post #50

> I've learned the hard way that Chrome is the new IE. I started having similar thoughts when seeing sites that require Chrome because they use some (admittedly awesome) new browser feature that's not yet standard. It's given me flashbacks to the days where people used ActiveX for some accessory feature out of "coolness" when they could have had a slightly less fancy site but which would work across browsers.

It's not unusual to visit a site (often something neglected but really important, like a support website), and find it simply doesn't load in Firefox. Then I open it in Chrome and it works. And it's clear which browser the developers tested the site against.

When people come across such things please report them to https://webcompat.com/ There are some Firefox, IE and webdevs that work on understanding what is broken and trying to get sites to work cross browser.

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

#147

Post by jsolson »

Crito wrote: post #135
jsolson wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you manage hundreds of tabs in Chrome? I used to use hundreds of tabs in firefox, but firefox had an effective tree-style tabs extension...

I tend to partition them into windows once the favicons go away. Otherwise mostly based on the ordering (which I adjust regularly).

Much of the time they are effectively a queue of things to review/skim/familiarize myself with while I'm authoring some code or a design doc. The ones with different favicons tend to be things like bugs where I owe an update, so I scan through them regularly (I'm extremely forgetful when it comes to lists of things to do).

Honestly I know how tree-style management would go for me: I'd group a bunch of things together in a tree and forget about them, largely defeating the purpose of having kept the tab open for me.

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

#148

Post by speeder »

Bjartr wrote: post #86
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.

You can probably go through the cleartype calibration wizard to improve the font rendering, I'm basing that on the assumption that the out of the box settings are probably tuned to look good on generic lcd screens

I did, many, MANY times, also tried disabling it, and doing other things.

there are two issues: 1) Windows 8 assumes CRTs won't ever be used with it, and takes the liberty to do some LCD specific graphics stuff, that doesn't even work in LCDs that are organized differently (example: if the panel is "sideways" somehow).

2) the default system font of Windows 8 onwards is "Segoe", that renders poorly in CRTs, and even worse if you disable anti-aliasing of any kind.

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

#149

Post by speeder »

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?!?

Because it is better... it is just big.

CRT advantages over the LCDs I have here:

1) Greatly better contrast, in fact it is what made me switch back to CRT (all my LCDs have extremely poor contrast, in some of them is impossible to watch "Game of Thrones" for example because in dark scenes you see just everything gray, except for the teeth of the actors).

2) Greatly better colours (LCD not only has colour shifting as you move around, it has less colours overall too).

3) Greatly faster response time. (even to do normal stuff, like using normal programs, with LCDs I misclick a lot).

4) I can use whatever resolution I want... I can play old games in low resolution can play new games in high resolution, can play widescreen games letterboxed or stretched, can play GPU-intensive games in low resolution to make them faster without losing quality due to upscaling, etc...

5) It feels much easier on my eyes for some reason, I am not sure what.

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

#150

Post by flanbiscuit »

jsolson wrote: post #125
jacobolus wrote: post #84

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 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.

Just curious to know why you, or anyone else, need 100+ tabs open. Especially when you say you can have up to 400. Can you remember what's in each? I'm not judging, just trying to understand because it's so different from how I use browsers. When my tabs start to become so small that I can no longer see the titles on them I start to clean up by either bookmarking them or close them. I rarely need to bookmark so I don't have a million bookmarks.
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