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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

#151

Post by update »

SquareWheel wrote: post #143
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!" :)

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.

I just did a clean install of OS X El Capitan and within an hour it was obvious that Chrome was better at managing memory. [extensions: UBlock Origin, Ghostery]

Personally, I think the browsers actually do beat each other in performance every couple of months. i.e. Chrome Version 49.0.2623.87 (64-bit) is better than (current firefox version) but next month it'll be the reverse.

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

#152

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

j_koreth wrote: post #46
zdkl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same experience. I've switched to Vivaldi, it feels like the Firefox of old. It's chromium under the hood though

Opera 12 is the only viable choice

I still have it installed. Otter is a good modern alternative for those of us who love Opera 12. It's still missing features but it's getting there, and it's blazing fast.

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

#153

Post by stevebmark »

If you're having trouble figuring out the point of this article it's because it's just trolling. This guy ran into a few problems specific to mobile Chrome, and got so angry he wrote this unedited sting piece.

> Chrome is the new IE

Browser wars are troll wars by children. That's all. Move along.

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

#154

Post by coldtea »

tachion wrote: post #142
wpietri wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, it's a totally different landscape.

First, CPUs are much more complex, with branch prediction, parallel execution, etc, so manually rolling assembler is not really feasible.

Second, programs are much larger and demanding nowadays (e.g. neither graphics, nor sound, nor networking and numerous other modern day services were as advanced, prevalent, or even existing, in the good times of assembler coded apps).

Third, today it's all about multicore performance. Not much use to squeeze everything from a single core, when you have other 3 or 7 or 15 sitting idle...

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

#155

Post by mbrock »

open-source-ux wrote: post #76
abritishguy wrote: post #20

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…

On OS X, too, Safari's text is way stronger and more beautiful than Chrome's.

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

#156

Post by jimmaswell »

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?!?

In my case I got it for free when someone was throwing it out, it looks good, it's big enough and 1600x1200, has the expected very low response time, and it's not really that heavy, so I really have no incentive to pay to replace it. In addition I like the anachronistic aesthetic and degaussing is nice.

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

#157

Post by mbrock »

donatj wrote: post #75

I read all these instructions he gives on making an "efficient" app and just wonder if everyone wouldn't be better off with less JavaScript. I have never used a JavaScript app I would call "better" than a static site. 2-4mb of Js? You've gotta be kidding me. There's no any that's a better experience than 10-20 50kb HTML requests for anyone. You're just working way to hard. Very very few apps benefit from that kind of…

That's a surprising comment to read as someone's who's immersed in making web apps in JavaScript that work great offline and synchronize data when possible. For me, sites that require network roundtrips for every state change are often near unusable. Instead, with JavaScript and AppCache/ServiceWorker, I can make web-delivered programs with instant response times, intelligent auto-updating, and so on. 2 MB of application code isn't too bad when you can download it once on WiFi and then never need to touch the network again.

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

#158

Post by jimmaswell »

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.

There have been extensions for Firefox that opened tabs in IE compatibility mode, which were needed occasionally in the past. I wonder if such a thing for chrome compatibility will end up having to be made. Hopefully not.

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

#159

Post by magicalist »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #89

I'm curious to see some actual benchmarks... In my experience, Chrome still has the fastest JavaScript. It still renders WebGL pages the best (although Emscripten allows Firefox some impressive feats). Does Safari have some special extensions for the shitty 'native look' apps I encounter at Apple.com? Did their JavaScript engine become 100x faster in the year or so since I've used it? Is the author comparing an iPhon…

bizarre that a comment asking for actual benchmarks is downvoted in the face of a hundred upvoted handwavey comments about people's current favorite browser.

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

#160

Post by jimmaswell »

thenomad wrote: post #14
dsugarman wrote: post #9

I was waiting for someone to come out and say it. 6 months ago, I couldn't imagine using another browser regularly but chrome has become so slow for me, I can't stand it. I switched to Firefox.

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.

Youtube is slow and unstable on Firefox on non-high-end computers. I seriously wonder if Google does it on purpose, making the site work best on Chrome with enough plausible deniability for it to not be obvious. Other video sites (both flash and html5 video) work perfectly fine with no lag or jitter on Firefox on low end computers for me where Youtube is unusable.
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