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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

#181

Post by bzbarsky »

jimmaswell wrote: post #160
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.

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.

It's not necessarily on purpose, but as far as I can tell they develop for Chrome first and then make it work in other browsers as needed. The result is that they do end up depending on various Chrome quirks, including both bugs and things it supports that other browsers don't yet, and the dependencies may or may not be found during testing (which is also Chrome-biased as far as I can tell; I can assure you they test more in Chrome on Android than in Firefox on Android!).

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

#182

Post by erikpukinskis »

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…

Ugh. Candy. Who cares. People are dying in this world and you judge a platform by candy.

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

#183

Post by bzbarsky »

fixermark wrote: post #132

I think the biggest issue is the high variance in performance between browsers overall, coupled with the declarative nature of UI rendering using the DOM. I have a UI that runs very smoothly in Chrome and Safari (desktop, not mobile). As of Firefox 44, it's unrunnable in Firefox. Why? Don't know. Profiling says we're losing a bunch of time in "layout" but why we're losing a bunch of time in layout, I can't tell. Chro…

If you have a public URL to the page involved, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can figure out what's going on there.

In general, in situations like this when there is a public link available, please do file bugs on Firefox!

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

#184

Post by vacri »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #150
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.

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…

I'm a sysadmin and need to troubleshoot a lot of different services. I use firefox with tab groups (the best thing since browser-sliced bread). I will have one group open for my AWS pages, for example, which will have separate tabs for ec2 instances (and maybe) ec2 volumes, ec2 snapshots, memcache, database 1, database 2, instances in another region, pricing page, monitoring, access management, so on and so forth. All separate tabs, because it takes 5-10s to load a new page in the AWS console, and then you also need to subnavigate that page. Troubleshooting will open up new tabs in-between those tabs. Throw those all in one group. Then, when I need to "do AWS", I switch to that group.

So why bother closing a tab when I can just switch out of the group when I'm doing something else? Another group does mail and google docs, another group does 'Atlassian stuff' (ticketing + wiki), another does build and CI, so on and so forth.

The only problem with this approach is memory consumption, because the modern web developer includes approximately 3/5ths of the entire internet on every page, and I 'only' have 8GB on my machine (non-expandable). Performance is fine for a while, but eventually (a couple of weeks) it starts to grind. Restarting FF at this point doesn't autoload the tabs, so it gives you a fresh slate, effectively.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

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

#185

Post by reitanqild »

Pxtl wrote: post #32
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've actually started switching browsers by website. General browsing? Firefox. Google Maps or YouTube? Chrome. Dont get me started on how painful mobile chrome is. The most hilariously bad are ironically mobile "responsive" websites that just make it crawl and the scroll position skips around during long loads so tapping a link is Russian roulette - the link can move after the touch and you get whatever moved into i…

I have managed to avoid it.

Feels like this would be like going back to the end of IEs reign..

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

#186

Post by hrktb »

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…

Would you see Discuss or Gmail or google docs implemented as a static site ? As I understand it, we are talking about sites that behave more like an actual application, and not a wikipedia like "let's read one page after the other" type of experience.

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

#188

Post by victorhooi »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #150
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.

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…

I don't have 400, but I do have 200+, spread across three windows.

I use Chrome's profile feature, to have separate Google accounts signed in.

And my tabs tend to be in "clusters". E.g. I'll have one cluster (5-10 tabs) where I'm doing research on IPv6, another where I'll have a cluster on some JS, another on say, Python list performance etc.

I remember where each cluster is, and even some of the tabs within each cluster - so I just page quickly to that cluster if I know I need to retrieve that info.

Also, I tend to not be that disciplined when bookmarking or filing stuff - so there's that as well.

I'm still yet to find a good lightweight note-taking system - Confluence as a wiki isn't bad, but is still quite heavyweight.

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

#189

Post by spankalee »

hrktb wrote: post #175
robdodson wrote: post #162

I didn't see the author at any point question the performance of their JS framework. More specifically, it seems like the author is using Ember for their apps. My (very rough) understanding is that Ember tends to have a lot of issues running on V8. Due to the way Ember is written, V8 tends to have a hard time optimizing for it. Looking at the dbmon benchmarks there's a big difference between Ember performance: http:/…

> My (very rough) understanding is that Ember tends to have a lot of issues running on V8 From an outsider's perspective, it would be fair to question if the problem is on Ember's side or V8's side. Look around the web, From the reports Ember is performing well enough on Safari and firefox, so puting the blame on V8 seems sensitive to me.

You have a good point. Ember triggers a weakness in V8's optimizations causing repeated optimizing and de-optimizing of core Ember functions, which takes time and generates lots of garbage, and V8 should fix that.

My understanding is the V8 team _is_ attempting to fix Ember (and Ember-style code) performance on multiple fronts, things like adding an interpreter, tuning how opt and de-opt are triggered, maybe adding dev tools that make it clear when script is spending time de-opting. Probably the most important thing would be to get more realistic workloads into benchmarks.

Ember does appear to be a pathological case though. Every other framework of similar size has managed to attain decent performance on Chrome.

One take-away here is that JS developers should not assume that all code is fast in all VMs. Optimizations are often (very educated) guesswork, and developed and tested against some corpus of benchmarks. If you use a pattern that isn't common in the benchmarks, you might trigger an unexpected problem. Framework developers should measure performance across browsers early, before baking in any hard to change design decisions.

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

#190

Post by victorhooi »

jimmaswell wrote: post #160
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.

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.

Seeing as most of Chrome is open-source and on Github, that's probably a little far-fetched....

https://github.com/chromium/chromium

It's more likely that most people within Google use Chrome (can confirm), and that if you notice your webapp is performing slowly, you could conceivably go over and speak to the Chrome developers to get them to look into it if it's a performance bug and fix it.

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