The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by smeehee » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 9:29 PM UTC

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…

I think that the IE11 one, of those, is best. I would have said that Firefox's rendering matched it but it's doing that broken kind of anti-aliasing which adds colour fringing.

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

#192

Post by PeCaN » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

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?!?

I worked with a CRT monitor for a while (design job at a non-profit; I had 2 CRTs and a several year old Mac Pro—it held up very well though) and it was actually quite nice.

- Non-16:9 aspect ratio. Photoshop is much nicer on 1600x1200 (relatively common CRT resolution) than on 1920x1080. CRTs are frequently 16:10 or even 4:3, so if I had a particularly nice one I'd be hesitant to replace it (4:3 LCD or LED are really hard to find).

- Higher refresh rate. 60Hz is nice enough, but 96Hz or higher is very pleasant. CRTs have a higher refresh rate than LCDs due to how they work (and if they didn't, you'd get quite a headache because there's no backlight).

High-end LCD screens have more or less caught up by now, but it took them a long time and they're still expensive (granted, high-end CRTs are at least as expensive now, but if you've had one for a while there's no real rush to replace it).

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

#193

Post by jimmaswell » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

victorhooi wrote: post #190

jimmaswell wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant the YouTube devs sabotaging it for Firefox, not the Chromium/Chrome devs doing something.

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

#194

Post by giovannibajo1 » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

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:/…

I've worked on a fairly complex web app with advanced graphic effects. It used Angular, and I can confirm anything this article says, and more. For instance, it's extremely complex to get a CSS animation perform reasonably well on Android, compared to old iPhones.

I don't think V8 is a problem per se, it's the whole browser that underperforms on mobile. The only positive point is that at least it updates quickly. Sometimes minor versions of iOS introduces bugs that you don't ever know when they will be fixed.

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

#195

Post by bunkerbewohner » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

Performance surely depends on the application. In my personal experience, a rather complex JS application I'm working on consistently (tested on Windows, Linux and Android) runs significantly smoother and faster in Chrome than in Firefox, and somewhat better than in Safari.

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

#196

Post by ctvo » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

A fun read, but there's a lot of claims and opinions without additional information or citation. Off the bat there's an arbitrary grades list. Why is Opera a B and desktop Chrome a B-? Author claims mobile Chrome required a bunch of optimizations. I believe him, but would love to read more on what type of work had to be done.

> The end result of this is that we've been brainwashed into believing Chrome is the best browser, when the reality is that across all metrics, Chrome is 3x to 300x slower than Safari.

In what way? The Javascript engine? Repainting?

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

#197

Post by hollander » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

Where does Firefox Mobile (Android) stand? I use that as my default browser on Android, and it works for me. I haven't used Chrome since long, especially because of privacy issues, so I can't compare them.

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

#198

Post by smeehee » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

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.

Sometimes, it's clear what minimum window size they've assumed. I know of one (bank login) which doesn't work well on a netbook due to this.

I tried to report the problem via the site feedback link which they helpfully provide in most of their page footers. It fails in Firefox but works fine in Chromium; I ended up reporting two problems reported instead of one.

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

#199

Post by sangnoir » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 10:22 PM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #177

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.

If by "common web technologies" you mean mostly non-standard or experimental technologies then yes. Lets not forget that it was Google that forked WebKit resulting in duplicated effort to implement various features. Google also loves to ship stuff that isn't actually standardized yet (which is fine) but today's web developers go whine about Safari not supporting it yet. No shit Sherlock, it's your own myopic view. On…

Most of the "experimental" features we whine about are supported by all vendors, save for Apple (Firefox, Chrome, Opera and freaking IE). It's a definite pattern: Safari is last to implement features, if at all.

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

#200

Post by runspired » Sat, Mar 26, 2016, 10:25 PM UTC

derimagia wrote: post #139

coldtea wrote: post #12

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

The main issue is that it shouldn't have ranked the desktop platforms. It sounds like those are more for him, because the rankings were confusing to me.

Author:

In some ways, yes. But the ranking is really where I slide various browsers in terms of ease of getting an app working well, and I think it's important to note that I generally find desktop Chrome more troublesome than Mobile Safari.

The article is primarily about mobile Chrome vs mobile Safari, but the issue is only partially Android's fault. Chrome performs just as bad in JS and render benchmarks on desktop as it does on mobile, and it's memory leaks are present in both; but this matters less on desktop because powerful machines mask this for us.