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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

#211

Post by bwat48 »

takno wrote: post #49
therealmarv wrote: post #45

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

I've got a wimpy first gen moto g and don't have any issues with firefox

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

#212

Post by georgemcbay »

r00fus wrote: post #67
mwcampbell wrote: post #52

How much of the poor performance discussed in this article is due to Chrome itself, and how much is due to the fact that Android devices tend to have worse single-core performance than iOS devices? Is there a browser for Android based on a recent version of WebKit (not Blink)? If so, that would help answer the question.

Didn't the author address this by talking about testing on both burner and top-line android models vs getting the web app working decently on an iPhone 4S?

Not really. Top of the line Android phones can actually be worse for this problem than cheaper ("burner") ones.

Top-of-the-line Android phones tend to follow the pattern of having a CPU with many cores each of which is slower than the CPU would be if they used a single core solution. This is excellent for native apps that properly use multithreading, but dreadful for web apps since JavaScript as it is commonly written (ignoring the various *Worker extensions to the language attempted over the years) is essentially single-threaded, so the majority of the app code is running on one slow core while the rest sit idle (or run background services that have nothing to do with the foreground app).

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

#214

Post by ehsanu1 »

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 don't know which version of Ember the author is using, but note that last year Ember introduced a new rendering engine called glimmer which performs much better on the same benchmark:

https://www.isemberfastyet.com/

https://dbmonster.firebaseapp.com/

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

#215

Post by userbinator »

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 would have thought that text rendering would be top priority from a UX perspective given that reading text constitutes such a major part of browsing the web.

The problem, as demonstrated by your example and the replies it's generated, is that people have different preferences on text rendering.

Of your 3 samples I think IE is the best and Chrome's is the worst, with FF inbetween. More precisely, I'd be OK with reading text rendered the first way indefinitely (although I'd want to change it), the second one I could probably stand for a few minutes, and the last one I'd want to stop looking at as quickly as possible, because of how blurry it looks.

This is what I normally use:

http://imgur.com/T3ihEqw

Sharp, pure non-antialiased text. I can read text like that all day without feeling like my eyes are going out of focus.

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

#216

Post by jsolson »

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…

It's actually because I'm so terrible at remembering certain types of things that I keep so many tabs. They are essentially an accumulation of "what I need to work on" for the next few days or weeks, along with the supporting research work I've done to accomplish those things so far. By grouping them in separate windows per task I'm basically keeping all of that context. I could also do the same with bookmark sets, but I've found when I do that I tend to forget about the task itself entirely.

There are probably more efficient workflows, but this one works fairly well for me.

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

#217

Post by sydneysider »

MBCook wrote: post #90
sydneysider wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the adblock extension on safari makes it freeze up for a second when I open a new tab. apart from that, soooooo much snappier than chrome. (desktop, not mobile ofc)

I had that same problem with Adblock. Much happier now on Safari and uBlock.

Link for ublock on safari? I looked but my google-fu is lacking I guess

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

#218

Post by hs86 »

Illniyar wrote: post #119
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 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.

Check out Tab Outliner[1] for Chrome. Its integration into the Chrome UI is not as good as Tree Style Tab's in Firefox but is has better keyboard shortcuts, rearranging tabs with Drag and Drop is more intuitive and its built in session manager allows you to unload entrie trees from RAM without losing the tab hierarchy.

This enables a workflow with several hundreds of tabs without the drawback of the additional RAM and CPU usage. Previously I shared the impression that Tree Style Tab for Firefox has ruined all other browsers for me and I could never switch away from Firefox but Tab Outliner showed me that I was wrong.

[1]http://tabsoutliner.com/

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

#219

Post by thenomad »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #71
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!" :)

And seemingly few people trying to diagnose why. Particularly when it's specific behaviour / sites that are slow.

You're making some assumptions there. It may also be that they have tried to diagnose why, haven't managed to find anything in an hour or so, and feel that their time could probably be more productively used, post browser switch, elsewhere.

(That's the case for me with FF at the moment, anyway.)

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

#220

Post by thenomad »

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 great on high-end computers either. The PC I'm usually browsing from is high enough spec to meet Oculus VR's recommended spec for VR experiences (just about). But YouTube on FF is still pretty unusable.
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