He hope the op knows that mobile Chrome on iPhone is not "chrome" at all. It's a layer on top of the outdated webview of iPhone.... :)
The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
221–230 of 230 posts
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
>On mobile devices you can rarely switch browsers without losing access to major parts of the OS You mean "on iOS", not on mobile devices in general. On Android at least all such integration is done with Intents, a broadcast message from the OS or one app to another, and those Intents can be remapped to target whatever app a user wants, meaning a third-party browser can be as integrated into the OS as Chrome. You can…
> Chrome is doing nothing secret and magic on Android. > having random third-parties replace the WebView in my app is a profoundly bad idea You haven’t heard of Chrome Custom Tabs, have you?
No, actually. Thanks for letting me know about that.
Regardless, my point stands: If I'm writing an app and I use a WebView or a Chrome Custom Tab, I'm going to want to know, for certain, that someone isn't switching out the underlying rendering engine.
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chrome is doing nothing secret and magic on Android. > having random third-parties replace the WebView in my app is a profoundly bad idea You haven’t heard of Chrome Custom Tabs, have you?
No, actually. Thanks for letting me know about that. Regardless, my point stands: If I'm writing an app and I use a WebView or a Chrome Custom Tab, I'm going to want to know, for certain, that someone isn't switching out the underlying rendering engine.
Well, but that’s the entire point of Chrome Custom Tabs. There are even Presto and Gecko based implementations of it.
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#224Earlier 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.
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.
YouTube's been fine in Firefox on my i5 6600 / r9 380, maybe you just need to start a new profile without old settings / extensions
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#225Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern frameworks have worked hard to mitigate DOM bottlenecks, thus pure JS bottlenecks are now a thing. Especially data-rich applications. Reflow and paint performance is still an issue but the focus on JS is worthwhile.
Have you measured this? Do you actually build or use specific apps where the dominant factor is JS execution time and not layout or network time?
Yes. String-processing tweets (linkify and emoji-insert) and crunching numbers for time series line charts were two areas where we saw some lag. It was React so these bottlenecks were happening during virtual DOM rendering.
And realizing GP was talking about client-side, but also don't forget server-side, where DOM doesn't exist and the hyper-focus on pure-JS perf is much appreciated.
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, actually. Thanks for letting me know about that. Regardless, my point stands: If I'm writing an app and I use a WebView or a Chrome Custom Tab, I'm going to want to know, for certain, that someone isn't switching out the underlying rendering engine.
Well, but that’s the entire point of Chrome Custom Tabs. There are even Presto and Gecko based implementations of it.
The "point" of Chrome Custom Tabs seems to be performance and better integration with the system browser.
I see that it's done via Intent, so it could potentially be swapped out, so you're right.
So then WebView is more of what I'm talking about, for when you want tight integration, or creating something like a Cordova app (though you can bundle a Cordova app with Crosswalk to sidestep WebView differences entirely); looks like Chrome Custom Tabs is more for when you want a good web experience, not a good embedded app experience.
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right. I ran a futuremark test on chrome, ff and safari (iphone 6) and chrome was the slowest BUT in terms of actual website loading, chrome was faster than FF. Although safari beat them all significantly! Future mark scores: Chrome:618 FF: 728 Safari: 2348 Actual website loading speeds were near instant on safari, followed by laggy chrome and incredibly slow FF.
While your test is exactly what is expected from iPhones, it says nothing about their performance on other devices. Chrome and Firefox on the iPhone are not the same Chrome and Firefox found on desktop and android devices. Apple restricts apps that provide web browsing to use old and outdated versions of the native IOS rendering engine and JavaScript engine. http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-wi…
Not anymore. Chrome switched to the native safari/webview recently, so it is much faster.
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#229I 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:/…
Author: Re Questioning Ember: I've questioned it many times (and vocally, but within the community itself where I'm an active member). This article is about something much bigger than my framework of choice. On the comparison above: I've called this one out before, it's a very poorly built Ember app that's also running a version from nearly 2.5 years ago, before Ember invested a ton of time in building a very fast re…
Thanks for the follow up. A lot of good info in there.
Btw, I just saw this article from the Discourse team on this same topic and was wondering what your thoughts are https://eviltrout.com/2016/02/25/fixing-android-performance....
Re: The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our expectations
#230What is this group the author mentions?
> Chrome has had such a problem with performance they formed a special group just to work the problem, but in nearly two years time that group has yet to produce anything tangible.