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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

#131

Post by wodenokoto »

dheera wrote: post #108

Mobile Safari doesn't go anywhere near the top of my rankings until they can make it simple to disable the silly rubber-band scrolling for mobile apps. Every CSS solution I've tried only works 95% of the time, never 100%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkwZbi3AslY The rubber band stuff is downright annoying, but what's shocking is 0:14 where AFTER the top part of the app got rubber-banded once, the bottom part of th…

I thought the video was of removing rubber failing.

I would hate your Web app if you removed rubber. I don't mind at all if your top bar follows the rubber, which happens on plenty of websites.

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

#132

Post by fixermark »

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. Chrome and Safari just... Don't. And there's so much decoupling between the rendering agents on all three browsers and the language we're using to declare what should be rendered that my best tool after profiling is guess-and-check.

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

#133

Post by BinaryIdiot »

kainolophobia wrote: post #126

I've shipped a Cordova app for iOS that utilized heavy touch interaction. We found that GPU-rendered elements were best kept at the top of the DOM and had to do some serious restructuring of the app to get everything to perform "well enough" on the iPhone 4. Weird thing is, when we went native, the users didn't seem to care too much. Comparison tests repeatedly left us with users that didn't notice/care about a laggi…

Interesting though it doesn't preclude it from being a UX issue. For instancing asking people who are already active users rarely matters (unless the app is just that bad). Typically making a change like that you measure the retention rate of new users and if it went up or down. How was the retention rate of new users after the change?

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

#134

Post by sweetbabyjesus »

therealmarv wrote: post #42
sweetbabyjesus wrote: post #37

My Nexus chrome browser is magnitudes faster than a fresh Firefox install. I don't know what this person is talking about.

You need to compare to Safari and iOS devices to see the real difference.

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.

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

#135

Post by Crito »

jsolson wrote: post #125
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 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.

How do you manage hundreds of tabs in Chrome? I used to use hundreds of tabs in firefox, but firefox had an effective tree-style tabs extension...

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

#136

Post by Manishearth »

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.

Check if sending the Chrome user agent string from Firefox makes it any faster or usable. This has been an issue in the past.

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

#137

Post by anon1385 »

lorenzhs wrote: post #103
anon1385 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You mean "on iOS", not on mobile devices in general. Also on FirefoxOS and ChromeOS where third party browsers aren't possible at all.

The first of which is discontinued and the second not an OS for mobile devices (phone/tablet)

FirefoxOS still exists.

Anyway if we are criticising organisations for creating platforms that prevents switching browsers then I don't think FirefoxOS's failure to achieve any kind of market penetration should exonerate Mozilla. FirefoxOS is/was objectively worse than what iOS does in that regard.

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

#138

Post by dheera »

wodenokoto wrote: post #131
dheera wrote: post #108

Mobile Safari doesn't go anywhere near the top of my rankings until they can make it simple to disable the silly rubber-band scrolling for mobile apps. Every CSS solution I've tried only works 95% of the time, never 100%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkwZbi3AslY The rubber band stuff is downright annoying, but what's shocking is 0:14 where AFTER the top part of the app got rubber-banded once, the bottom part of th…

I thought the video was of removing rubber failing. I would hate your Web app if you removed rubber. I don't mind at all if your top bar follows the rubber, which happens on plenty of websites.

I would hope that a web app is compared to a mobile native app experience, not a website... native app top bars never have the rubber effect. It's the stuff in the bottom that should have the rubber effect, but not buggy as in 0:14 - 0:18.

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

#139

Post by derimagia »

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.

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

#140

Post by kuschku »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #60
okket wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a "hype cycle" can only exist where the OS supports integration of 3rd party browsers (desktop only). On mobile devices you can rarely switch browsers without losing access to major parts of the OS (read: 3rd party browsers can render/view web pages, but forget about integration).

>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?

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