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Comment by mpakes | Hacker News Reader

After using Chrome for 6-8 weeks, I can't go back. Firefox has so many things going for it (history, extensions, compatibility, etc, etc).. but I can't handle the slowness. The JavaScript performance deficit is bad enough, but the outrageous startup time puts it over the top. I'll keep it around for occasional compatibility testing, but it's no longer the go-to browser.

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Linux 64-bit Sunspider benchmarks

FF 3.6 x86_64: 2940 ms Chromium x86_64 : 656 ms

enuff said

Startup time is MUCH improved in Firefox 3.6. Chrome still feels slightly quicker, but we're talking on the order of 100s of milliseconds. For something that I do once a day, at most, the difference is negligible.

It does seem to be improved, but on my system (new-ish MBP running OS X), Chrome and Safari startup is nearly instantaneous, and Firefox still lags. I don't know how it compares on Windows.

Still.. bravo to the Firefox team for making a big improvement in this department. My ire is now refocused on the (lack of) JavaScript performance. :-)

Do you have a lot of plugins installed? I tested on a 6-month-old MacBook Pro 13", on both OS X and Win7, and Firefox starts up pretty much instantly (less than 500msecs). Agreed, Chrome and Safari seem marginally faster, but I don't close my browser very often, so it really doesn't matter.

"Startup time is MUCH improved in Firefox 3.6. Chrome still feels slightly quicker, but we're talking on the order of 100s of milliseconds. For something that I do once a day, at most, the difference is negligible."

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/psychology-we...

Read the "The Effects of Slow Download Times" section. Those miniscule effects add up big over time, and lead to better overall satisfaction of the service. The link specifically refers to various web services, but I would be extremely surprised if there was not a similar effect in relation between satisfaction and general speediness (UI snappiness, JS/HTML/etc rendering speed) of various browsers.

Thats not to say that speed is the only reason to choose a browser, but it likely has more of an effect on how you use your browser (and therefore how you use the internet) than you would be able to consciously discern.

Startup time is usually a matter of vacuuming your sqlite. I actually ended up running firefox entirely from ram, which makes it significantly faster.

How? Just clearing the cache?

ram: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1120475 (I think I've seen windows guides somewhere)

defragmenting: http://lifehacker.com/5344418/make-firefox-faster-by-vacuumi...

I start up my browsers once or twice a month, so start time is pretty irrelevant. I must not use javascript-heavy sites because I have never noticed a performance difference in Chrome.

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