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Comment by cbryan | Hacker News Reader

The problem with your point is that it assumes users' are using Chrome because of its rendering speed. I don't think that's the case.

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No, I'm not actually assuming that, because I realize there is only negligible difference between major browsers today in terms of rendering performance, and none can approach the rendering performance of native UI frameworks on mobile.

But I am assuming that a browser offering a gigantic leap in UX through native-like rendering performance will entice web app developers to recommend that browser over others, because it's nigh impossible to build a consistently 60fps non trivial app with native-like interactions and transitions on the web today, while Servo and Webrender aim to make 60fps on the web the norm rather than the exception.

I think it's different now, but when I first switched to Chrome it was absolutely because of performance.

I occasionally run Firefox (out of nostalgia, idealism, or the need to test a site), and the fact that it is so slow is absolutely what stops me from switching back to it.

If you ran it again it would be fast. Chances are you are going through an update/check process

Nah. One piece of rendering I particularly care about is interactive SVG performance, and -- while, as another thread says, we can't expect smooth 60 FPS experiences from current desktop browsers -- the difference between Chrome and Firefox is the difference between 15 FPS and 1 FPS.

Recently all toolbar icons in Firefox have been converted to SVGs [1] and in the process several performance problems were found and fixed or are in the process of being fixed [2]. You may want to try out a recent Nightly build.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347543 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054016

I adopted chrome because of the speed, but I keep using it because I'm used to it and it works fine. I know my way in and out of chrome's dev tools. On firefox it would be a struggle to figure out a web development routine.

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