Hacker News Reader

Comment by MadWombat | Hacker News Reader

I didn't have any complaints about speed. Who actually cares about browser speed? But I do care that suddenly, my browser looks completely different, half the functionality I use is missing and there is no way for me to get it back. The fact that this happened as an automatic upgrade without as much as asking me whether or not I want it to happen is not exactly a winning point either.

Edit: It seems that I was too hasty with my "who cares about speed" question. Apparently a lot of people do. I guess I just never found FF that much slower than other browsers. If it takes a second or two longer to load some page it is just not important to me.

View on HN

>Who actually cares about browser speed?

I do. I can't use a browser that does not feel snappy. I couldn't care less about whether tab edges are round or not.

>Who actually cares about browser speed?

Millions of people who've switched to Chrome. Including hundreds that have said as much in HN comments over the last 5 years.

great. let them use Chrome then. FF was strong in customization. I don't care if site refresh takes 20ms or 50ms - I can't notice.

I do care very much if you break all of my current extensions and as a result the UI behavior I was used to is gone. It's like being forced to switch to a completely new browsers. If I wanted different browser I could have switched to Chrome years ago, thank you very much. Customization is much more important than speed.

>Customization is much more important than speed.

Obviously it's not, since the majority of Firefox user base (which used to be very high) jumped to Chrome 5-10 years ago, despite the first having customizations (add-ons) and the latter not yet (and when it added, incompatible ones).

In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.

sigh... should have ended that sentence with "for me", but I thought that it was clear enough that the entire paragraph is about my preferences, not talking about users in general.

still - as you wrote, folks who cared about speed jumped the ship already. Honestly, I don't believe they're coming back, just because FF's speed is now comparable to Chrome.

> In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.

alternatively: advanced users that tend to use add-ons also happen to be those who know how to disable telemetry.

> Who actually cares about browser speed?

Pretty much every end user, especially non-tech related end users.

It's kind of a huge deal FYI.

> Who actually cares about browser speed?

This, from Hacker News, who not one week ago was complaining about "everything being perceptibly slower" and who constantly complains about latency in applications. Pretty sure everyone cares about browser speed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com