Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

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It really depends on the websites. Firefox has long been significantly faster than it was in the Firefox-1.x days, when it was the fastest browser. It's always been perfectly snappy and efficient for hackernews, craigslist, 10,000-line colored diffs in the cgit web frontend ... but popular web sites got many times slower. Chrome enabled web developers to do atrociously inefficient things and just not care.

Even today, Travis-CI really struggles in firefox, it's modern pleasing animations are just so atrociously coded. And remember when the Reason (facebook language) website was unveiled, it really killed firefox, because of some strange shadow effect applied to all letters or something ...

I think the issue is less poor coding and resource consumption and more the fact that devs seem to primarily test their website on Chrome.

Whether inadvertently or not, the Chrome team hit on a genius way of gaining market share by focusing on dev tools so heavily.

i remember years back when people were installing Chrome simply because it had Adobe Flash built in and didn't require a system wide install anymore. For a while, that was the biggest reason my friends installed it. Then Flash started going away, and they were still using it, and wrapped up tightly in the Googleverse with Gmail and then Android.

I recall Firebug being one of the reasons for sticking with Firefox before Chrome had dev tools.

The web is a complex platform, so it's definitely not hard to wind up using some feature that performs well in one browser but poorly in another. I don't know that it necessarily reflects badly on any individual browser--software is complex and it's hard to determine what combinations of web features will wind up being widely used. I do think it's a shame when this happens because sites don't get tested in anything but Chrome. There's no excuse when large companies release webapps and don't test in multiple browsers.

(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)

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