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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Browser vendors talk about benchmarks all the time but what really matters to me is startup and closing times; here Chrome really shines and FF3.6 is slow as hell.

It's probably about perception; maybe the browser should show a window even if it's not really ready (and maybe there is a problem with plugins and add-ons that need to initialize themselves, etc.)

Anyway, how is FF4b7 doing in this regard...?

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For me it's UI responsiveness - seems I must be one of few people in the world that care about it since I've never seen any article or benchmark on that (there was a couple about startup times), so I'm not even sure if it isn't only a matter of perception, but for me the problem with Firefox is that the UI feels slow, like there is a lag between clicking on an element and an action being taken by the program. Safari is also very bad at it (in Windows), as well as IE (but to a lesser extent) - Opera and Chrome on the other side are both great. But again, it's never a topic, so I suppose there's no progress on that in FF4, or is there?

UI responsiveness never seems to get the love it deserves. That I can count the time taken to respond to right-clicking a project in Eclipse on every machine and OS I have available is shocking. How can people use this software?

I just right-clicked on a project in Navigator in Eclipse. It opened instantly. I have about 10 projects though; maybe you have way more? Not sure what the problem might be on your end, but rest assured Eclipse does not behave that slowly for those that use it.

Or, perhaps, a single project that is enormous. Eclipse has rarely felt responsive to me, either.

I can do this with a single project on Mac OS X 10.6, Ubuntu 10.10, and Windows 7, and I have been able to repeat the observable latency on every machine running Eclipse I have ever seen, including those which were said to be 'fine' by their users.

I suspect it is more a matter of personal tolerance.

Are you doing Android development? If so, Eclipse 3.6 isn't compatible with the ADT plugin. I had the same slow downs, but moved back to 3.5, and it works fine now.

http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html

Actually, the Chrome team cares a lot about responsiveness and have written and even made videos on the subject. Here's an interview with Peter Kasting (UI engineer) specifically on the topic of UI responsiveness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymgXTdWWNUU&feature=playe...!

Mozilla's wiki on that: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Perceived_Performance - including ideas about program's startup time, page loading, tabs, scrolling, etc.

Chrome only shined at startup when I first installed it. Now that I've used it for a while and its browser history has been populated, its startup is now comparable to Firefox.

Chrome is crazy with history; it seems to save everything forever. I delete its history regularly; I had not noticed it had an impact on startup time, though.

There's got to be something with their history implementations. I've got about five months worth of history in Safari and it loads after reboot in a second.

Bootup time used to matter to me but now my laptop always sleeps - and likewise, I very rarely close all my browser tabs so the startup time is not very important to me.

It's not just about startup time, scrolling and switching tab is also a lot smoother in Chromium than in Firefox (at least on linux)

FF4b7 is still sower to startup than Chrome for me. They are right, though ... it does feel faster on webapps and rich sites than the previous beta.

True . Same with me too .

Strange, how often do you open/close your browser?

I use Firefox mostly with Selenium, to run my automated tests, so I do it numerous times each day.

After a while when there are many tabs opened, I find it easier to start anew by closing the browser (in fact I kill the task).

There is also a shared computer in my home that is used by my wife and my kids; there, browsers are constantly opened and closed since for some reason, most non-tech people (that I know -- and that includes my wife) close and reopen the browser to start a new browsing session.

Whenever Firefox memory use has ballooned to over 1GB.

Which is pretty much daily.

Agreed. I can also open/close tabs a lot faster in Chrome than in Firefox...

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