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Comment by bb101 | Hacker News Reader

I happily switched to Firefox Quantum when it first came out, but have periodically switched back to Chrome because Chrome feels faster and snappier. Not sure why that might be the case. I'm using the latest MacOS X with the same set of extensions/add-ons in both browsers.

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Chrome is so popular that developers optimize for it. So for example, even though Firefox has a much faster CSS engine than Chrome, most developers don't use the kind of heavy CSS shenanigans that would make Chrome seem any slower than Firefox because if they did the site would be slower to the majority of users.

It's a chicken-egg problem, basically.

I really doubt that most developers deliberately optimise for Chrome, or do you mean subconsciously? I'm a web developer and although most others I know use Chrome (I primarily use Firefox even though I'm not entirely satisfied with it) I've never heard of anyone deliberately optimising specifically for performance in Chrome.

It's not intentional, but The Market doesn't care if it is: They optimize for Chrome by virtue of optimizing in their choice of browser, usually Chrome. High usage of Chrome causes Chrome to be even more preferable.

Devs optimize for Chrome by testing on Chrome. I'm starting to see sites that don't even work on Firefox.

The worst is when sites serve a crap version of their page to any non-chrome useragent. Many sites do this, Google being the worst offender (nearly every Google app)

I fake my user agent to recent Chrome to avoid these shenanigans. But you will get Capchas all the time because sites think you're a bot

FF performance is very poor compared to Safari and Chrome (on Mac).

Have you enabled WebRender? It's not yet enabled by default on Mac and it does improve performance significantly.

Browsers feeling snappier is sort of like cell phones being thinner, at least for me. There is a threshold below which it just doesn't matter to me, and browsers and phones have been there for a few years.

Best viewed in chrome isn't pasted on most sites, but might as well be.

Sadly, it is. The IE7 era, perpetrated by Google.

When I saw a dev I mentored put that on a site I realized I had failed in my attempts to fully explain the dark days of the browser wars. Chrome truly is IEv2.

OVH client interface goes into a login loop on anything other than Chrome. There are a few sites like this which are the only reason I have Chrome installed.

I've been able to solve that on a few sites by turning off the "enhanced tracking protection" next to the address bar (haven't tried OVH specifically).

For OVH I tried a lot of things, disabling extensions (one by one, and all of them), using a blank (firefox) profile, the usual cache/cookie invalidation, disabling various privacy protection enhancements (one by one and all of them), etc. Chrome worked.

For other sites yes, often just cache/cookie invalidation is enough.

Pulling out a tab into a new window is really snappier in chrome than in firefox. Every time I do this in firefox, I ask myself why this is such a burden.

Exactly. Chrome just feels faster overall.

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