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Comment by theodric | Hacker News Reader

Chrome became so bloated and crap and slow that in 2020 I moved over to Firefox (which has been imperfect, but better), so my anecdata suggests that browsers don't actually get faster overall, but ebb and flow as feature creep and optimization compete for dominance.

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To me it feels like bloated browser profiles makes the browsers sluggish.

I get annoyed with how slow Chrome is, so I switch Firefox. After a while the Firefox profile gets bloated and I get annoyed and switch back to Chrome with a clean profile and it feels really quick again. Ad infinitum.

The Firefox profile manager and Chrome temporary files would let you test this theory.

I dont understand how profile could make such a difference but that is also my experience as well. Everything is fast in a clean profile.

On Firefox, if you have an unbelievably large number of entries in your History, Bookmarks, and/or Downloads (your Firefox "Library" — chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml), you could theoretically become limited by insert/update performance in Firefox's embedded sqlite, I believe.

The fix for 99% of firefox problems is: firefox -p, make a new profile

Typing this on Midori Android, it feels faast! I was using Firefox until a few days ago, but I feel I should change.

That's on a Galaxy S4, mind you.

Dillo is blazing fast on desktop, but doesn't support https very well. It also doesn't support JavaScript, which isn't a big deal to me.

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