Comment by asr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asr | Hacker News Reader

Eh... not such a big deal to me. I would like to use Firefox--I think Google's privacy changes demonstrate why it's still important to have a non-profit in this space--but these changes are not going to lure me back to Firefox. I moved to Chrome because Chrome is faster.

I know Firefox has worked on their speed, and it may be I only notice a difference because I'm on a netbook, or because the Firefox versions of my extensions are more poorly written than their Chrome counterparts. But for whatever reason, Chrome feels faster to me--both in general, and also due to other nice touches like its ability to open PDFs without launching Acrobat.

The window-dressing is nice, but just as search quality is the most important thing in search engines, and auto-complete, instant search, etc. are mostly secondary, speed to render the site appropriately is the primary indicator of browser quality; new-tab windows and the like are nice-to-haves. As far as I can tell, Chrome is still winning on speed, and I hope Mozilla is devoting appropriate resources (read: 90%) to changing that.

EDIT: as an aside, I know downvotes are somewhat amorphous on HN, and I shouldn't take them personally, but it bugs me that when I take some time to try to write a thoughtful (though admittedly critical) reaction to news, I get voted down to -1 (at least 5 downvotes) for my trouble. I've seen similar reactions frequently in other threads, and it saddens me that this is apparently now common HN behavior. This response is just not conducive to building a community. The responses here are great--if you think my comment is wrong, upvote those instead. Meanwhile, excuse me while I leave HN...

I agree it is painful and not right to be downvoted for things like this. You are just sharing your opinion, on topic to the post.

I work for Mozilla and I think that the only thing we are really losing on is the perception race. A frequent trend I hear on forums and comment threads is how slow Firefox is or how much it crashes. People seem to almost enjoy making the assessment that it is a universal constant. I know that it isn't a constant. Even though I have a profile that is many years old and has a dozen or so extensions installed, even though I have run prerelease versions for the last three years, I still generally have a stable and fast browsing experience. Even when compared to Chrome which I install clean and try out for a couple of weeks every few months. There have certainly been occasions that I have run into issues, but because I have been willing to give Firefox the benefit of doubt, I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause.

We continue to strive to find ways to resolve these issues without having to rely on the user or the community to figure them out. That is just part of making a good product. But I know that the problems are not a universal constant that every user must deal with, or a reason to try to get everyone to move to a different browser.

One of the biggest projects my team (Metrics) has been working on lately is a way to enable people to easily measure the performance and stability of their own browser and compare it to the general population. If it turns up systemic problems, that is wonderful because with evidence, it is easier to fix those problems. If it turns out that a person with poor performance is obviously an extreme outlier to the typical performance, hopefully it will make it easier to change the conversation from "Firefox is slow for everyone and no one should use it" to "Firefox is slow for me and I would like help making that not be the case for both me and anyone else who ever ends up in my situation". This would be a paradigm shift that would obviously be great for Mozilla, but I think it would be great for Google or Microsoft or Apple if they chose to follow a similar strategy as well.

At the end of the day, many Mozillians do not hate Google Chrome because it is still pushing to make the web a better place. Maybe not in all the same ways we push, but every little bit is better than none of it.

"I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause."

And therein lies the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem. The average user doesn't care who's fault it is - all they know is it's broken or slow, and as Firefox surfaces those issues, it must be Firefox's fault. Chrome does a better job of shielding users from perceived browser problems.

It is certainly the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem with users who are likely to run into these issues.

My question, which I hope we will be able to answer better soon, is whether this is something that actually does happen to the average user or if it only happens to certain types of power users. Either way, we need to strive to do everything we can reasonably do to fix it, but I would be much happier to know whether I was in the outlier group of people who rarely experience problems or if the "average user" does not see those problems but we continue to talk about the problems as if they were the typical case.

Mozilla is working on a PDF reader and "integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful": https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

It's mostly working already. I rarely ever find PDFs that it breaks with.

Just an aside, Foxit[1] is much faster than Acrobat, and I'm pretty sure FireFox can open Foxit inside a tab.

[1] http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/

I don't like how foxit is distributed, I'm not a fan of any software that attempts to sneak toolbar installs with it.

That aside foxit is way faster than Acrobat.

Windows user here. I gladly abandoned Adobe Acrobat Reader as soon as I discovered Foxit Reader. But a few years ago I became unhappy with it (it was trending the same direction as Acrobat Reader: slow, bloated, intrusive) and found SumatraPDF[1], a better (for my simple needs) lean open-source alternative (its Firefox/Mozilla plugin works fine)!

[1] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...

Mozilla is indeed sensitive to performance issues, and is actively addressing them:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Features/IonMonkey

>and also due to other nice touches like its ability to open PDFs without launching Acrobat.

Just as a side note- Mozilla has a cool project called pdf.js [1] which opens PDF docs in browser using HTML5 and javascript.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

I didn't down vote you, but try Firefox with a new profile. Odds are that your speed problems are due to an extension or years of cruft or maybe just perception -- on most benchmarks, the difference between Chrome and Firefox is completely negligible.

> I moved to Chrome because Chrome is faster.

And on my system, Firefox is faster. Faster is such an inconsistent metric.

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