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Comment by MegaDeKay | Hacker News Reader

Firefox tracks their performance across many different benchmarks. Here is the performance vs Chrome over the past year on many different ones. It is encouraging to see steady improvements being made on a substantial number of them over time.

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3...

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It appears that Chrome still wins most of these. Even the touted Speedometer win has apparently been trumped by Chrome over the last couple of weeks. The competition doesn't stand still. Which is good, imagine if Firefox threw in the towel, Chrome would become IE 6 in short order.

See also, significant regressions in Firefox's memory consumption: https://arewefastyet.com/mac/memory/overview?numDays=365

In general I’ve preferred Firefox’s lower memory usage than pure speed.

Safari is faster than either across almost all dimensions, lighter on battery, nicer UI, better standards support generally than FF and even matches chrome for what I care about. It’s the clear best browser imo.

Safari is only well maintained on MacOS and iOS. That makes it a non-starter for most people.

More than half of US users run iOS or MacOS on one or more of their devices.

Less than 5% of people live in the US. Not sure how your statement is relevant to my statement about most people in general.

Which is irrelevant if 95+% of your users are coming from the US…

Unless you’re equally interested in non English speaking users then the global average is absolutely meaningless.

What matters to organizations is some subset of everyone and what their specific access looks like.

We're talking about web browsers. Pretty much everyone with a personal computer(including smartphones) needs one. The US makes no sense as a subset here. If we were discussing what markets for a company to target, then sure. But we're not, are we?

I and many people here abandoned Chrome, so it’s only relevant to me from a software development perspective.

In terms of software development a US specific audience isn’t uncommon. Local utilities and many government agencies etc just don’t care about foreign users.

> Unless you’re equally interested in non English speaking users then the global average is absolutely meaningless.

The US is not even the largest English speaking population, it’s India. Additionally, if a subset is to be chosen, why is this subset from the US? Why does it get to be the centre of the universe, especially for a general-use product like a web browser?

The point was it’s rare to care about global numbers, not that the US is the only meaningful subset.

As to why a US only subset may be reasonable vs a language specific subset, some US government agencies care about a global audience but many are US specific. They may have multiple languages because Americans aren’t all fluent in English.

The US is hardly representative. Globally, 25.3% of website visits happen from a device running iOS or MacOS. That's impressive, but still a mere quarter. Windows (29%) and Android (40%) each account for more users.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

Which isn’t actually relevant to any specific website as they all favor either some subset of users and generally a subset of their devices. Ie: Fewer than normal stack overflow users are coming in on cellphones let alone PlayStations.

You need to know your target audience, not simply lookup overall statistics. I’ve seen Windows make up less than 4% of all users and I’ve seen it be over 90%.

Statscounter is a popular statistics for platforma usage, but I strongly doubt that it is heavily biased. I've never found that any websites use statcounter (though I haven't aggressively investigated), and never found installation guide in Japanese. Perhaps is userbase biased to smaller websites on some countries?

I can run Chrome and Firefox on my Debian laptop and on my Android devices. How do I benchmark Safari there? I can't, so Safari is barely relevant to me. Nice to know that it's faster than the other two browsers on Macs, but I'm not very surprised. Apple should be able to integrate it with their hardware and OS more than Google and Mozilla.

Customization and freedom means Firefox is always the best for me.

How's the safari world of add-on's? Do you have tab containers? What about mobile? Can you block ads?

On Mac? Probably because only Safari has access to the private api's

Just compare the results from Windows and macOS.

Lol... Doesn't make any sense

No safari on Windows. And I don't have a Mac.

It sure does. Did you even open OPs link? There you can compare everything.

And no need for Safari on Windows since you can compare Firefox on Windows (where those 'private api's' are not protected by Apple) with Safari on macOS

Generally, no.

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