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Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

Its honestly amazing how much worse google maps runs on Firefox as opposed to Chrome. It wasn't always like that and I feel like across my devices between windows and Linux, google maps is barely usable in Firefox anymore. If I need to do any real map searching, I need to break out chrome if I have any respect for my time.

I'd be interested in reading a writeup by someone knowledgeable in web tech that would explain what on earth is happening between these two browsers when both are serving maps.google.com.

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It's not just Google Maps. It's any webapp from Google. Youtube and Gmail run very poorly in Firefox compared to Chromium browsers. I don't use Google docs, but I'm willing to bet it has the same issues. It's not very noticeable if you have a beefy PC, but on the mini PC I'm currently using, the difference is quite significant.

Even on a very beefy pc, whatever is going on in the firefox runtime can't keep up. My machine was built last year, high performing i7, 32gb ram, 3080ti, etc. Can run any new game at max settings without shuddering but maps and other google properties fall apart.

I'm not sure whether the problem is in the firefox runtime or in the way google optimizes for Chrome (and maybe even "accidentally" slows things down on firefox)

DOS AIN'T DONE TILL LOTUS WON'T RUN

Remember that mantra?

I'd be interested to hear what it was like on the dev team. I'm sure they don't super care about throwing elbows at Firefox now that that fight is won, so maybe the issues are just holdover from past decisions.

But 10 years ago... was it just "don't test on firefox"?

Or "heeey, we just made a brand new feature [that no one else uses] go ahead and use it in mail and maps!"

Or more openly nefarious?

10 years ago, maps worked great on Firefox, I'd be genuinely surprised if they didn't test it there.

I genuinely think they're doing anti-optimization for firefox users at this point.

Edit: Did some google employee see this and turn a "maps on firefox load speed" knob?

I decided to test again on a private window vs my typical plugin laden setup and it seems to be performing far faster than it has in years. wtf.

It's quite possible that they just try to optimize and only bother testing on chrome, so they're more or less passively conform to what Chrome is good at.

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