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Comment by etimberg | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, I use Firefox on my laptop and it just feels so slow and clunky compared to Chromium based browsers. It's been like that for years and doesn't seem to get better

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This is anecdotal, but my experience has been the opposite. I briefly switched to Chrome some years ago because everyone else was and the dev tools were genuinely better, but as a user it felt clunky and slow, so I switched back to Firefox. They pretty quickly got their act together wrt to the debugger and such and so I only ever dropped into Chrome for work and to this day it's still clunky and slow. I never understood why anyone would want to stay with Chrome especially with Google ramping up their shenanigans.

Firefox has been fairly meh for me performance-wise, and tends to absorb memory over time. I kinda expected that with a few hundred tabs open.

What I didn't expect was how sluggish Firefox (119.0.1) would become on a brand new machine with around 20 tabs open. By the time I restarted it today, switching to Firefox and acquiring focus took about 2 seconds. I've a grand total of 3 plugins (FB Container, Multi-Account Container, uBlock Origin) installed.

Uninstall your extensions. If you do a side by side comparison of clean installs, they’ll feel similarly responsive - Firefox uses less memory but the Chrome team closed the gap somewhat over the last year. Safari is still noticeably faster and lighter than both but that’s only to be expected since they don’t have cross-platform complications.

As many others have stated, I don't have this experience at all, plus it's vague, not a comment on any technology, use case, or trend that could be the foundation for a meaningful conversation. By contrast the article cites specific instances of slowdowns purposely inserted based on which browser agent is active.

The problem is people can and will endlessly go in circles with their anecdata, to no conclusion. And that's if you're lucky. If you aren't, some optimized statistical average of understandings, misunderstandings, emotionally satisfying interpretations shared by people at the same time can cause a narrative to be ouji-boarded into existence that feels authentic to the participants.

So, yeah. My experience is the opposite, but you should only take that for what it's worth.

I feel the same. However, how much of this is actually one being faster/slower than the other, and how much is really just subjectiveness one could train away. And now: how much of this is due to deliberate sabotage.

This. I'm on EndeavorOS on crappy hardware as my only device, and I daily drive Firefox, but sometimes, Firefox simply doesn't load a website (i.e. coveragemap), and for this reason I have Chromium on the device in case. Also, Firefox crashes when I have too many tabs open.

I dunno, it's always been the other way around for me. Firefox is fast and light, while Chrome hogs RAM and CPU like a beast.

Both on laptop and desktop (although my desktop is way beefier and doesn't mind).

Opposite for me, I'm on a 10 yr old Mac and FF runs just as well as it always did while Chrome is more sluggish. On Android, FF feels a bit slow to render while Chromium browsers do fine.

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