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Comment by erinaceousjones | Hacker News Reader

Not ever had Firefox for android be slow and buggy for myself! I've been using it in place of chrome on my phone for a good year. Honestly everyone keeps talking about how FF is "slow and buggy" and it has NEVER given me issue :/ why is my subjective experience so different to your subjective experience?

Meanwhile chrome/chromium is the one which is most likely to cause me GPU driver crashes, but that's because I use it for fun VR and "let's see how big I can make textures" experiments. Generally it manages a higher frame rate than FF in that context with stability as tradeoff.

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There could just be a difference in hardware. I'm a Firefox user but there is a noticeable difference, just not one that matters much on a top tier soc

Loading JS heavy pages like Twitter on Firefox Android is way slower than Chromium based. Very noticeable on 2019 hardware, less so but still on 2022 hardware.

Ah, fair point. I'm on a pixel 6, so I have a privileged perspective that like 90% of smartphone browser users don't have because fairly new and fast SoC with a good amount of memory. I hadn't considered how much a difference that makes, because conceptually in my head "it's just webpages!" like we're still in the early 2000's

That hasn't been my experience at all. It was Firefox that made web browsing bearable again on my old android device.

But is completely Firefox fault? Some companies just test compatibility and optimize with Chrome in mind, forgetting that sometimes some browsers (Firefox as well) dont respect some standards. Or even adding some features only available in some browsers.

Yes, is not as bad as it was in the 90s or 2000s, but is still a common issue

What's the user visible tradeoff between "an average page is so laden with advertising and tracking nonsense that it loads slowly and is covered with crap, but that crap all renders real fast" vs "JS renders at 1/10th the speed but only the stuff you want to look at?"

Honestly Twitter has become a downright hostile browsing experience on any browser and any hardware. It's probably on purpose to make you use the app.

I use Firefox on a ~2020 era Android, and not even a particularly great one at that. Works fine for me aside from a very few badly written sites, and certainly not any shower than chrome.

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