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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

> Gecko is old, buggy and slow - at least in comparison to WebKit

Is this a widely held view?

From an end user perspective Chrome and Firefox feel pretty much neck and nack. Firefox has better memory usage, Chrome JS engine is a little faster.

I use both (Chrome on Ubuntu and Firefox on Android).

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As an end user, based on anecdotal evidence, I can say that:

a) on both Windows and Linux, Firefox startup is slower than Chrome

b) at least on Windows, Firefox memory usage is far worse than Chrome's

c) perceptually, Chrome feels a lot faster than Firefox

But yeah. Anecdotal.

As an end user, i can say that : a) Chrome memory usage is far less than Firefox. try 50+ tab and you'll see. b) Chrome is faster than firefox but it's buggy when you have many tabs c) Mozilla never try to take my personnal data

Actually this is false. Firefox is loads better when it comes to memory. Chrome is slightly faster but not when Firefox has Noscript installed.

Depends on the number of tabs one tends to have open. On Ubuntu your (a) and (b) are far worse for me in Chrome than in Firefox (in fact that much worse that I only use Chrome on my 8GB RAM laptop but not on a 4GB one). I agree with (c).

Odd, these days Firefox always uses much less memory than Chrome for me.

Have you tried a recent version of firefox? Nicholas Nethercoat and friends have done quite a bit in the last year to reduce memory usage in firefox.

Hmm, for me, chrome is a much bigger memory hog than FF. Its memory usage is somewhat more controllable because of the process-tab thing (which is probably also responsible for its greater memory usage), but while actually in use, it uses a lot more memory for a given set of tabs open.

Speedwise, they seem pretty much neck-and-neck, although chrome is faster at some of the advanced webgl 3d rendering stuff...

[The competition with chrome has been a great thing, as it seems to have lit a fire under the FF devs, and resulted in many, many, improvements in recent versions.]

Working as a front-end developer I happen to come across tiny bugs and inconsistencies in Chrome more often than in Firefox, rare as that happens.

Developer tools - Firebug all the way, even the error console is more useful.

You're assuming the way Firefox renders if the "correct" implementation. This is like old IE developers complaining about their site "breaking" on Firefox.

Try running some of the Chrome experiments, e.g. 100,000 stars: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars

On my pretty high-end machine this runs very smoothly on Chrome and quite jerky on Firefox.

Yes, Firefox is the new IE, literally. In the past years generally everything just works, i develop in Safari and then test in IE, Opera and Chrome. Usually no big quirks. And then comes Firefox, usually something is badly broken. Let's say i have added extra tags into DOM just for FF only, I have FF specific CSS hacks.

The first thing you learn as a web developer with respect to (modern - ignoring IE 7 and even 8) cross browser compatibility is that all browsers have their quirks and all of them suck. Off the top of my head:

Until recently, Chrome 'implemented' the HTML5 date input by giving the user a spinner on the side of the input box which, when pressed, will set the date in the input to '00-00-0000'. Worse, this renders the normal feature detection used by libraries such as modernizr.js useless.

Text rendering is badly broken for Chrome on Windows right now. http://i.stack.imgur.com/MsHdy.png - Firefox, Chrome, IE9. Bug report: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692

There was a bug that caused inset box shadow used to be rendered outside the element. This is fixed in recent desktop versions, but still haunts older versions of Android's default browser - versions as recent as the one included with 3.x Honeycomb are affected.

Browsers, even modern ones, are incredibly quirky. Moving to a monolithic Webkit market will not help with any of the bugs listed above, nor, I suspect, most of the bugs one might encounter today as a web developer.

The first thing? Well, I have been web developer since 1999. I wrote drag&drop cross-browser JS in 2003. Under my belt is front-end of one Seedcamp winner, webapp that was presumed as native on iOS. What exactly do you wan't to teach me?

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