Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

(Disclaimer: I used to work on Chrome. I'm more than a year out at this point but I still talk to Chrome developers.)

Chrome wins some tests but loses the most on the start-up benchmarks, which is a real bummer. There was a time where we'd spend literally days figuring out why startup regressed by a handful of milliseconds, and this test shows an end-to-end test taking nearly six seconds.

One idea I saw mentioned is that there may be a bug related to how Chrome reads the system proxy settings (something about an API change between Windows 7 and Windows 8). I think most of the Chrome developers are still on Windows 7; the bots that are tracking startup performance are definitely still Windows 7 as well. So maybe that number is more of a single bug than a systematic thing.

All of the above is not intended to diminish Firefox's impressive results -- just thought I'd provide some background! What these sorts of tests show most is that competition pushes browsers ever faster. If the proxy theory above is right, then maybe this test will inspire Google to invest more into Windows 8 testing, which ultimately benefits users.

(Edit: Firefox won other tests too, I also didn't mean to say this was the only factor.)

Chrome is my main browser and I use it all day at work. The browser window opens instantly for me but it only becomes usable about a minute or so later after it has finished grinding on the hard drive. From the looks of it I'd say it's loading all the history, settings and extensions that takes so long.

> Chrome wins some tests but loses the most on the start-up benchmarks

Well, congratulations to FF for being the perfect browser for the 0.01 percent of people who don't keep their browser open all day.

Startup time matters (a lot). Even if i open it once a day i still want it to be fast. Nobody likes slow apps.

Agreed. A few years ago there were a lot of complaints about Firefox starting very slowly, especially on Windows machines [1]. For those of us that obsessively close apps that aren't being used, the startup time was a big turn off.

[1]. Just google Firefox loads slow to see lots of results like http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/762446

Startup time matters as close to zero as you could get for me. Chrome only gets restarted when the computer gets restarted which is only when OSX releases updates which is about every 3 months. As long as the answer isn't '5 minutes', I don't care about it at all.

Same deal for the other test that seems to be sinking chrome in the overall score, the open 40 tabs thing. I don't think I've ever opened 40 tabs at once, and if I did, I can't see myself caring that they all finished in some amount of time. I'd be far more concerned that the browser was smart enough to prioritize the one I'm actually looking at.

The structure of the overall score in this is pretty broken in opinion. The final tally is a geometric mean of Wait Times, JavaScript/DOM, HTML5/CSS3, and Hardware Acceleration. Chrome won all but the wait times test and even within the wait times test still won the single page test. It lost purely due to 'cold start' and 'open 40 tabs and time all of them', which are least relevant tests to reality in the entire suite.

>Startup time matters (a lot). Even if i open it once a day i still want it to be fast. Nobody likes slow apps.

Slow is the 99.9999% of time you use it. Not the few seconds it takes to open.

Also, get an SSD and be done with it.

Also, with sleep, you don't even startup once a day.

I have an SSD, Firefox still takes a few seconds to open. Chrome is instant.

But for the majority without an SSD, Chrome is a lot slower.

I agree startup time is not a major concern, however it's super to have it. I guess all that speedup and memshrink ventures are starting to pay off.

I use Windows at the office and my work doesn't need me to have 300 tabs open at once. So I keep lauching and closing Firefox.

Start-up time matters, thanks.

Why do you close it? I also use windows, never have more tabs than I can read their titles, and never close Firefox (except when some js crashes it, like browserstack.com)

Firefox is my browsing (err) browser (I like tag bookmarks too much).

I use chrome to develop with as I like their tools much better than firebug which, to me, is very slow in comparison. Chrome I close out relaunch semi-frequently (crtl-w spam, oops), but still keep it open, because why not?

Because when I close the one tab left, Firefox closes itself. Thanks to the fast launch time, I don't bother to keeping one open.

Note for anyone confused: this is not true on a Mac; in general it depends on what the OS's convention is.

Firefox doesn't do that on Windows either for me. I had to use a small extension by a friend to enable that.

browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false should fix that.

I close what I'm working on when I'm done working on it. I don't like clutter. Simple as that.

Of course, I also work in an operating environment that generally doesn't leave desktop programs running after I close the last window. So, it just happens naturally when I close a window.

It's always so cute how everyone thinks the way they use a browser is the only way anyone uses a browser.

Like folk who think that having hundreds of tabs open at once is the norm! :)

I definitely know it's not the norm, and should not be the norm. It's a really bad habit I have. I run across something interesting and for some reason just hate to close it, and so I end up with tons of browser windows open.

Eventually Chrome freaks out and starts eating all my CPU time and I have to restart it and close a bunch of browser windows.

Bookmark it, tag it with your favorite keywords and then close the tab and hope that you will find it when you need it.

I don't believe it's the norm, but it is what I choose my browser for. I generally have about 4 windows running with anywhere from 5-30 tabs apiece, in some rare cases 50+. Chrome simply can't handle that gracefully. Firefox, meanwhile, has built-in tab grouping that deals with a hefty number of tabs with no issue.

When Firefox was slow to start, it was bashed about it a lot.

Now they have put a lot of effort into that, making it one of the fastest browser to start. And yet it's bashed because they put their effort into "something" that doesn't matter to many people.

I don't understand these kinds of arguments. It's not the same people who are complaining in both instances.

Maybe not the same people, but the same type of person.

In the business world, they are the guy that will adopt your product if you add this one feature. And when you add it, it's perfect! Well, except it's missing this one feature, and if you add that...

On the web, it's fan boys. Product X is better than Product Y because of this! Oh, Product Y is now better than Product X in that area? Well... Product X has this! And who cares that Product Y has that other features "no one ever needs that."

Or when reading reviews. They'll tell you how great the product is, how much they use it, but mark it failing marks because they also want it to have a new feature. Or this book is excellent, but I had to wait more time to get it in e-book format, so I'm going to mark it as a 1-star review before the actual book is released.

One could argue these people all make valid points. You can say they balance out the people that never complain or are always happy.

But over time, I've learned to take what these type of people say with a grain of salt. They'll always poke holes. They'll always find reasons. They'll never be happy.

Obviously, this is all my own experience. Make of it what you will.

Agree with you. Not really surprising that the Chrome crowd are finding something else to fixate on now, until that gets better, then it will be something else....etc...etc

Honestly the main reason I used FF over Chrome historically was the huge and active addon selection. Chrome has caught up a lot now but I am trying to wean myself from all Google products so not ever going to use Chrome by default, simply because it is a Google product and not because it may or may not be "better" than FF.

> Not really surprising that the Chrome crowd are finding something else to fixate on now,

Heck with the Chrome fans, lookit all the IE10 zealots in here!

I switched from Firefox to chrome because firefox took ungodly amounts of time to startup. But I'm happy with Chrome so I don't go checking every month to see if firefox have fixed it yet. Maybe I'll try it again.

That has definitely changed: not only does Firefox start up much faster than before, but Chrome starts up much slower than it did before. (Of course, I just mean on my machines, have no idea if it would be true on your system.) If start up time matters to you, you probably want to switch back to Firefox.

Weird. I just tried it then from a cold restart. Chrome is instant on my computer, firefox is near instant. Maybe because I have an SSD now I don't notice it.

Mozilla's user stats show that 96% of Firefox Beta users restart their browsers daily and 98% within 2 days. I imagine non-beta Firefox users restart even more often, e.g. they open Firefox to check their Yahoo mail and quit. Most people do not live in their browsers.

The beta channel updates more frequently and is less stable than the Release channel, it would stand to reason that the Beta channel would require users to restart their browser more frequently regardless of their preference, just like Aurora channel would need to restart even more frequently than the beta users.

From a non-power user's perspective, whenever I am fixing my family or non-technical friends' computers their browsers are regularly left open with an ungodly amount of tabs, often with multiple instances of their webmail client of choice. I'm sure some of them have no idea how to close the browser even if they wanted to, short of rebooting. I know my girlfriend likes her tab count to closely match her unread email count, alright that's an exaggeration, but I often joke to her that she has a hoarding problem and get her to throw away some of her tabs/unread emails.

>Mozilla's user stats show that 96% of Firefox Beta users restart their browsers daily and 98% within 2 days.

This number would absolutely plunge if they would allow plug-ins/extensions to be installed without restarting the whole browser. Ridiculous.

a) Some plugins can now be installed without restarting

b) Certainly, a completely-restartless plugin system would reduce that number, but most people probably settle into a set of plugins and don't go changing them all that often, so I'm not sure what sort of impart that actually has on these 96-98% numbers.

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