> 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.
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.
Like folk who think that having hundreds of tabs open at once is the norm! :)
Eventually Chrome freaks out and starts eating all my CPU time and I have to restart it and close a bunch of browser windows.
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.
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.
Heck with the Chrome fans, lookit all the IE10 zealots in here!
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.
Start-up time matters, thanks.
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?
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.
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.
This number would absolutely plunge if they would allow plug-ins/extensions to be installed without restarting the whole browser. Ridiculous.
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.
[1]. Just google Firefox loads slow to see lots of results like http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/762446
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.
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.