Ask HN: Is it possible that gmail is working better on chrome? (intentional?) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it possible that gmail is working better on chrome? (intentional?)

2 pointsujjwalg6 comments

Recently, I have been experiencing very slow reaction time on my gmail accounts on firefox as compared to chrome while refreshing, drafting, deleting or for that matter doing anything on my account. But, its fast as hell on chrome at the same time. Can HNer's check and confirm on this? Is it possible that Google is doing it intentionally? I am not saying it is, just a paranoia thought.

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(Disclaimer: Work at Google, but no inside knowledge on this, and this is of course just my personal opinion. I was a Chrome fan well before I joined Google.)

Could just be that Chrome works better in general on JavaScript-intensive sites. One of the selling points of Chrome is its lightning-fast JavaScript JIT-compiler. When Chrome first came out, the first thing I tested it with was GMail, and I found that GMail was noticeably faster in Chrome. Then I tested it with a bunch of other JS-heavy sites, including my JavaScript-gaming startup that I'd just folded in part because JavaScript was too slow to run games, and found they were all faster in Chrome.

Chrome also seems to work much better with Comet-enabled apps, which GMail is. It actually has a sane threading model, while Firefox occasionally locks up when a Comet app makes the hanging GET back to the server.

If this is the case, Chrome is now my default browser. I am fine with most of the websites being slower but not gmail.

Or just use a bonafide mail client. Gmail allows you to use IMAP and SMTP; get the fastest mail client you can find for your platform, set its sticky bit or patch its executable .text section into your OS's resident parts, in fact, go out there and get a processor with enough L1 cache to keep your mail client in there at all times. Email is mission critical, gotta be fast.

I've been consolidating email accounts for the past few months; transferring thousands of emails from one account to another, sorting, labeling, archiving, etc.

I keep one gmail account open in Firefox, and another in Chrome.

There is no difference in speed for me. Chrome stutters plenty.

It was not happening till a week back. But for the last few days, I am definitely seeing gmail to be working much much faster on chrome.

One of the big things hyped when Chrome came out was its better JavaScript performance. Anecdotally, it seems to run script-heavy sites I use, including the Google apps, more quickly than IE or Firefox.

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