Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by acdha 2755 days ago
> They plainly admit that Firefox can just hold it’s own and it is still NOT the fastest and best browser experience out there.

The reason why is that those are complex judgements rather than easily measured objective facts. Browsers are extremely complex and what “fastest” means depends on what you're measuring and where it's running. Chrome's memory usage is a great example — if you have tons of RAM and nothing else running, it's often faster but if either of those is true, Firefox being so much more memory efficient more than balances it out, especially for people who keep tons of tabs open — and all of the comparison points are changing regularly as browser development teams adjust.

1 comments

How much of what you say is due to the “extremely complex” rendering engine and how much to just “simple” app design?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. My point was just that you can’t distill the performance of a complex system down to a single number and each browser is going to have areas where they’re ahead on something which some group of people cares about.

As an extreme example, this is far from true but assume that the next version Chrome was faster on every part of the browser from networking to JavaScript, CSS, etc. Firefox might still be faster for most users on the metric they care about the most because its default tracking protection blocks 90% of the page weight on most sites and so every single one of those people would say it’s faster because that’s what they actually experience.