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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

Chrome, the fast, stable, and lightweight alternative to Firefox.

I don't know quite where it went off the rails...

Chrome's still fast, but other browsers caught up, and more importantly web developers took advantage of the increase in performance and started getting away with writing more bloated websites, resulting in much of the speed gains being nullified.

Just try to use Chrome or Firefox to browse relatively lightweight websites (e.g. GNU.org), they're amazingly fast compared to what browsers used to be like before Chrome came out.

Just try to interview as a front end engineer these days. Someone at Airbnb laughed at me because I used a for loop instead of lodash on an array. He said "wow, you write it old school."

Why write fast code when you can write triple transpiled bloats bullshit vis a vis Babel, flow and jsx.

Come check us out at https://massdrop.com

I'm still sad Massdrop removed the vaping section, got a good deal on a keyboard though!

You guys aren't hiring in Portland ;)

I could honestly believe that is Airbnb's slogan. But I'm sad to believe they treated an interview candidate like that.

I hope you were able to use that tool to leverage a better job elsewhere and that he/she is no longer interviewing people at Airbnb.

The best part of this: The native for loop is what lodash uses. It's the fastest way to do it.

The issue is the callback, it introduces significant overhead because it is a new context with its own scope on a per callback basis.

Yes, exactly. I suppose if you registered the callback as a named function expression, a good js engine might be able to optimize on it and inline it, but I also don't like leaning on compilers so much.

Why i first started using Noscript.

I don't think that's the whole story. Yes, websites are increasingly obese and JS-happy, but Chrome has also gone downhill.

Safari feels significantly snappier, and has better RAM usage than Chrome at this point, and it used to be the exact reverse. Chrome is hell on a laptop battery, too.

firefox the lightweight alternative to mozilla

I can't resist, it applies perfectly:

Firefox, the fast, stable, and lightweight alternative to Netscape.

I don't know quite where it went off the rails...

The web went off the rails, not Firefox! Or better, webdevelopers went off the rails. Or even better, their managers. No no no, probably their CEOs! Or... ehm...

meh. incorrect cheap shot.

Firefox slogan always was Take Back The Web.

and it's still kicking at it. I'm using it on android now, with NoScript and httpsEverywhere just fine.

Wrong. Phoenix was produced as a small, light, extensible replacement for the perceived bloat of Netscape. it started as an experimental project.

See the announcement by Eich & Hyatt announcing Firefox would be the focus, not Communicator: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-Apr-2003.h...

"Firefox is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism"

"Take Back the Web" came a year or two later as I recall.

It is still quite stable for me, I can run a single chrome session for months on my desktop.

But, thank god that desktop has 32GB ram and a fast, QC i7 because damn is it bloated and slow!

I remember switching to chrome years ago because it was so much faster than Safari, and, yes, while I'm 100% sure Chrome is just a bloated slow mess now, I can't really pinpoint any time when it happened.

Are you sure you're not just browsing more complex sites? Modern rich web applications can use a surprisingly high amount of cpu, gpu and ram

Running those same web apps feels a lot less sluggish and less taxing on Safari these days, even with a lot more tabs open.

When they decided to favor revenue over their users' privacy.

I agree chrome is too fast and becomes unstable

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