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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

I actually tried switching. I found Firefox to be still slower than Chrome. At least on Google sites it may not be their fault but knowing where to put the blame doesn't help me on my end. Marketing doesn't seem like the likely fix.

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Are you on Mac? If yes, it's not a feeling, it's a real problem Mozilla is trying to address but have yet to crack. Firefox is an order of magnitude more performant on windows and linux.

Hasn't Firefox been around for longer than Chrome...? It's a bit off-putting when they can't seem to solve popular platform issues.

I've been on Chrome for a long time, tried to switch to FF when Quantum came out and couldn't hear myself think over the sound of my laptop winding up.

Yes it is. Given that their team is top notch and their intent has been great so far, I will go with "it's a freaking hard problem and google could afford spending millions of dollars to solve it" kind of explanation.

Another reason could be that Google optimizes both sides of the Chrome/Google webapp interaction but doesn't care very much about optimizing for any other browser than Chrome.

Once you realize that not being evil isn't a priority at Google anymore this explanation actually makes some sense.

I've never had any issues on my Mac. Then again, I'm using an MBA 2012 sans Retina. If you are using displays with "non-standard" resolution (including Retina), even external ones, then you can refer to my other post[1] for background.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18599707

Nope, Windows. Google.com itself spends at least 1 second switching its logo placeholder to its image on Firefox. See here for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055952

Google Chrome is probably talking HTTP3 to its own sites, so not sure that's a fair test.

This isn't because of that. Although even if it was, my entire point was that at the end of the day if Firefox is slower, even if it's Google playing dirty, that's going to make users like me not want to use it over Chrome.

For personal email I'm on FastMail, but my work email is still Gmail (not my choice). I found Gmail to behave like shit in Firefox.

Then I tried it in Chrome and found that Gmail behaves like shit in Chrome too.

The solution however was to drop Gmail's web interface. Switched to a desktop client. If you're on MacOS I think MailMate is the best.

Couldn't be happier. And this advice is independent of your browser choice.

PS: the fact that Google's online properties are optimized for Chrome should make you realize that Chrome is the new IExplorer and it's our fault for allowing it to happen ;-)

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