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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days, so if you’re seeing issues like this, I would first suspect that it’s the web sites you have loaded in those 50+ open tabs instead of the browser itself. So many sites use bad JavaScript and that’s often what causes the problems.

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> So many sites use bad JavaScript and that’s often what causes the problems

Then Firefox needs to handle that better. As an end user, I don't care about the quality of the JS of the sites I want to browse - I just want it to work, and if it works in Chrome but not Firefox then I guess I'll switch to Chrome.

Exactly this. Often with complaints about FF performance someone comes along and says something like the above, about JS or my laptop's hardware, or etc, but if Chrome, with all its shitty tracking, can make those same sites load just fine on nearly any machine, then FF should be able to do the same if it wants more users. I don't care about your browser's problems and exceptions to decent performance. I shouldn't be expected to filter the sorts of sites I visit for the sake of making sure they don't harm my delicate little FF instance. I just want the damn thing to work as other browsers apparently can.

> Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days,

The GP is likely going to be triggered by those words, because... I've seen this repeated every X months/years... "Oh... yeah, you had problems in the past, but it's so much better now"... and... it rarely is. GP will just need to try out again at their own schedule and make their own determination.

I had this standard issue with desktop/laptop linux for years... "xyx doesn't work well"... "Oh yeah, it's so much better now - no problems now". Try the new recommendation - still broken.

I had a f2f with someone at a local meetup, and we got in to "xyz is subpar/broken on linux" (some gnome thing possibly). This happened to be a linux user group, and someone challenged me with "no, you're wrong, it's fine now". So... I pulled out the laptop and fired it up and showed the irritation/bug. The response - after showing that what I was saying was a bug - was a shrug and "Oh, I don't care about that - doesn't affect me". The verbal equivalent of "WONTFIX". In person.

tldr: telling people who've been burned - often for years - that things are "better now" is generally not all the productive. Most of the time, people who have specific/legit issues will figure out if/when they're fixed or tolerable enough.

This is valid but in both directions: people will say "Firefox is slow" because they don't have the time/interest to say "Firefox is slow on this specific webapp that is very important to me on my specific laptop". Of course the responses to the first statement are going to interpret it generally rather than specifically.

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