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Comment by midtake | Hacker News Reader

As I remember it, Chrome was way faster than Firefox, but I was in high school and probably stupid. Firefox wouldn't catch up to Chrome until Quantum, which was amazing when it first dropped, but now Firefox is slow again.

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No, Chrome was way faster than Firefox. You were not wrong. It grew right alongside HTML5, and Chrome put a lot of effort into V8. Firefox was definitely better than IE or Safari, but Chrome could do everything that Firefox did without the memory usage that Firefox had. It's funny how memory usage is now abysmal on Chrome, too.

> Firefox is slow again

Currently I am feeling this too but only for one site, GitHub. Which is where is spend most time during the day...

Quite sad, I don't know if it's GitHub's fault or not but Firefox needs to figure out what's going wrong here soon or people like me may be literally forced to Chromium.

I've tried Chrome too on that wave of hype, including on some pretty slow machines. Like the Eee PC, and for a few months, not few hours btw. It wasn't perceptibly faster than Firefox, at it had its own slowdowns, just a bit differently. For example as I remember, Chrome often rendered a page visibly faster than FF, but it was actually unusable and frozen static "image" of sorts for a few brief moments, and only then it become active. FF had a slower time rendering, but at all times it was not frozen statically, just some elements were loading. Things like that. In the end, I returned to FF not because Google had some bad rep back then, but purely because Firefox was better and more pleasant to use. I'm still baffled how that "FF - slow!" campaign worked out eventually.

Yes, they were both much of a muchness when taken as a whole, though some people definitely did find that one or the other was notably faster for their typical workloads.

But Chrome won the vast bulk of its market share not because it was technically better in every way, but because they spent much more on marketing at the exact time IE entered terminal decline.

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