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Comment by whopa | Hacker News Reader

The article links to another article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b2, with Chrome still coming out ahead on performance. The JS engine is only one part of the equation. Chrome is faster than Firefox in a host of other things, like DOM manipulation and startup time, as well as the process-per-tab design makes it scale to multiple cores far more effectively.

Mozilla's lagging pretty hard on the innovation front. Everyone (except IE) has fast JS engines now. It's not really a differentiator. They aren't really doing anything notable long term, they're just gliding on their inertia. At least Google is actively working on Mac and Linux ports and extensions for Chrome, which are their two big catchup areas. Mozilla isn't even thinking about process-per-tab.

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The faster JS is attractive if you use a lot of JS heavy sites,. I do not - in fact I mostly browse with JS off. Start up time is a once a day issue, it is not significant given all the other apps usually in my session, and will be even less so once I solve an issue with suspending to RAM.

I would like process per tab, but I like my Firefox extensions more (Scrapbook, Clear fields, No Script, Its All Text, Errorzilla, Download Helper, Add to Search Bar, Web Developer, No Squint, Search Status).

It'd be more interesting to see an article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b3, which recently came out. See https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/03/12/f.... You'll notice that one of the improvements in b3 is performance increase in the javascript engine.

You're right, though, when you say that it isn't just about the javascript engine's speed. So maybe we should wait until Chrome becomes a full-featured browser before we start touting its unbelievable performance. Remember when Firefox went 2.0 and one of the biggest complaints (that I remember) was how it had become bloated and wasn't as fast? Guaranteed the same will eventually happen to Chrome.

The b3 improvements are incremental, I doubt you'll see that big a difference in benchmarks.

There wasn't a whole lot of change from Firefox 1.5->2.0, Firefox 3.0 was the big refresh. I don't actually remember that much complaining about poor performance in Firefox 2.0 relative to 1.x.

What do you feel are missing features in Chrome that actually matter to people that you feel with materially impact performance significantly?

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