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Comment by ibotty | Hacker News Reader

this post is uninformed.

first, a cache should never slow you down. old obscure settings can. and these can be in your old firefox profile as well.

second, the usecase of many open tabs is better in firefox. there are studies out there that show lower ram usage in firefox for many tabs. (first google link, because i don't find the one i had in mind right now: http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-...)

btw: if you are going to criticize test methodology, why do you include two browser? you know you can run various development version of firefox as well?

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"first, a cache should never slow you down."

Cache tangent: Of course it can and will, generally things that use caches wait for the results of those caches query before hitting whatever the slower thing is being cached. Anytime you have a cache miss and the slower thing must be queried anyway, the wasted time you spent waiting for the cache query results "slowed you down". Also applications that allocate huge caches for data sets with poor cache rates or low utilization can "slow things down" by starving other data-sets with better hit rates or higher utilization from being as large as they could be.

With Chrome you have to trade memory usage for the process sandboxing of each tab which adds a measurable overhead. But I think for the general population it is a trade worth making.

I think it definitely used to be, but these days Firefox crashes so rarely that I don't see it as an issue. I imagine other browsers are similarly stable, and it depends on your personal usage patterns, but I think the majority of users probably neither use dozens of tabs nor experience frequent crashes, so both should be fine for most users, but power users are likely to prefer one or the other.

I actually don't know how much of an effect cache should have on performance, but the article mentioned the "disable cache" not working as having a negative effect for him, so I assume it was because he thought it made things slower for him.

Your second point is a good one. I didn't know!

I'm not sure what you mean by your last point. Include two browsers? Do you mean that I mentioned Canary? I didn't consider that specific to my point. Yes, I know FF has dev versions as well.

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