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Comment by Artemis2 | Hacker News Reader

The idea is great, but in a world where browser performance is a competition, writing a web browser in Javascript might not be the best.

The interest here is learning, and it looks like Breach is very good on this point.

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Yeah, just like Firefox which is pretty much Javascript and XUL on top of Gecko :)

I don't use Firefox anymore because it's so much slower than Chrome, especially when using firebug. Speed IS important. Whenever I see Mozilla release new versions like every day, with new features that I will never use, I wish they would just drop everything and focus on improving performance.

When is the last time you used it? Or, what sites do you visit? The current speed of Firefox is quite good. Maybe Chrome could surprise me and be faster. I don't see how, right off.

I switched back to firefox about 6 months ago now. I'm using nightly, and the built in developer tools are good enough that I don't worry about using firebug anymore. I find the speed pretty good, faster than chrome for some things, slower for others. One area it does shine is implementation of es6 features, and syncing with my mobile firefox browsers.

I hear a lot of firefox hate, and while it certainly used to be true that it wasn't very good, it's no longer true.

I've generally found the opposite to be true; Chrome/Chromium have lately been slow as heck and buggy for me on the majority of the computers I've used, whereas Firefox has been less so (but still slow as heck and buggy).

Really, every browser is slow as heck and buggy, so to each his own ;)

There are many of us are Mozilla who focus primarily on performance improvement. The fact is, though, that performance improvements usually are not splashy enough individually to be added to release notes. "Improved performance measure X by 15% in circumstance Y!" is not going to thrill anybody, even if it is important. Please don't take the release notes as representative of where our engineering effort is spent.

That's wierd, I can't notice FF being any slower than Chrome.

The heavy lifting looks like it is done with Chromium so the parts implemented in Javascript shouldn't be a problem if they are done well.

Indeed all the rendering is of course taken care of by the Chromium Content Module. Javascript mainly orchestrate the UI.

I'm not a browser expert, so please enlighten me on this. How can it be named "A new browser written in JavaScript" if it's not actually entirely JavaScript?

Do you consider Chrome on iOS a browser, isn't it just a wrapper around the UIWebView?

I don't. It's just a wrapper around UIWebView.

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