The only controversy around Brave is around Eich and his own personal beliefs. But honestly, if you can get past that, the team backing it is one of the strongest and most pro-user browser teams today. I'm particularly biased in favor of their security engineering.
That said, I still prefer Firefox because Firefox isn't Blink.
Suppose you believed that California with gay marriage would receive a similar fate to Sodom or Gomorrah, what's morally wrong with spending the money to try and avert that fate? It's nothing personal.
You probably believe in curtailing certain personal freedoms for other reasons and you are morally justified to do so. Again, nothing personal.
> I'm going to ignore your crazy theory that California might be subject to biblical catastrophe.
That's not "a theory" I have, that's a sincere belief that religious person might have. Had you been born a century earlier, it probably wouldn't have seemed so crazy to you.
> The key difference is that I don't want to limit personal freedoms for a specific class of people.
You probably do, but you'd just arbitrarily define what is and isn't a (protected) class of people, so I'll leave it at that.
Of course the steps from 'insane belief' and 'act perceived as immoral' can involve specific steps of reasoning which seem morally correct within the context of the insane belief. That's not the point, not a good justification for the act, and not something that we as a society should tolerate.
Some kind of incompetence, delusion, or misunderstanding is very often the cause of an immoral act.
It's not only "morally correct" within the context of the belief, it's not immoral in the general context. Doing a wrong thing based on false information but in good faith is not morally wrong. At the very least, you must accept innocence on ground of insanity.
I don’t see how one could conclude Eich has any hate for anyone based on one political donation 12 years ago.
Gay men and women who had worked alongside and under Eich for years at Mozilla were appalled at the controversy and said he had always treated them kindly and was a great friend.
I see how this thread maybe isn’t helpful — except that it demonstrates that people still have hard feeling towards him (though I doubt anyone who knew him personally would, gay or not). But it’s bringing up the old controversy yet again. Sorry.
Do you seriously believe that (as of the time of the prop 8 vote in 2008), 52% of the California electorate actually hated those 1.3 million residents?
Can you not imagine that it's possible to disagree with someone on social issues without hating them?
Just by default, the blocking of ad networks is useful for minimizing malware delivery vectors. But beyond that, it's mostly just how many times I've seen Yan and team stay on top of security risks in real time when I crash the brave office.
The only controversy I've actually read about Brave is their replacement of the site's ads with ones they've sourced themselves. But maybe they've stopped doing that now?
We never started, and we wouldn't do it without publisher as partner that gets paid (70%, same as users get for user ads). Why did you think we did "replacement"?
I spent an hour yesterday with two different websites trying to place an order on Firefox (to name and shame, CVS and shutterfly). I eventually gave up and used Chrome to place an order, but sent a note telling CVS that they lost my business because their website is broken on Firefox.
Please, more people switch to Firefox. Chrome is breaking the internet.
They’re not intentionally breaking anything, they’re just making it work exclusively with Chromium by not testing under Firefox. It saves them time and money.
Something I realized recently is that all of these sites have analytics. They can see exactly what percentage of their users are on Firefox, and that will directly drive their dev priorities. Using Firefox isn't just a symbolic gesture; it's a direct vote in its favor.
Do as blockers typically block the user agent? Or have people just gotten lazy and only bother looking at JavaScript generated analytics logs and not actual server logs?
Or have user agents devolved to the point where every browser lists every other browser and you genuinely can't tell them apart anymore?
Seems like you should still be able to identify the browser without a fancy analytics package.
I will switch to Firefox as soon as I am convinced it is a better option. It has been my experience that it is slower and more broken than Chrome, and despite promises of respecting users has a history violating user trust. Plus, there was that one time they fired a guy for having a fetish.
Nah, I don't set it to strict, and turned off the new Enhanced Tracking Prevention that's on by default. And all extensions were either disabled or set to permit everything on both sites. But I didn't reset my browser or start it in safe mode just to give a company my business.
It is totally possible that the "problem is on my side" but they still lost my business. There's only so much effort I'm willing to put into purchasing from a company if I can't use their website. Most places work fine, both of these didn't. I normally just find a company that has a better website to give my money to instead.
> Please, more people switch to Firefox. Chrome is breaking the internet.
I have tried to switch to Firefox multiple times, but I couldn't stand how much slower it felt than Brave, especially on Android. I also prefer the minimalistic interface of Chromium, and run Brave with its "Rewards" feature turned off.
Oh, I meant on my desktop. I use Firefox Focus or Firefox Preview on my phone and if Focus doesn't work I've yet to personally find Firefox Preview to be slow.
YMMV of course. Firefox has a long way to go it seems on mobile.
CVS is an outsourced shop, stripped to the bone. All their IT jobs have left Rhode Island over the years to be replaced by “managed services”. It’s highly unlikely they will read your feedback.
Please report those via webcompat.com – Firefox's compat team will always follow up and learn more how to close the platform gap that causes the issues but also reach out to the devs.
No, not sure, but I disabled adblock, cookie deletion, noscript, cross-website cookie trackers, etc. Pretty much disabled every extension in my efforts with no luck.
It's possible it would have eventually worked if I started the browser in safe mode or something, but this doesn't seem reasonable to me to do to be able to give them money.
I generally use Safari for everything and Chrome+Safari+Firefox when developing. When on Mac, Safari just feels the smoothest and seems lightest on battery.
I actually tried Safari last night (tried it for a day or two a couple of months ago as well). Is it just me or has everything about the extensions changed? They're only available from the App store? I tried to install Bitwarden but got sent to download the desktop app.
And overall the extension landscape looks highly bleak. What are the recommended adblockers? I found Ghostery Lite (which according to the reviews seems quite disappointing) and a number of paid adblockers...
From my test some while back there at least seemed to be a decent number of extensions out there but now it's different. Why?
Edit: The Bitwarden extension seems to have been installed automatically along with the desktop app.
Regarding ad blockers, my solution has just been to stop using the internet so much. I almost exclusively use it for work now. So I run into almost no websites with ads.
I heartily recommend going internet free except during work hours, and using the library for the rest. It's been such an amazing life improvement for us, we wish that on everyone.
Had you said that 6 months (or even 6 days) ago I would've laughed it off but right now I actually agree.
Laughing foremost because I'd certainly be asking the wrong guy as I'd expect most HN guys to be power users. Not laughing because I recognize the huge potential of waste of time the internet brings along, that I hadn't really seriously considered until recently, had just figured it's half necessary to keep myself up to speed with things. We really don't need to be up to speed with things, outside of work at least, and if work is stressing us to the point where it becomes uncomfortable we should simply just change our work.
I do however like to be efficient in whatever I do so I would still like a convenient way of browsing the web, but... in the big picture it's not that important, especially if you leave out the time consuming stuff. Then it's mostly looking up stuff, which you can do using whatever tools.
In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it.
For work I simply use Chrome and will keep it that way. Simple, easy, compatible, not fighting the mainstream. For private browsing though I would prefer to use something more.. personal. Brave works fine, currently trying out Cliqz. And I've tried out Next and Qutebrowser the last two days. Being a geek/ADHD I guess. There are more important things in life. Meditation helps. So does sailing. And not ranting on HN.
I've been internet free for almost a year and a half, and it's wonderful. My ADHD has entirely gone away. I'm reading anywhere from 30-60 minutes every day. It sounds like you're on a similar path. I'll pray for you that it all goes well. If I were you, I wouldn't delay it much longer, things tend to get in the way and make us put off important life changes.
> In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it.
Forgot which book it was, Sinner's Guide or Philothea, but the author said that Hercules went off into a lonely area to debate with himself what kind of life he ought to life, and he concluded that a life of virtue is the only one living. Your statement reminded me of it because (a) it's purely a choice of the will, which is the only thing we really have control over, and the only thing we own that nobody else has control over; and (b) he went off away from the busyness of the world in order to have an opportunity to think about his life and how he should live it.
Firefox is even worse on DOM microbenchmarks and in many others. It really only shines in WASM performance. [1]
It's unlikely that you will notice the difference anyway, few websites manipulate that many DOM elements at interactive rates. Those would be much better off with Canvas, which is also way slower on Firefox.
> This round of tests was under an Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot
in my experience, both browsers performed very differently under Windows than under Linux (Manjaro). both mozilla and google clearly spend more time optimizing for the overwhelmingly more common user (Windows).
Would be interesting to see this graph for all releases of Chrome. Honestly, I'd love to see visualizations of benchmarks like this for all big open source projects!
Is it? I've never seen a graph do this. Even e.g. fund performance comparing to index, normalized to starting value, show below-the-line in all graphs I've seen.
It’s pretty easy to understand this chart. In finance absolute numbers make more sense as they are “static”, but in benchmarks it’s typically not very useful to show eg the time spent, as this depends entirely on your hardware and is not very interesting. Rather, you solely want to compare with other numbers, and as such you normalize everything to 1.00 as the starting point.
This type of chart is extremely common in benchmarks.
Sorry, I think static was not the correct word; I think I meant absolute, ie Tesla stock being worth $1k is the same for everyone. This is not the case with benchmarks, where the numbers are fairly meaningless and different for everybody, depending on their hardware.
How is it not the same with stock and funds, e.g. what I linked to?
What I linked to doesn't show the fund price, it shows the value normalized. Just like benchmark values usually are. It's not the normalization I (and others) am saying is bad, it's the graph.
But yes, stocks are usually shown graphed with their ticker value. Funds are usually not.
I understand what you mean, but no. If you use a linear y-asis, you want to see for example that it goes to twice the amount, or halve the amount. The data-to-x-axis distance does this when the zero is not suppressed.
Alternatively, you can go to a log plot, where constant factors produce constant shifts. But even then, one would typically not put the x-axis origin at 1 on the y-axis.
Not really... would the performance ever be “0”? No. So it doesn’t make sense to be on the graph. Really, it should be logarithmic: 100 ops/s, 10 ops/s, 1 op/s, .1 ops/s.
So... a meta point: this is another example of a submitted story that absolutely flies up the rankings, currently sitting right at the top of HN after 20 minutes, despite no particular reason to be there.
It's not a rigorous test, there's no data on other browsers or earlier versions, it's a github issue on one particular js/DOM benchmark detailing a likely regression. There aren't any details I can see on what hardware is tested. Even if you wanted to start researching chrome performance, this is a bad place to start.
So why is it up so high after just a few minutes and 54 upvotes?
I think the number of comments factors in, and maybe even viewership. It also seems like the rate of upvotes matters; I've seen single-digit posts rise to the front page. For better or worse the algorithm seems to prioritize posts that people are interested in, not necessarily posts that people have indicated to be high-quality.
A reliable way for an article do do well on social media is to be fun to argue about, or to be supporting evidence in a broader ongoing argument.
In this case, there is a broad ongoing argument about Google and its products [jumping the shark/being evil]. That argument is so much fun that, as I write this, almost every single top-level comment in this thread is a salvo in that argument, only tenuously connected to the OP. This article is just a convenient place to have the argument.
(I have a personal learning experience here: The first article of mine that hit the HN front page was a writeup of a PyCon talk entitled "To Make the World Better, Remove Some Javascript from it"[0]. It also shot to the top within minutes, and was [defensibly] flagged off the front page very quickly, because the title alone immediately turned it into a place to argue about JS [not] being evil, rather than discuss the Python-to-Javascript compiler I was talking about. Suffice it to say that subsequent articles have been more modestly titled!)
Instead of improving the browser, Google team wastes their time to find a way to stop uBlock Origin and other AdBlockers. However, very soon they will face competition from Microsoft, because they also switched to Chromium Engine, so they will not have any compatibility issues anymore and can improve their browser much faster than before.
I agree, it has been so intolerable I've been using firefox because it just feels faster. I'm getting really fed up with google projects as of late just being abandoned.
If you take a second (ok, 4 hours to download the repo) to take a look at the git history of the chromium repo, you'll notice that 100% of the hundreds of commits per day are for things that are unrelated to uBlock Origin and AdBlockers.
"they will not have any compatibility issues anymore and can improve their browser much faster than before"
?? You'd would like to believe... Microsuck ? those idiots? You think they are going to make a better browser? for all the money they have they seem to hire morons to developer there shit software.. Edge? crap Vivaldi 10x better
Chrome dev tool also starts to lock up if you reload while on a breakpoint. The dev tool was the main reason I started using Chrome. Really sad to see it degrade.
That's funny. Because it used to have a related/sort of opposite problem:
If you were on a breakpoint and you reloaded the page, the code execution was resumed. Didn't realize it did that until I saw network traffic that was generated by code after the breakpoint.
I'm so glad to hear that I'm not the only person this is happening to. I had to switch to Firefox for debugging as Chrome would lock up completely on breakpoints.
They release often for the same reasons you would do continuous deployment. Release a little, but often. It helps them to better isolate regressions in the field and deliver non-critical security fixes quickly.
I know I say that it helps them prevent regressions and this post is talking about regressions, but it's also work keeping in mind that Chrome telemetry is insanely extensive. I'd wager that in the field, to the typical user, that Chrome 80 is actually faster than 75.
well, it creates a lot of DOM and executes a lot of JS, which stresses both JS and GC. it also uses the full bootstrap build to stress CSS & layout...which "modern" websites definitely (and unfortunately) do.
to call these microbenchmarks (especially when viewed collectively) for the purpose of dismissing the results is dishonest at best.
each datapoint on the graph represents a lot of internal metrics (GC, JS, DOM, layout/css). these aren't some one-liner JS loops. when you have a diverse set of "microbenchmarks", and they all show the same trend, you can be pretty sure the results are not "contrived".
Been on Firefox since Quantum came out and I have to say I don't miss Chrome one bit. The only honest to god thing that I wish Firefox had was the rounded edges of the top bar design like Chrome..
Devtools are great, performance is great, battery life on MacBook 16in is great, Nightly is awesome (has its ups and downs).
I honestly only ever use Chrome to double-check if my CSS styling is cross-browser. Although I have been using Edge a lot more for this use case, because I can't stand Google.
You have to enable it manually nowadays, but it opens up a ton of possibilities - you can theme virtually everything (find out which elements to theme using the browser toolbox).
I wish Firefox would enable the SharedArrayBuffer, multi-threaded performance just gets destroyed by postMessage. Transferable helps but only works in situations where both threads dont need the object at the same time.
> The only honest to god thing that I wish Firefox had was the rounded edges of the top bar design like Chrome.
Hah, part of my happiness in my return to using Firefox more as my daily driver lately has been the square tabs. Rounded tabs and tabs that shrink way too much turned out to be my big reasons I disliked the Edge to Edgmium "upgrade".
One great thing that Chrome has over Firefox is live translation, you can go on any live chat, right click -> translate to English and then the incoming text will be translated on the spot.
My first requirement for a browser is that it works with Bitwarden. My second requirement is that it allows vertical tabs. That's really the biggest asks for me.
So I started trying out some new browsers recently, and really like Brave for the out-of-the-box privacy focus. The crypto stuff is novel and I'd be interested to see where that goes.
Also tried Vivaldi and absolutely love it. Reminds me of the old Opera (absolute favorite), it's got configurations for everything. Vertical tabs are a built-in!
I use Firefox from time to time too, but find the interface less polished (at least on MacOS).
Firefox fits both of your requirements perfectly, I use both all of the time. Not only are tabs with the Firefox extension vertically aligned, but trees (I don't know whether this is the case, I avoid using Chromium-based browsers)!
Like I said, I use Firefox with the exact setup as you said, but I find the interface isn't as slick as Vivaldi or Brave (that's pretty nebulous but so are most opinions). At least for Vivaldi, I think most people who fondly remember Opera know what I'm talking about. I don't mean to denigrate Firefox, I quite like it.
I recently started using Safari over Chrome. I feel like it has better privacy than Chrome but doesn't have the performance issues that Firefox does. Even with the recent attention Firefox has gotten on Mac it still is a dumpster fire compared to Safari in terms of battery life and performance.
I get way better battery life with Safari than either Chrome or Firefox. I like how pinned tabs are there in all windows (otherwise.. what's the point?) But the extension ecosystem and lack of customizability makes me sad.
Amusingly(?), pinned tabs being in all windows is one of the most annoying things to me about Safari.
I use them in Firefox/Chrome to signal that they're tabs I definitely want to always keep open, and which I expect to open a lot of other tabs from. It's a whole different use case from wanting them available on every window.
The uniformity across all devices is great in Safari too. Synced passwords between my work laptop, home laptop, phone, and iPad is such a convenience. Also great if I'm reading an article at home and then want to bring it up on the phone for my commute and then my work laptop when I arrive--totally seamless.
I'm so mad about how they switched to a subscription service (they don't even make their own lists) and the latest Mac app is now Catalina only (which I can't use). I prefer Safari but Firefox seems to hit that middle ground between Safari's locked down excellent battery life and Chrome's garbage Google bloat.
If only Safari wasn't such a pain for front end devs I'd join you there. Luckily Firefox's performance problems aren't quite bad enough to make the experience laborious (for me).
I had a recent experience that forced me to better understand the development process of Chromium.
My OpenLayers mapping application suddenly got VERY slow. tl;dr: Chromium team had made an optimization change to canvas `getImageData` which slowed it to ~1/40th performance in some cases. It was frustrating to have to convince them this is a problem at all.
But what frustrated me more was how they came to decide to sacrifice performance in one way to benefit it in another. I'm sure they came to the conclusion somehow, but it ended up just utterly breaking apps that are already out there. One teacher struggled with a school-board-wide course that just didn't function because the main software was broken by this.
getImageData and other canvas APIs randomly regressing in performance is a common occurrence, sadly. Google frequently makes changes to the 2D graphics stack and they don't test a wide set of scenarios, just particular cherry-picked ones. Back when I still maintained some games using canvas it was pretty typical to see my framerates shift wildly every 6 weeks when a new release rode the trains.
Two other scenarios that will often change in performance is canvas-to-canvas draws and canvas<->WebGL interop, because how those are implemented is complex. In the past particular behaviors would instantly disable hardware acceleration for a given canvas, tanking your performance.
Chrome used to rely on fixed synthetic benchmarks like this for guiding their performance optimizations, but quickly realized they aren't a great indicator of real world performance and ditched them in favor of instead evaluating Chrome's performance against a collection of popular, real-world websites. See https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance for a discussion of their bench marking methodology.
Apparently some people don't understand what I'm driving at, so I'll explain:
V8 could choose to look at both microbenchmark performance and real web performance, as both are useful signals for how V8 performs in general.
The only reason to not use microbenchmarks is because you think they will somehow lead you astray and cause you to optimize things such that user experience actually gets worse. But, frankly, I find that incredibly unlikely, and I'd love to see actual examples of such a thing.
Otherwise, this just seems like, and now I'm going to return to that idiom: throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, here, simply because someone somewhere decided that microbenchmarks are universally "bad" while website performance tests are universally "good".
Of course, this presupposes that this is, in fact, what the V8 team is doing.
> The only reason to not use microbenchmarks is because you think they will somehow lead you astray and cause you to optimize things such that user experience actually gets worse.
That's not the only reason. It's about putting the effort where it's matters. Sure gaining 30% speed in synthetic benchmark seems great, but if in real world scenario theses things doesn't happen that often (and spoiler alert, they don't), it will means actually much less than 30% of the speed gains. That's not a good metric to go toward.
It's simply about investing the development time that you got, where it matters for the user.
If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.
Just pondering here: imagine that sites they choose are poorly written, and they spend considerable effort optimizing for these bad patterns. Could it make harder to make a truly performant website for Chrome, because switching to better patters makes your code loose due to them being less optimized in the browser?
> Could it make harder to make a truly performant website for Chrome, because switching to better patters makes your code loose due to them being less optimized in the browser?
I doubt it would, great pattern aren't just good for humans, they are also much more predictable, and that's quite good for JIT compiler.
If it does, I'll just refer to my last sentence which still apply:
> If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.
> if you make performance markedly worse on the regression test, then that's a bug.
Not at all, it's about not investing time on what doesn't matter. For sure it will means you spend less time on something else and that will slowly get worse.
That's why feature get deprecated and removed. Supporting something not used has a cost.
I'll repeat my last paragraph:
> If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.
The thing about performance is that it's almost always a trade-off. For very mature projects, you hardly ever get a win on everything, you usually get an increase here and a decrease over there. It's very likely that optimizing for the microbenchmarks is actually hurting the real world performance, which is why it's gotten worse over time. So, optimizing for the microbenchmarks is more likely than not to actively harm real world performance.
For example, if you have a caching scheme that was designed to make the microbenchmark better, it could very easily make real world performance worse. Like if the microbenchmark used 100 sized X blocks, so you pre allocated those on start-up, great microbenchmark speed up. But in the real world that hurts start-up time, and the cache is probably not fully utilized.
A lot of times it's good to use microbenchmarks as a signpost, to indicate if some performance tuning causes a massive degradation that is unexpected.
I wish there will be some Chromium/Blink/v8 experts shedding some light on what might be going on in this thread. Otherwise it’s just gonna dissolve into another switch-to-Firefox call-to-action megathread that happens twice a day now.
I've noticed this too. I think it might be a result of the UX. Unscientific of me, but Firefox feels like the buttons directly trigger behavior, the page renders as it comes in, and the content is "closer" to the engine somehow. Chrome feels like the buttons signal intents and behavior is orchestrated behind the scenes to feel smooth. They're both good approaches, but Firefox feels more like I'm driving stick, if that makes sense.
I've seen a real-world regression in the performance of a site I develop [0]. It's math-heavy, so maybe that's not "real-world" enough for them. Filed a bug [1] but it's finnicky to repro, and the V8 team seems unable to replicate it in-house.
If you want to view "real world" performance try this awesome website[0] on some of your regular sites. It includes comparisons with chrome, chrome+ublock, and brave. Also previous hn discussion[1].
I think the outlier cases are interesting. The Gamespot test[2] loads 2x slower and with 2x page size using default uBlock. Strange glass-card websites these days.
I haven't confirmed it with hard numbers yet, but I think these perf regressions may also be affecting node; node 13.1 executes our test suite in about 5 minutes on my workstation, while a canary build of node running the latest v8 (which I was trying because it fixed a perf regression in debug stepping performance which first appears in node 13.2) seems to take almost 7 minutes. Now, I thought it was just maybe a consequence of it being a prerelease build; but seeing this, if it's actually just indicative of broad perf regressions in v8... I'll be honest, I'd be surprised, since every v8 release blog is always talking about perf _improvements_.
I officially gave up on Chrome when they stupidly axed the "Close other Tabs" feature. They brought it back a version or two later, but that was the straw for me. I'm not sure what's going on in the Chrome team, but it appears to have lost its original vision and direction.
Funny. I always regularly update Chrome in hope it's going to become faster as they improve the code in newer versions. What a waste. I'm going to stop updating it now.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadThat said, I still prefer Firefox because Firefox isn't Blink.
You probably believe in curtailing certain personal freedoms for other reasons and you are morally justified to do so. Again, nothing personal.
> You probably believe in curtailing certain personal freedoms for other reasons and you are morally justified to do so. Again, nothing personal.
The key difference is that I don't want to limit personal freedoms for a specific class of people. That's when it does get personal.
That's not "a theory" I have, that's a sincere belief that religious person might have. Had you been born a century earlier, it probably wouldn't have seemed so crazy to you.
> The key difference is that I don't want to limit personal freedoms for a specific class of people.
You probably do, but you'd just arbitrarily define what is and isn't a (protected) class of people, so I'll leave it at that.
Of course the steps from 'insane belief' and 'act perceived as immoral' can involve specific steps of reasoning which seem morally correct within the context of the insane belief. That's not the point, not a good justification for the act, and not something that we as a society should tolerate.
Some kind of incompetence, delusion, or misunderstanding is very often the cause of an immoral act.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...
Gay men and women who had worked alongside and under Eich for years at Mozilla were appalled at the controversy and said he had always treated them kindly and was a great friend.
I see how this thread maybe isn’t helpful — except that it demonstrates that people still have hard feeling towards him (though I doubt anyone who knew him personally would, gay or not). But it’s bringing up the old controversy yet again. Sorry.
Can you not imagine that it's possible to disagree with someone on social issues without hating them?
How so? Has Brave introduced security related features that are not in Chromium?
That would indeed be impressive, considering the amount of developers working on Chrome.
So there's a bit of insider knowledge there, yes.
Oh, and there's my desire to push back against browser engine monoculture, which I believe is bad for the Web.
Please, more people switch to Firefox. Chrome is breaking the internet.
The analytics is most likely blocked by common adblock rules. And present-day Firefox users are quite likely to be advanced users, running adblock.
Thus Firefox ends up being under-represented in the analytics.
Or have user agents devolved to the point where every browser lists every other browser and you genuinely can't tell them apart anymore?
Seems like you should still be able to identify the browser without a fancy analytics package.
Yes
Yes.
On the other hand, if you're running adblock, many sites probably don't care how and if the site works for you.
And by the way: it is estimated that 60% of all internet users block analytics. So take your stats with a grain of salt.
Source?
It is totally possible that the "problem is on my side" but they still lost my business. There's only so much effort I'm willing to put into purchasing from a company if I can't use their website. Most places work fine, both of these didn't. I normally just find a company that has a better website to give my money to instead.
I have tried to switch to Firefox multiple times, but I couldn't stand how much slower it felt than Brave, especially on Android. I also prefer the minimalistic interface of Chromium, and run Brave with its "Rewards" feature turned off.
YMMV of course. Firefox has a long way to go it seems on mobile.
It's possible it would have eventually worked if I started the browser in safe mode or something, but this doesn't seem reasonable to me to do to be able to give them money.
And overall the extension landscape looks highly bleak. What are the recommended adblockers? I found Ghostery Lite (which according to the reviews seems quite disappointing) and a number of paid adblockers...
From my test some while back there at least seemed to be a decent number of extensions out there but now it's different. Why?
Edit: The Bitwarden extension seems to have been installed automatically along with the desktop app.
Regarding ad blockers, my solution has just been to stop using the internet so much. I almost exclusively use it for work now. So I run into almost no websites with ads.
I heartily recommend going internet free except during work hours, and using the library for the rest. It's been such an amazing life improvement for us, we wish that on everyone.
Laughing foremost because I'd certainly be asking the wrong guy as I'd expect most HN guys to be power users. Not laughing because I recognize the huge potential of waste of time the internet brings along, that I hadn't really seriously considered until recently, had just figured it's half necessary to keep myself up to speed with things. We really don't need to be up to speed with things, outside of work at least, and if work is stressing us to the point where it becomes uncomfortable we should simply just change our work.
I do however like to be efficient in whatever I do so I would still like a convenient way of browsing the web, but... in the big picture it's not that important, especially if you leave out the time consuming stuff. Then it's mostly looking up stuff, which you can do using whatever tools.
In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it.
For work I simply use Chrome and will keep it that way. Simple, easy, compatible, not fighting the mainstream. For private browsing though I would prefer to use something more.. personal. Brave works fine, currently trying out Cliqz. And I've tried out Next and Qutebrowser the last two days. Being a geek/ADHD I guess. There are more important things in life. Meditation helps. So does sailing. And not ranting on HN.
> In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it.
Forgot which book it was, Sinner's Guide or Philothea, but the author said that Hercules went off into a lonely area to debate with himself what kind of life he ought to life, and he concluded that a life of virtue is the only one living. Your statement reminded me of it because (a) it's purely a choice of the will, which is the only thing we really have control over, and the only thing we own that nobody else has control over; and (b) he went off away from the busyness of the world in order to have an opportunity to think about his life and how he should live it.
It's unlikely that you will notice the difference anyway, few websites manipulate that many DOM elements at interactive rates. Those would be much better off with Canvas, which is also way slower on Firefox.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-8...
in my experience, both browsers performed very differently under Windows than under Linux (Manjaro). both mozilla and google clearly spend more time optimizing for the overwhelmingly more common user (Windows).
My best guess to understand it is:
- On the horizontal axis, we have consecutive Chrome releases.
- On the vertical axis, we have total time of benchmark execution, relatively to Chrome 75
The source of the data is the "js-framework-benchmark"[0] run in a controlled environment in Chrome[1]
[0]: https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark
[1]: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2020/table...
E.g. this https://www.blackrock.com/uk/intermediaries/products/230286/...
Doesn't start from zero, but is very clear that it doesn't start from unity either.
This type of chart is extremely common in benchmarks.
And how are finance numbers, in what I linked to, static?
I have no problem with normalizing the number. That seems like the obvious best way. That's why they also do it in the finance graph I linked to.
What I linked to doesn't show the fund price, it shows the value normalized. Just like benchmark values usually are. It's not the normalization I (and others) am saying is bad, it's the graph.
But yes, stocks are usually shown graphed with their ticker value. Funds are usually not.
Alternatively, you can go to a log plot, where constant factors produce constant shifts. But even then, one would typically not put the x-axis origin at 1 on the y-axis.
> Bonus mess points for choosing 1 instead of 0 as the starting point on the vertical axis...
What purpose would a block of whitespace at the bottom serve?
Charts that I'm used to have units like FPS or MS on an axis that starts at 0.
It's not a rigorous test, there's no data on other browsers or earlier versions, it's a github issue on one particular js/DOM benchmark detailing a likely regression. There aren't any details I can see on what hardware is tested. Even if you wanted to start researching chrome performance, this is a bad place to start.
So why is it up so high after just a few minutes and 54 upvotes?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.
In this case, there is a broad ongoing argument about Google and its products [jumping the shark/being evil]. That argument is so much fun that, as I write this, almost every single top-level comment in this thread is a salvo in that argument, only tenuously connected to the OP. This article is just a convenient place to have the argument.
(I have a personal learning experience here: The first article of mine that hit the HN front page was a writeup of a PyCon talk entitled "To Make the World Better, Remove Some Javascript from it"[0]. It also shot to the top within minutes, and was [defensibly] flagged off the front page very quickly, because the title alone immediately turned it into a place to argue about JS [not] being evil, rather than discuss the Python-to-Javascript compiler I was talking about. Suffice it to say that subsequent articles have been more modestly titled!)
[0] https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk
Like GMail is awful[https://medium.com/@boriscoder/peeking-under-the-hood-of-red...] and chrome is on its way.
?? You'd would like to believe... Microsuck ? those idiots? You think they are going to make a better browser? for all the money they have they seem to hire morons to developer there shit software.. Edge? crap Vivaldi 10x better
If you were on a breakpoint and you reloaded the page, the code execution was resumed. Didn't realize it did that until I saw network traffic that was generated by code after the breakpoint.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
They release often for the same reasons you would do continuous deployment. Release a little, but often. It helps them to better isolate regressions in the field and deliver non-critical security fixes quickly.
I know I say that it helps them prevent regressions and this post is talking about regressions, but it's also work keeping in mind that Chrome telemetry is insanely extensive. I'd wager that in the field, to the typical user, that Chrome 80 is actually faster than 75.
to call these microbenchmarks (especially when viewed collectively) for the purpose of dismissing the results is dishonest at best.
each datapoint on the graph represents a lot of internal metrics (GC, JS, DOM, layout/css). these aren't some one-liner JS loops. when you have a diverse set of "microbenchmarks", and they all show the same trend, you can be pretty sure the results are not "contrived".
Devtools are great, performance is great, battery life on MacBook 16in is great, Nightly is awesome (has its ups and downs).
I honestly only ever use Chrome to double-check if my CSS styling is cross-browser. Although I have been using Edge a lot more for this use case, because I can't stand Google.
I did this myself using userChrome.css :-)
THANK YOU.
I had no idea this existed, I will be looking into this.
You have to enable it manually nowadays, but it opens up a ton of possibilities - you can theme virtually everything (find out which elements to theme using the browser toolbox).
Found the link for anyone else interested: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-changes-userchrome-css.ht...
That's a powerful machine most users don't have, you are less likely to notice the difference than most.
Hah, part of my happiness in my return to using Firefox more as my daily driver lately has been the square tabs. Rounded tabs and tabs that shrink way too much turned out to be my big reasons I disliked the Edge to Edgmium "upgrade".
So I started trying out some new browsers recently, and really like Brave for the out-of-the-box privacy focus. The crypto stuff is novel and I'd be interested to see where that goes.
Also tried Vivaldi and absolutely love it. Reminds me of the old Opera (absolute favorite), it's got configurations for everything. Vertical tabs are a built-in!
I use Firefox from time to time too, but find the interface less polished (at least on MacOS).
I use them in Firefox/Chrome to signal that they're tabs I definitely want to always keep open, and which I expect to open a lot of other tabs from. It's a whole different use case from wanting them available on every window.
My OpenLayers mapping application suddenly got VERY slow. tl;dr: Chromium team had made an optimization change to canvas `getImageData` which slowed it to ~1/40th performance in some cases. It was frustrating to have to convince them this is a problem at all.
But what frustrated me more was how they came to decide to sacrifice performance in one way to benefit it in another. I'm sure they came to the conclusion somehow, but it ended up just utterly breaking apps that are already out there. One teacher struggled with a school-board-wide course that just didn't function because the main software was broken by this.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100184...
Two other scenarios that will often change in performance is canvas-to-canvas draws and canvas<->WebGL interop, because how those are implemented is complex. In the past particular behaviors would instantly disable hardware acceleration for a given canvas, tanking your performance.
My money would be on that it improved performance on something google related: maps, youtube, etc
V8 could choose to look at both microbenchmark performance and real web performance, as both are useful signals for how V8 performs in general.
The only reason to not use microbenchmarks is because you think they will somehow lead you astray and cause you to optimize things such that user experience actually gets worse. But, frankly, I find that incredibly unlikely, and I'd love to see actual examples of such a thing.
Otherwise, this just seems like, and now I'm going to return to that idiom: throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, here, simply because someone somewhere decided that microbenchmarks are universally "bad" while website performance tests are universally "good".
Of course, this presupposes that this is, in fact, what the V8 team is doing.
That's not the only reason. It's about putting the effort where it's matters. Sure gaining 30% speed in synthetic benchmark seems great, but if in real world scenario theses things doesn't happen that often (and spoiler alert, they don't), it will means actually much less than 30% of the speed gains. That's not a good metric to go toward.
It's simply about investing the development time that you got, where it matters for the user.
If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.
I doubt it would, great pattern aren't just good for humans, they are also much more predictable, and that's quite good for JIT compiler.
If it does, I'll just refer to my last sentence which still apply:
> If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.
Progress is only counted towards the real world sites, but if you make performance markedly worse on the regression test, then that's a bug.
Not at all, it's about not investing time on what doesn't matter. For sure it will means you spend less time on something else and that will slowly get worse.
That's why feature get deprecated and removed. Supporting something not used has a cost.
I'll repeat my last paragraph:
> If your usage is closer to synthetic benchmark and thus you lost close to that 30% of performance since Chrome 75, then take your real world scenario and send that to the V8 teams, I'm sure they'll be happy to consider it in the test suite.
If you do need that speed, show them.
For example, if you have a caching scheme that was designed to make the microbenchmark better, it could very easily make real world performance worse. Like if the microbenchmark used 100 sized X blocks, so you pre allocated those on start-up, great microbenchmark speed up. But in the real world that hurts start-up time, and the cache is probably not fully utilized.
A lot of times it's good to use microbenchmarks as a signpost, to indicate if some performance tuning causes a massive degradation that is unexpected.
[0] https://noclip.website/
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=104449...
I think the outlier cases are interesting. The Gamespot test[2] loads 2x slower and with 2x page size using default uBlock. Strange glass-card websites these days.
[0] https://webtest.app/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052969
[2] https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.gamespot.com/
keep in mind that canary builds might not be compiled with all the typical release optimization flags turned on.