I've seen many webapps that are completely unrelated to Google, that are more performant on Chromium browsers, just because most developers are using them for development. It's also easier to justify spending time fixing bugs/improving performance if it affects the majority of users, instead of spending effort for 4% of users.
It's not just that they passively focus on Chromium, they will deliberately trash performance on every other browser without a second thought.
Or having two different frontends, or stopping feature development to make Firefox developers happy. Which are terrible choices.
And going beyond of what standards offer is pretty much how web evolution had always happened.
Google built their redesign on top of a prototype set of APIs that didn't end up being standardized. That's their own fault, and it should be their problem.
It's not just Firefox devs, it's everyone else apart from Chrome, because Chrome had gone and implemented said APIs that were never standardized, so they didn't need a polyfill. And I would bet money that ShadowDOM v0 would have been removed from the Chrome codebase earlier if not for the fact that Youtube was using it - they wouldn't have forced themselves to use the same polyfill as everyone else.
Shipping a new, standards incompliant frontend was a choice, not an immutable fact of nature. There was nothing wrong with the previous frontend apart from the fact that nobody is going to get promoted for not shipping the new thing. And since the consequences of shipping impact everyone except for Google, who cares, let's ship the garbage UI anyway.
Don't make excuses for this kind of behavior. Google absolutely has the resources to do these things properly but they didn't.
There is a real problem here and it's absolutely related to the fact that Google is only incentivized to develop/test on their own browser, but that's really orthogonal to other browsers being slow or not being able to improve performance of a polyfill.
Google did not have to publicly ship their pre-standard experimental "v0" web components implementation so early in Chrome. They chose to do so regardless of what other browser vendors expressed.
Likewise they did not have to make YouTube use them so soon, thus forcing other browsers to rely on a polyfill that could not feasibly be made remotely performant compared to just implementing web components more quickly, wink wink.
They chose to do these things the way they did. They wanted to ship it on their timeline, and to hell with what other browsers wanted to spend time on first instead. They wanted to look like they were heroes for pushing the web forward, while in reality they were just holding other vendors and APIs back to get the one they valued the most done first, no matter how much of a mess they caused in the process (the transition from v0 to v1 was hardly quick or painless). And that's just web components.
When is the last time you saw Firefox ship such a major web API in such a non-final and un-vetted state, and then use one of the largest web properties on Earth to get others to prioritize it as they wished? Or even Apple, for that matter?
It's flat out ridiculous to try equating the vendors in this manner. They don't have the market dominance or even the same force of apologists burying the lede on their bad behaviour.
I'm sure the other browsers also have their own Project Fugus underway too, where they're just shipping a slurry of new APIs regardless of whether anyone else will ever implement them? Or is that the others' fault somehow too, because they should also be trying to fragment the web as much as possible as quickly as possible?
If we collectively just want Chromium to be the only engine because we value rapidly iterating on new APIs more than anything, then let's at least be honest about it.
I'm not trying to be a downer here. Realistically, there will always be a browser out in front that is going to iterate on features faster than the others. That's normal as long as you have more than one browser. If we want to criticize Google for practicing anti-competitive behavior then let's do that, but it just really doesn't make sense to me to put "they shipped a feature that someone else didn't" in that category.
Google didn't merely "ship a feature someone else didn't". They keep shipping new features as they wish, whether others even agree. They have in fact accelerated that attitude with Project Fugu. Some of them are quite complex or consequential APIs.
They do not deserve a free pass for it because Mozilla once shipped one or two relative minor features before Chrome did, or Apple added some weird CSS visual property for their latest iPhones without consensus. We're talking orders of magnitude of difference here.
The problem isn't who is first to ship. It's the casual disregard for even reaching consensus on the basics before shipping something, the sheer rate of output, the interop issues left in the wake, and the anti-competitive tactics being applied. Those are not "hypotheticals" in the slightest.
What is hypothetical is acting like anyone else could just magically compete on those terms. Microsoft couldn't keep up with them. Opera couldn't. No new engine has even come close to breaking into a general market yet, though a couple are feverishly trying.
Is that really ok with us? If so, then let's just be honest. Let's just say "new APIs are more important to us than engine diversity, and we don't mind Google being as evil as possible to kill the other engines off." As a webcompat worker, I'd love to see that honesty.
That is, it all depends on the full context. Competition is fine, but not anti-competitive behaviour. I maintain that we have had too much of the latter from Google, and that it is only increasing as folks intentionally look the other way and try to boil arguments away to mere deflections and other apologia.
Example: Our startup's product (https://benaco.com).
WebGL is slower on Firefox (e.g. this bug on Linux: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527), so I use Chromium to work on it, despite using Firefox for everything else, for 19 years.
This is literally one of the big things changed by what's described in the article (for those still using X11; it's already been solved for quite some time on Wayland)
> Even wirh webrender, EGL and dmabuf all enabled, performance is still not at par with chrome. Bug 1684224
which shows 5x higher FPS in Chromium than in Firefox.
There will be more to do until general parity, even past FF 94.
Firefox isn't terrible, but there is a noticeable startup lag and I get random freezes a lot more often.