On the desktop, I presently remain a Mozilla partisan, sticking with Firefox through thick and thin. But I have acknowledged that in terms of pure page user interface and interaction speed on a Windows PC, nothing can compete with IE. Its use of GPU acceleration for 2D page rendering makes things like CSS transitions shockingly smooth and fast. The CSS transitions for gradients are particularly delicious; I still have an optional subtle animation in the background of my blog using the gradient transitions. I used to have more animation in my blog (before readers convinced me it was annoying), and IE made Firefox and Chrome look as if they were running on clunky hardware from 5 years ago. IE is the only browser that—even when rendering typical web sites—reminds me that my workstation is a 3770K with a high-spec nVidia GPU. In Firefox and Chrome, I can easily forget how powerful my PC is until I fire up something that kicks off some 3D.
I am hopeful that Spartan will continue to lead in that area of so much importance to me: perceived performance. If it improves its actual JavaScript performance and CSS capability versus IE 11, which I expect it will, I'll likely be quite impressed.
However it appears that the average web page has gotten more than 40x slower. (They're also not really pages, they're "apps".)
People my age or a bit younger (early 20s) say craigslist and hackernews look "hideous" but dammit this is how web pages are supposed to be.
I've been using the web for a long time, and while loading was slow, I don't remember UIs feeling so sluggish and unresponsive.
Even the small layout changes Reddit has done the past few years has started to drive me away.
Not for me. I'm 18, and I think HN is doing great with this webdesign. As well with other sites.
I prefer an application for e.g. Twitter, because the website is way too slow in Firefox. Especially when you follow over 1000 people.
I also really liked http://motherfuckingwebsite.com as an example explaining what is wrong with websites these days.
The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed.
It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people are willing to forgive them, considering what bad actors they've been up until recently.
IE may have had utterly stank HTML compatibility, but adding XMLHttpRequest and inventing AJAX was probably the single most profound changeset in the history of the web.
[I think this proves what i said right](http://www.paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/)
But the Mozilla Foundation was founded in between IE6 and IE7 and, if I recall correctly, their stand on a standards-based web was there from the get-go. They fought a war, against Microsoft in particular, and were starting to win by the time Chrome came in and cemented the victory.
I wish someone would just make a new browser that lets people browse a mix of native apps and web pages so we can stop bolting more crap on top of HTML/JS/CSS.
You on the other hand are being completely impractical by expecting Microsoft to just roll over and work towards a goal that they don't agree with technically and philosophically. I wonder how you feel about Apple and their choices?
So go use your other browsers and don't use anything from Microsoft. It's funny that you even have a choice since Microsoft is apparently in control of the whole industry!
Really? I didn't notice. Mozilla are working on the new generation of browser engine anyway (Servo), which is much more performant. However Firefox itself is nowhere slow.
No you don't. Or if you do, it's a strange definition of notice. A millisecond is one tenth of how fast the centisecond counter on stopwatches change -- while one can obviously see that change, could you tell the difference between two different counters going ten times as fast, but at a difference of a couple of milliseconds? I don't think so.
One light-millisecond is ~300 km, or roughly the distance to the horizon at a height of 1000 moh, for another frame of reference.
Vivaldi has a cool story, former Opera guys that want to make a browser for the power user, not your mom- which is basically the only browser that actually targets me as it's intended audience. The downsides are it's only in technical preview mode and they pretty openly admit to tracking your usage [at least their openly admitting it, everyone else does the same expect maybe Old Man Firefox]
Despite all the evidence to the contrary?
>As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times.
No you don't. As a web developer, I personally can attest that's not true.
It's fast in benchmarks… but it's either single-threaded or has horrible locking. One slow script somewhere will not just block the tab, but the entire browser. Good luck hunting it down with 40+ open tabs.
(I really miss Opera 12, it's still the only browser to decouple the UI to its own thread so a long-running script doesn't lock up the page. Or the whole browser…)
Humans are impatient to the core.
Also, what evidence you have that says Firefox can't be slow(even with all the add-ons it supports). In fact, those hundreds of bugs will be quite a sufficient evidence that it indeed is for many people. (It's coming from someone who still hasn't converted to Chrome)
You might dismiss it as pedantry, but there is a clear linguistic difference between "I notice millisecond differences" and "I notice differences of 300ms".
Firefox is too slow. As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. I may be an outlier but I think most people who spend a lot of time on browsers will notice even small differences in load times. I've long switched from Chrome as my main browser, disliking the direction Google has been going with several of their products.
I might be an outlier, but I'll give Spartan a chance to impress. [As a side note, it's amazing how crippling to your reputation bad technology decisions are. IE 6-9 gutted respect for Microsoft]