Does speed matter to you anymore when you pick a web browser?
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Actually, the speed is always important. Of course, today it is more "speed feeling" than "speed calculating", but, anyway, when you spend a little bit more time for each action during full work day (for most people it mean 16-18 hours in browser), you feel yourself more tired.
That's why I hate JS animation - very often this animation just spend my seconds every hour without additional comfort
If you see it once - you says "wow, it's cool!", but if you see it every minute or even more often - it's really ugly.For me the perfect browser should finish action exactly after the mouse button click. Without animation, fading out, etc.
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For me the perfect browser should finish action exactly after the mouse button click. Without animation, fading out, etc.
+∞
… but sometimes an animation can improve accessibility - when I think of pure CSS menus a little animation can prevent nervous flickering of submenus, see rationale last paragraph here:
http://www.greywyvern.com/?post=337 -
Yes, animation is good in some cases, but these cases should cover less than 5% of the functionality, not more
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Not really. To some degree a browser needs to be fast. But I think most modern browsers are fast enough when compared to each other.
Ease of use is much more important. A feature like Mouse Gestures or Rocker Gestures saving seconds of time is much more important than one browser rendering something a hundredth of a second faster.
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No, it no longer matters to me because all of the browsers I use (IE11, Chrome, 31, FF26, Opera 18) render pages more or less equally. Of more important to me is having a stable browser, one that is compatible with the internet sites I frequent and one that I can configure to my own liking. Frankly I see very little difference between the main browsers speed-wise given the way in which I use a browser (never more than four or five tabs).
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Speed matters enough to me to always go through chrome://flags and opera://flags to enable (or make sure it's enabled):
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GPU compositing on all pages.
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Threaded compositing.
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Accelerated overflow scroll + Universal accelerated overflow scroll.
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Accelerated 2D canvas.
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Accelerated CSS animations.
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GPU accelerated SVG filters.
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Direct3D 11 (on hardware/drivers that support it).
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Fixed position elements create stacking contexts.
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Compositing for fixed position elements.
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Compositing for RenderLayers with transitions.
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Compositing for fixed root backgrounds.
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Delegated Renderer.
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Deadline scheduling.
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UI deadline scheduling.
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Map-image rasterizer (AKA Zero-copy).
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Disable compositor touch hit testing.
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Enable accelerated scrollable frames.
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Enable composited scrolling for frames.
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Enable lazy session loading.
etc.
, which I check with opera://gpu and chrome://gpu (and also check that flash hardware acceleration is on) and experiment with.
I also enable SPDY and ASYNC DNS.
I also go into chrome://plugins and make sure PepperFlash is being used instead of regular flash. The former is more responsive (but uses more resources). YMMV though.
Using a process for each tab helps too. Browsers lazy-loading images as you scroll helps too.
When I do something in a browser, I want it to happen as fast as possible. So, a browser has to have those configuration option goodies for acceleration. (Firefox for example does HTML parsing in another thread.)
Now, with that said, UI speed/feel is even more important to me. Opera Presto has always been the fastest there. On recent hardware though, it's harder to tell. Firefox has improved a lot over the years. But, I still like Chrome even if opening/closing tabs isn't as fast as Opera Presto and Firefox. Chrome starts up super fast (with a warm start at least), which is awesome since closing the last tab closes the browser (no extension works around that 100% of the time).
Besides that though, I'm more interested in stability (including updates not introducing regressions), support for all the new web APIs and goodes, and things just working.
In short, speed still matters to mew when picking a browser, but there are other things that are more important.
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Wow, that was a comprehensive and very useful post! I've been checking Chrome flags all morning! Thank you!
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@ christian
- On my desktop PC and on a fast connection I hardly can notice any speed differences whether I'm using OperaPresto or Firefox.
A few milliseconds more or less are irrelevant for me.
For instance SPDY is always disabled in my browser. Having control over the content a server is pushing is much more important than a theoretical speed gain of some milliseconds.
Nevertheless I care for speed in general:
- I'm running a local filtering proxy.
- Most of the time scripting is disabled.
Unfortunately JavaScript is the most misused scripting language. An ideal opportunity to serve lot of junk, to snoop or even worse, to use it as a handy attack vector.
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Responsiveness of the GUI is also important. (Firefox has improved XUL so it isn't a PITA anymore, at least on my machines the GUI is fast)
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Last but not least, the way I can work/interact with my browser is eminently important (configurability & customization of the GUI) .
Accessing and changing some settings quickly on the fly are a must-have for me - for instance settings like enable/disable JavaScript or proxy.
- On my desktop PC and on a fast connection I hardly can notice any speed differences whether I'm using OperaPresto or Firefox.
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One of the biggest things in Presto is not reloading every single page when you go Back; I've yet to find another browser which even compares in that regard. Getting a new page up quickly is also a good thing, but these days there's little difference between browsers there - with certain exceptions. There are a couple of extremely long listings I've seen that render well in Presto while bringing Chromium to a standstill. But that's only a couple of pages which I absolutely have to use Presto for … and in that sense it isn't speed really.
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i must say that to me, speed still matters, particularly when you are on a slow connection. at home, it's not a big issue. on the road, you can't always ensure you have strong connectivity, there's only so much you can do to improve your connection strength. browser speed matters a lot in cases like this.
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I'm a speed junkie! I disable everything that I can to improve performance, be it plugins, ads, scripts, or page elements that doesn't bring anything to my daily browsing experience.
I also despise ajax and flash content.Opera (Presto) and Proxomitron deliver what I want regarding speed.
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Yes, browser speed matters a lot to me when I'm abroad. :woohoo:
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Yes. Speed drew me to Opera back in the dialup days. For a few years after getting broadband, browser speed didn't seem to matter, but now I'm encountering more and more pages with so many ads, photos and pulling in so many social network like and share buttons and so much Ajax that the pages load at almost dialup speeds again.
I don't need the fastest browser, but one that can handle lots of Ajax and still give competent speeds.
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Usually not anymore.
But O12 and the latest QNAP NAS are a nice example of a speed issue. The configuration pages of the NAS are barley usable. They switched to some kind of OS-Like look and feel with animations sigh. You click on one item and wait 5 seconds until the action is finished. Probably this is not a real speed issue, but a implementation issue on either side (no finger pointing).
Another point is that faster implementations might tend to be more power efficient on todays systems (so called 'race to halt'). As modern CPUs have a high dynamic of deep sleep / performance modes and the ability to fast switch between the CPU can earlier go to power saving modes and stay longer in them if rendered pages are done faster.
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I can say very confidently that speed does not matter to me, as long as it is "fast enough" as has already been said.
I had been using Chrome (under Windows) for years until recently.
After I got a new laptop I decided to ditch Chrome for IE11. Why, you ask?
Battery. With Chrome my shiny new (well, matte black ThinkPad ) was struggling to eke out 4 hours of battery. As I usually do no more than browse the web, OneNote, and keep a shell open web browsing battery life was extremely important to me.
When I switched to IE11 I was astounded. Where I normally got 3.5 hours from an Ivy Bridge and a 6-cell I now get 6 or more. Outstanding!
Browsers are superficially very similar these days; it's the extras that set them apart. For me, IE11's draw was battery life. I'm willing to ditch a few milliseconds of speed and a few key extensions to double my runtime. -
I don't think that the speed of opening a web page is important to me. Hell I even got a "slow" internet connection at my place, because I thought "what do I need 50Mbit???" So I'm basically slowing me down by myself.
What I think is important though is, that the browser keeps its speed, even if it is "under pressure". i.e. if you have 25 tabs open and watching 3+ different live streams, there should be no real change! -
For me it's not even the Web-Page loading-time, if thats works fast enough, than thats enough.
I think i care more about about smooth scrolling and speedy switching between tabs when the page has already loaded.
Though I also don't try to artificially slow down my Browser (addBlockPlus an such).
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I strongly disagree about speed not being important. I tested page loading to a certain point. Difference between faster and slower browser was over 30secs, not milsecs. If I were testing loading whole thing, i bet difference would go over a minute. In long term usage, I'd lose hours.
I also must mention online games. Speed is more than important there, specially if You snipe attacks in games like Travian.
If You use browser only for Facebook, Wikipedia, Google and reading news, then it isn't important. -
There's also the "perceived speed" which means rendering as soon as downloading begins. This way you can often instantly see if the page is worth it and, if it is, begin reading immediately. This is what Opera used to get right until version 11 or so. Much of Opera's attraction lied in customisation of keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures which made it a blaze to use. These factors can add a lot to web usage speed so that full download speed becomes secondary.
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Yes if slowness is in minutes and No if it is just few milli-seconds or seconds.