[have_faith]

> Most people switch browsers for one reason: speed.

Is that true? Maybe it is and I'm out of the loop but I can't remember the last time someone complained about browser speed. The bottleneck seems to be website bloat more than anything else. Would love to see this argument quantified.

[butz]

Nowadays users switch browsers to escape from AI nonsense. But in all seriousness, just enabling an ad-blocker significantly increases the speed of the browser, because, as you correctly noticed, website bloat is the largest bottleneck. And usually "raw" website content is only small fraction of all other stuff that gets loaded from various remote sources to show you ads and track you better. And to take speed point even further - disabling JavaScript does wonders to website speeds, you won't believe how quickly some websites are loading. Logging in to banking website might not work at all, though.

[hbn]

I've been playing Dragon Age Origins recently, and I've been popping into the Steam overlay browser to look up some stuff, which frequently leads me to the wiki. And oh my god, I can't believe how bad the internet is without adblock these days. Every page visit, it pops up ginormous video ads that cover 90% of the web page, and it needs to chug along to get the initial render done before I can collapse it.

[yannickburky]

Orion already weighs 100 MB less than Chrome. You will probably already feel this difference every time you launch it.

[sedatk]

It was true, and it was what made Google Chrome popular in the first place. Internet Explorer and Firefox were dead slow to start at the time while Chrome started instantly.

We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.

[eddythompson80]

That was a funny period of time because you could very transparently see the clear application of a corporate team that was tasked with improving the “startup speed KPI”.

During that time IE startup time went from a dozen or so seconds to also instantaneous. It was even faster than chrome sometimes. But that was just the startup. The application wasn’t ready to accept any user input or load anything for another 10 or 15 seconds still. Sometimes it would even accept input for a second then block the input fields again.

It’s the same mentality all those insanely slow webapps do when they think some core react feature for a “initial render” or splash screen etc will save them from their horrific engineering practices.

[ringer]

I think Google gained more users with its aggressive advertising campaign than with its speed (except for power users). If someone used a Google product like search, email or youtube in a non-google browser, Google would always show an ad encouraging them to switch to Chrome.

[GeekyBear]

At the time, the argument for Chrome was that Firefox and IE were bloated and their memory requirements were too high.

A system with less than 64 Megabytes of RAM (most computers of the time) would have to lean heavily on spinning rust virtual memory, making everything slow.

However, since then Chrome has become one of the biggest memory hogs that people commonly run.

[zipping1549]

Unless it's ungodly slow, to the point where it's beyond being noticeable, speed is the last thing I care about when it comes to browser. Most of the options available are reasonably fast and differences are not huge enough.

[wyldberry]

Gentle reminder that if you're commenting on hacker news articles you are likely the outlier in the "why people switch browsers" reasoning. Friends and family constantly surprise me with their tech choices and how they interface with the digital world whenever I'm home on holidays.

[handsclean]

It was the primary motivating factor behind the previous major browser shift, though there were also other large factors.

Remember that users often don’t correctly figure out which part of the stack is causing something. I’m guessing people generally don’t ID the browser as the performance bottleneck unless they’re familiar with browsers of significantly differing speed, and when not it comes out as asking for faster internet, faster websites, or a faster computer, all of which we hear constantly.

[rock_artist]

I wouldn't say it's only speed. I've been Firefox for years, but eventually ended up surrendering Apple eco-system. with Apple silicon, Firefox at least then wasn't sleeping that well, and the tab sync of FF between my devices was also less than I've desired.

So performance is general is more like it... that includes not hurting my battery life.

[dmix]

I've used all 3 browsers (chrome/safari/ff) daily doing web dev for years now and I'm convinced Safari just feels faster as a cohesive Mac app, with the animations and what not, but isn't in general when using the internet day-to-day. FF is little different than Chrome/Safari.

Also as a dev Safari is becoming the new IE. I've had a whole suite of Safari-only bugs in the past 2yrs and lots of browser crash reports from users.

[freehorse]

I have definitely switched in iOS to orion for the support of firefox and chrome extensions. Have not the slightest idea how different browsers in mobile compare in speed. But if it was abysmally slow I would have had seconds thoughts about it probably.

[TingPing]

On iOS its all WebKit anyway (for most regions).

[hombre_fatal]

Or seconds to think about it

[whazor]

Website bloat also slows you down cognitively, not just in load time.

[Tagbert]

From my perspective, all browsers are fast enough and within a couple of percent the same performance. I value features, privacy, etc. More than raw speed.

[crossroadsguy]

I switch(ed) for simplicity and privacy. Haven't found any yet. Camino and Firefox used to be that; and the browser on ElementaryOS (which IIRC was just a cleaned Firefox but not sure). Not anymore. Stopped using ElementaryOS, and every other browser collectively decided to aspire for FUBAR.

Now I think I'll just keep switching until there's one decent browser left which hasn't been AIed.

[port11]

Hmm, I did switch to Safari from Firefox because I couldn't put up with how slow everything felt. Ironically I now find Safari quite laggy, whereas Orion or Brave with uBlock make for a better experience. I do agree most people either don't switch browsers or switch to something they heard is good. Maybe Kagi have better intel than us.

(Safari with adblocker, of course.)

[ksec]

A lot of people switched away from Firefox / IE to Chrome when it launched.

Orion is faster than Safari on the same Mac. And it isn't rendering speed, but basic UI interface, multi-tabs usage. It is annoying because you see what Webkit is capable of and somehow Apple is not doing such as great job for Mac Safari. The difference is especially true on x86 Mac.

[freeandclear]

It is definitely the features that draw me to trying new browsers. The difference in a few milliseconds is not a big deal to me.

[seriocomic]

I use Kagi as my daily driver on mobile, and have it constantly as my second browser (next to FF Dev) on desktop for the same reason I use Kagi Search, support of the concept. It doesn't hurt that the browser is pretty good performance and experience-wise.

[biztos]

I switch browsers a couple times a day for one reason: compatibility.

That’s how often I find myself having to do something in a web app that only supports Chrome. Meet the new IE, same as the old IE…

[turnsout]

The last time most people changed browsers, it was to Chrome, and it was related to speed. But that was over a decade ago.

[xnx]

People switch browsers because they are accidentally tricked by a dark pattern in Windows 11 to do so.

[eviks]

Browsers are slow to startup, that's a common complaint for various browser-based apps, you must've heard that?

[embedding-shape]

Applications that use browser engines for rendering tend to be a bit sluggy compared to native applications, yes. But I don't think a common complaint is that a web browser as a standalone application is particularly slow either running or starting up. People tend to say stuff gets slow once they have a ton of tabs open, which makes sense.

[vitorgrs]

They are? My Linux PC have horrible perf (a 2014 Core M, 4gb RAM), and yet, Firefox opens instantly.

[esafak]

It is. That's why I dropped Firefox.

[ivell]

Have you tried it out recently? On Mac and Android it is now very good.

It used to be slow for me, but now on the same hardware it is fast enough that I don't see any difference compared to chrome.

[NaomiLehman]

I switched from Firefox to Chromium because of speed.

[nxpnsv]

I switched to zen browser. It was not for speed but feel. It feels nice.