Comments on: Does browser speed matter?

By: rillip

rillip — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:50:51 +0000

Browser speed is not important to me. Perceived speed does play a role in my choice, however. For example, Firefox “feels” slow to me. Opening tabs seems to take longer. There seems to be a longer delay between clicking a bookmark and when the page actually starts trying to connect. It’s not that serving the page matters, it’s the “feel” of responsiveness. I imagine if I were to actually time these, I would find that Opera (the browser I choose) is actually slower on one or more of these things, but it’s human perception that matters more.

It’s very hard to figure out where this comes from. Right now, I’m using Kazehakase. It “feels” fast. But it “feels” ugly. What about the UI is different? I don’t know. It has scroll bars. It’s grey, has little x’s for tabs, feet for the “Go” button, seems almost identical in every way I can evaluate to Opera/Firefox. But it feels ugly.

Humans, myself included, are far too fickle.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:44:13 +0000

Ah, good point, Count Shrimpula. I guess since I’m using Ubuntu, I don’t really consider IE a viable browser choice. I was thinking mainly of Firefox, Swiftfox, Opera, Galeon, Konqueror, Epiphany, Dillo, etc.

By: Count Shrimpula

Count Shrimpula — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 22:38:07 +0000

Yeah, there are definitely browsers that are more and less secure than others. Firefox is more secure than IE7 (in no small part because of ActiveX, which IE users and other browsers do not. That’s also a big reason you run into sites that aren’t compatible with Firefox/Safari/etc) and IE7 is more secure than IE6, which has/had terrible security. And that mirrors Windows/Linux. Part of it is how they’re designed, part of it is market share painting a bullseye.

By the way, I’ve been playing around with (K)Ubuntu on an old computer for about a year now, and I finally took the plunge and bought a Dell E1505N preloaded with Ubuntu a few weeks ago to use as my primary computer. Your guides and forums posts have been awesome in helping me get set up and getting through any snags along the way. So I just wanted to say thanks for that.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:17:34 +0000

Tyler, just curious: are there browsers that are more insecure than others?

I’m a bit naive in asking, but I genuinely don’t know.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:12:03 +0000

I think the performance and the security of the browser is much more important.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 02:28:25 +0000

Good point. For older hardware, I’d definitely use something lighter (Galeon isn’t too bad–despite what people contend, I’ve never found Epiphany to be a lightweight browser). And, yes, I’d use Lynx over Dillo. Dillo has very limited appeal… the worst of both worlds, as far as I’m concerned.

But for older hardware, it’s not the browsing speed or rendering speed that affects my user experience so much as the memory use (Firefox is a hog). Luckily, I don’t use my older hardware as much. Even on my 256 MB of RAM on my Dell laptop, Firefox flies.

By: Jorophose

Jorophose — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 01:20:33 +0000

Browser speeds are important.

On this Celeron @ 500MHz with 192MiB, if I’m working with XFCE, Firefox is a huge pain, and almost litterally drags everything down with it. Opera is speedier at loading pages (But sometimes has trouble with very large CSS files) and more responsive, with a quicker startup.

It’s also got better MDI management; open a ton of tabs in Firefox, and it’ll pause for a second while it’s tries to load them. At least on slower hardware. On Opera the only lag is when you switch to that tab.

You really see the performance hits on slower hardware. Firefox using 100MiB for two tabs (A friend of mine saw that) when you have 1024MiB and as long as you’re not using lots of Java-apps, well it’s not a huge problem. But once ressources are tight, you really do see what browsers are faster.

Dillo is pretty lame though. I wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone. Took over as default browser without warning and won’t return control to Firefox, horrible way of scrolling, general uglyness, and general weirdness. But I’m planning to try and rework the source, since the project is officially abandonned…

By: Jonas Wisser

Jonas Wisser — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:44:24 +0000

I agree… I follow the same “open in new tab” method of browsing, and it really doesn’t matter to me how fast the browser is. Hence why I tend to use Firefox with several extensions installed over everything else- functionality over speed I don’t need.

By: emvigo

emvigo — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:42:19 +0000

No, it hasn’t too much sense… Yes, Firefox looks a bit slower than IE (maybe it’s just an ilussion like Zodmaner says), but I use it because it has a better perfomance: it rarely crashes (I can’t get IE start… for some reason it starts two program instances and crashes, unless I open Windows Update), it’s simpler and it’s more comfortable, at least for me. That’s what matters.

With dial-up, to save a second can make a difference, but not because of the “experience”, but because of the bill. With DSL, I don’t see any practical reason to choose a browser by its speed.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:41:59 +0000

Thanks for the reassurance, folks. So I’m not the only one who doesn’t care about “saving” that fraction of a second.

By the way, I have used Opera and Konqueror, and I have seen how they are noticeably faster than Firefox. My point is that I just don’t see how that speed increase has any practical positive effect on my web browsing experience.