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cyberrockyesterday at 1:57 AM1 replyview on HN

I think the problem with that is that Firefox Android with uBO still feels like it has worse First Contentful Paint than Chrome Android. Even on a high-end phone the difference can feel ridiculous; sites render after 1-2s on Chrome but sometimes I can count up to 5 with FF.

The benefits of having uBO might matter more to you and me, but let's not forget that faster rendering was arguably the main reason Chrome Desktop got popular 20 years ago, which caused Firefox to rewrite its engine 2 (3?) times since then to catch up. 20 years later this company still hasn't learned with Android.


Replies

Zakyesterday at 3:25 AM

Maybe I'm less sensitive to that, but I hadn't really noticed on a phone that wasn't high-end in 2020 and certainly isn't now. I'll have to pay attention to sites being slow and compare a Chromium-based browser next time I notice one.

I switched from Firefox desktop to Chrome when Chrome was new because it was multi-process and one janky page couldn't hang or crash the whole browser. I vaguely remember the renderer being a little faster, but multi-process was transformative. Firefox took years to catch up with that.

I'm very sensitive to ads though. If a browser doesn't have a decent adblocker, I'm not using it. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chromium browser with good extension support on Android is Edge.