I tried using Chrome (from a decade+ of using Firefox) and while it is definitely faster in some instances, it is also laggier in others. Tab switching is noticably slower for me, for instance. I also found it frustrating that it would draw an unusable interface before it was done loading, which 'felt' faster, right up until I wanted to actually use it.
Chrome has some good points though - its scrolling feels much better, one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser and I can just switch to another tab until it recovers and (obviously) Google products have much better performance. Ultimately though, its slowness in other areas, plus its inherrently broken mouse gestures, meant that I switched back to Firefox.
I do wish Firefox was a bit faster moving. I know there are difficulties in dealing with a huge, old codebase, but I just wish features that Chrome has had for years, like chromeless app windows and multiprocess would just hurry up. Features like window-based private browsing took years to migrate from Chrome, and it's frustrating as you said to be perpetually caught in a game of catch up.
> one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser
It hasn't been the case for years. Plugins are sandboxed. (plugin-container.exe)
The broken mouse gestures on Chrome are the single most important dealbreaker for me. I will never go back to a browser without good mouse support (which Chrome isn't).
Eh, I still get lockups for whatever reason, and I have to wait 30 seconds for the browser to recover, I can't just switch tab and do other things while I'm waiting like with Chrome.
Designers tend to be extremely annoyed by Chrome's scrolling. I should count the time I've heard this or something similar from a designer: "but let's use css-transitions instead of free-form scrolling, it's so-much-smoother on Chrome than that ugly chunky scroll, and most of our users are on Chrome so let's just move over that ugly free-scrolling, it's so 90's anyway" (if he/she actually got the argument this far, I'm already imagining having a foot on his/her neck and driving a chair foot through his/her skull repeatedly while splashing his/her brains on the walls...)
That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll I think: it makes designers want to look for alternatives to scrolling websites, and unfortunately for all of us, these "gorgeous" but completely user-hostile alternatives exist. And good luck if you get on such a website with js disabled if it wasn't coded in a gracefully degradable way...
>That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll
No, that is just designer's dumbness. Scrolling should be a system setting and browsers should not override it but just read and use it (I am looking at you, Firefox). And websites certainly should not override it with at all.
Yeah, but if I randomly pick any 2 Windows apps, the probability that they will scroll the same is very low. Heck, even the bultin Windows Explorer I'm staring at on Windows 8 has nice smooth scroll on the main folder pane and "chunky" scrolling for the folder tree on the left, that's two scrolling behaviors in the same window, for a builtin Windows app (!!!).
Thing are more consistent on Mac OS, but on Windows and Linux these kinds of GUI functionality are still at the "wild west" level, so the only sensible choice is to implement what's "better looking for the user" in your application, which all browsers except Chrome seem to do, btw, and they've arrived at a convergent result while doing it...
And "designer dumbness" is real, but it's root cause is in the fact that lots of good graphic designers are "control freaks", and when they know that something is "technically possible", they don't care how much work it takes, and it takes them a lot to "grok" how detrimental the overall result is for UX.
I solved the problem for myself by staying as far away as possible from "design-driven development" or teams led by designers... but it is a fact that such teams exist at lots of small agencies and startups and that they do shape the field, unfortunately.
This actually might be a fairly uncommon use case - I tend to scroll by clicking the middle mouse wheel and dragging down. On big, multimedia-heavy pages like The Verge (which can clock in at multiple megabytes in size), scrolling on Firefox is laggy, and on Chrome it is smooth.
Chrome has some good points though - its scrolling feels much better, one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser and I can just switch to another tab until it recovers and (obviously) Google products have much better performance. Ultimately though, its slowness in other areas, plus its inherrently broken mouse gestures, meant that I switched back to Firefox.
I do wish Firefox was a bit faster moving. I know there are difficulties in dealing with a huge, old codebase, but I just wish features that Chrome has had for years, like chromeless app windows and multiprocess would just hurry up. Features like window-based private browsing took years to migrate from Chrome, and it's frustrating as you said to be perpetually caught in a game of catch up.