Firefox Takes the Performance Crown From Chrome
Performance is nice to be sure, but I think other things are much more important in 2013, like consistent HTML Canvas implementations.<p>For one small example the in-canvas kerning on both Firefox and Chrome are <i>awful</i> compared to IE10.<p>From a while ago: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/62WBzVZ.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/62WBzVZ.png</a><p>You can see for yourself here: <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/vVC4s/" rel="nofollow">http://jsfiddle.net/vVC4s/</a><p>Notice also the difference between doubling the font and doubling the scale, esp where each line gets cut off: <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/jGcrL/" rel="nofollow">http://jsfiddle.net/jGcrL/</a><p>This makes animations rickety and un-smooth (text animation): <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/simonsarris/HZFcR/" rel="nofollow">http://jsfiddle.net/simonsarris/HZFcR/</a><p>Surprisingly IE10 handles all of these perfectly. Of course, IE10 has totally broken canvas clipping (non-rectangular clipping regions are impossible. They worked fine in IE9.)<p>Firefox does render large text much better than Chrome, which is why I used it when taking screenshots for my book. But scaling the text (as opposed to setting a larger font) is a disaster.<p>This is just an example. I could go on for days about canvas bugs. I wish there was a bigger push to fix those instead of eking out a performance advantage.<p>To Firefox's huge credit, I've submitted a lot of bugs to Chromium and the FF team, and the FF team <i>consistently</i> gets back to me within a week and usually fixes the bug within a month. The bug reporting experience with Chrome on the other hand is rather disenchanting.<p>For a cross-platform bug example, the context's miterLimit is just plain broken by default in Chrome. I reported this (with examples) back in April and have yet to receive <i>any</i> kind of reply. Thank god it's an easy workaround.<p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=225512" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=225512</a><p>If you want people to use your browser and develop with it in mind, working elements are more important than being slightly faster than the others. (Good developer tools come in close second I think, at least for this crowd).