Despite trying to use Phoenix with every milestone release since 0.2, I always finding myself switching back to IE (blech). The problem is that it seems just too sluggish. This is a bit of a puzzle, since people regularly post experiments showing that Phoenix performs all sorts of tasks -- launching, rendering, etc. -- faster or as fast as IE.
Experimenting with 0.5, I think I know why Phoenix SEEMS slow, at least on old, underpowered machines like mine. My mode of browsing is to have two or three or more windows (tabs, on Phoenix) open at once. When I bring up a new page, knowing it will take several seconds to download and render, I switch to another page and read it or work on it. Here is where the problem occurs with Phoenix. It is often the case, while one page is "getting made," that nothing else can be done with the browser. The menus don't work, other tabs won't come to front, and you can't scroll a page or enter text into forms if you do have another tab in front. IE seems to do better job of letting the user pull a window to the foreground and allowing it to proceed while other windows are "getting made."
The problem isn't that Phoenix is slow, but that it makes the user wait. I suspect this is more apparent on slow machines than fast ones, but there always will be pages that burden the machine. It is a well-known UI principle that making the user wait is worse than doing a task slowly. Or to put it another way, you can get away with making a user wait on a task, if you allow him to get on with other tasks. IE does this pretty well. Phoenix lags.
Just my two cents. Other than that, I love Phoenix, and I look forward to making it my primary brower some day.
Why Phoenix SEEMS slow
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Arctic Dragon
- Posts: 199
- Joined: December 16th, 2002, 4:44 pm
- Location: Ottawa, Canada
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bzbarsky
- Posts: 478
- Joined: November 5th, 2002, 1:36 pm
Re: Why Phoenix SEEMS slow
rturpin wrote: It is often the case, while one page is "getting made," that nothing else can be done with the browser.
Filed <a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194540">bug 194540</a>