[HN Gopher] "This Browser Is Lightning Fast": Effects of Messagi...
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"This Browser Is Lightning Fast": Effects of Messaging on Perceived
Performance [pdf]
Author : cpeterso
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-03-12 20:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| You can fool some people some times, but people use the browser
| every day, if it s not fast they ll use another.
|
| And afaik firefox isn't planning an IPO or being acquired by
| google so i dont see why they would want to use these cheap
| tricks
| hu3 wrote:
| Mozilla's main income comes from Google being default search
| engine on Firefox. I think it's about half a billion dollars
| per year.
|
| It's in their absolute best interest to market Firefox as much
| as possible.
| hu3 wrote:
| Abstract
|
| With technical performance being similar for various web
| browsers, improving user perceived performance is integral to
| optimizing browser quality. We investigated the importance of
| priming, which has a well-documented ability to affect people's
| beliefs, on users' perceptions of web browser performance. We
| studied 1495 participants who read either an article about
| performance improvements to Mozilla Firefox, an article about
| user interface updates to Firefox, or an article about self-
| driving cars, and then watched video clips of browser tasks. As
| the priming effect would suggest, we found that reading articles
| about Firefox increased participants' perceived performance of
| Firefox over the most widely used web browser, Google Chrome. In
| addition, we found that article content mattered, as the article
| about performance improvements led to higher performance ratings
| than the article about UI updates. Our findings demonstrate how
| perceived performance can be improved without making technical
| improvements and that designers and developers must consider a
| wider picture when trying to improve user attitudes about
| technology.
| fullstckuxdev wrote:
| There is no date in the paper...
| topaz0 wrote:
| March 10, 2021
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06181
| godelmachine wrote:
| Coming straight to it - in my perception, performance-wise
| ranking would be -
|
| 1. Microsoft Edge
|
| 2. Google Chrome
|
| 3. Mozilla Firefox
|
| Although Firefox is a RAM guzzler and can get excruciatingly
| slow, I made Firefox my primary browser after I got fed up of
| Google AMP, was surprised to so many useful features in Firefox,
| such as sending tabs across Mobile - Desktop.
|
| Edge has done a pretty decent job, thought I have some issues
| with their freezing tabs and recently introduced vertical tabs.
| toast0 wrote:
| I haven't tried the new Edge, but the old Edge used to get into
| states where button presses on the controls would be queued.
| That's not great for performance perception. (Incidentally,
| firefox on Android sometimes gets there too, especially after
| viewing npr org, hmm)
| godelmachine wrote:
| Edge Legacy would be deprecated this year, along with IE,
| AFAIK.
| astrange wrote:
| Firefox has some of the best memory tools and your problems
| could always be extensions. (Or if not, getting a content
| blocker extension might help.)
|
| Check about:memory.
| progval wrote:
| Did you read an article about Edge's performance recently?
| jedberg wrote:
| I think the priming effect is more subtle though. What people
| express _out loud_ might be primed, but their actual feelings may
| not change. I wish we had kept the data on this, but our search
| experiment at reddit is a good counterpoint:
|
| At one point we measured how search was doing, so we added a
| button to the top of the search results that said "did you find
| what you're looking for?". 70% clicked yes. Not great, not awful.
|
| Then we upgraded the search engine, but didn't tell anyone.
| Suddenly that stat jumped to 90%+. But people would still
| complain just as much about how bad search is. Many months later,
| we finally announced that we had changed the search engine.
|
| The stats on the button didn't change, but the public narrative
| did. So what people say they perceive and how they actually feel
| may not necessarily match.
| bombcar wrote:
| People remember two things - when things don't work, and when
| they start working.
|
| The first is why people will complain something is "crappy" if
| they had one bad experience with it, and the second is why the
| "new" thing is often perceived as better EVEN if it has more
| problems than the old - as long as it doesn't have the same
| problems.
|
| After awhile the "new" wears off and it's crappy again.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Such things are very tricky, because negative experiences are
| remembered vividly. Search working is expected, search not
| working is a huge problem. Also, search is a hard thing to get
| right.
|
| When it goes wrong on reddit, it goes annoyingly wrong. For
| instance, my main issue is that some searches return a flood of
| irrelevant content. Searching for some games brings a flood
| from r/GameSwap or some such place. Or, trying to search about
| Nikola Corporation will bring up a whole lot of sports
| personalities.
|
| That makes sense in that it's a tough problem to solve, but
| what's annoying is that it has to be dealt by hand every time.
| I can write a filter, but what I'd really like is a permanent
| setting: "I'm not ever interested in results from /r/GameSwap
| or /r/SportsSubreddit". Also it might be helpful to be able to
| set a limit how much stuff can come from a single subreddit,
| because some contain very repetitive content that drowns out
| all useful results.
|
| Edit: Also, search should parse youtube URLs and ignore HTTP vs
| HTTPS, youtube.com vs youtu.be and the ?feature=share junk at
| the end. I can't be the only one who thinks "This must have
| been discussed on Reddit, and the discussion has to be more
| useful over there", but Reddit comparing the URLs literally
| makes it annoying to find matches.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I'm not sure why people hate Reddit search so much. I've never
| used it much, but when I have, it's been fine over the last
| decade or whatever.
|
| The narrative is so strong though, I'm not sure how you could
| defeat that without creating a radically different solution
| that derails the narrative.
| faizshah wrote:
| I've been using reddit since around 2012 and throughout that
| time I rarely used Reddit's search mainly because it didn't
| search through comments in a post to score relevance. The
| only times I would use Reddit's search was if I remembered
| some words or phrases in the posts title and I had a specific
| post in mind I was looking for. I'm also pretty sure that
| back then the relevance of search results in general using
| Reddit's search was far inferior to site:reddit.com
| specifically in query expansion (synonyms & misspellings in
| particular).
|
| I only started using Reddit's search recently because of
| changes to google that make reddit search results have
| incorrect times.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I hate that in the new design, when I'm IN a specific
| subreddit, there's no way to limit search to that specific
| subreddit. After the search is done, it'll show a link do
| only display results from inside that subreddit, but 100% of
| the time I'm in a subreddit, I want results from that
| subreddit.
|
| Edit: adding that because of the search, and lack of managing
| multi-reddits, I'm still using the old reddit with the RES
| extension
| cameldrv wrote:
| The fact that the search engine changed though is information.
| If the search engine is the same, maybe they had 490 mediocre
| experiences with the old one, and then 10 better ones. Since
| it's the same search engine, they're going to average all of
| those together and say it sucks.
|
| If you tell them that the search engine is brand new, they'll
| reset their expectations and only look at the new data to make
| a judgment.
| Stupulous wrote:
| I am guessing that most people wouldn't use reddit search
| because of its reputation, so the 90% of people saying they
| found what they were looking for were a small % of users. When
| you posted that you updated search, a lot of people who had
| given up on it might have tested it out again and changed their
| opinions.
|
| Does that check out with your data?
| jedberg wrote:
| Sadly I don't remember nor have the data. But that is
| certainly possible and could have skewed the data.
| kempbellt wrote:
| Besides the rare "OMG! This is AMAZING!", people who are upset
| by something are much more likely to make noise than people who
| are content with it. It's just how we are wired.
|
| Odds are, no changes you make will completely silence the loud
| few, and even if it does, it'll trigger others. You can track
| engagement though. If the majority of people silently but
| demonstrably show that they enjoy how things are, you have a
| solid foundation to build on. The numbers will speak for
| themselves.
| marcodiego wrote:
| A classic: mojave experiment
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsStHxtVr_w
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm prepared to catch a lot of shit for this, but I get the
| feeling this is where we're at with the M1. Yes, the M1 Macbook
| Air is faster than Intel Macs, but that's not a high bar of
| entry. People were reasonably frustrated with how Apple gimped
| Intel's CPUs to run in ultra-thin machines, so why take that
| anger out on Intel? Intel is far from being the best company on
| the block (or even the CPU space), but it's pretty concerning to
| watch how fast people jump to conclusions based on the messaging
| they get from YouTube and Twitter. I've argued about this with
| several Apple users, and it always boils down to the same closing
| argument: "but I want to use a Mac!" There's nothing wrong with
| that, but it's certainly a certainly a better place to start than
| "This x is so fast!"
| neogodless wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're getting at.
|
| I might agree that the M1 Air being faster than the previous
| Macbook Air is one reason why users perceive it as faster,
| though that doesn't really explain it seeming "much faster."
| You'd also have to argue that Big Sur makes up for some of the
| difference, and assume comparisons aren't being made between
| updated Intel Macbook Airs.
|
| I haven't had an opportunity to use an M1-based device, so I
| really just have to accept that it's surprisingly fast. Of
| course, just like some "want to use a Mac", I "want to use a
| gaming PC/laptop" and so I do. And my gaming PC and laptop are
| both "very fast." I don't know that their speed would
| _surprise_ people coming from older, Intel-based PCs or
| laptops, though depending on what they are doing, they might.
|
| But I still don't know what point you're trying to make. I
| guess you're just saying people read that the M1 machines are
| fast, and so they think they are. But there also benchmarks
| that show it performs remarkably well, on par with low-wattage
| Ryzen laptop CPUs and in some benchmarks / single-core with
| high-wattage Ryzen desktop CPUs, which are really fast.
| toomim wrote:
| Great! More Academic articles about how to lie to users and
| convince them that your software is better than the competition
| without actually making it better.
|
| Dark Patterns are the new Light Patterns!
| toomim wrote:
| Here's another academic article about how to lie to your users
| from just 8 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26345283
|
| Truth is so 1995. Nobody cares about honesty anymore!
| switch007 wrote:
| I wonder if we're happier when we're lied to. Reality kind of
| sucks
| modzu wrote:
| brave new world
| gumby wrote:
| Same old world
| _Microft wrote:
| Thought experiment: two programs take exactly the same time to
| complete a task but one of them is _perceived_ as slow and the
| other as fast (for whatever reason). Shouldn 't this make the
| latter the better one of the two programs? At least I would
| count "being less annoying than the other program" (assuming
| that perceived slowness is annoying) as a positive feature.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| If the only basis for perception of speed is essentially
| deceit, ``being less annoying'' means it lies to you more ---
| I don't think I'd call that an intrinsically positive
| feature.
| _Microft wrote:
| Why should the perception of speed have to be based on
| deceit?
|
| I bet I would perceive a progress bar that progresses with
| constant speed as faster than one that stalls and stutters
| even when both of them take the same time to completion.
| Even more if the alternative would be an indefinite
| progress indicator (hourglass pointer, spinner) that just
| goes away when the task finishes.
|
| On the other hand if the result is that a user is less
| annoyed by a process, I do not see why it should be wrong
| to convey that feeling artificially by setting up a
| situation in which the same result makes them feel better
| than in a more "honest" one (as you might call it?).
| matthewrobertso wrote:
| I definitely agree that showing a progress bar makes a
| slow operation feel faster, I've seen this work many
| times.
|
| I think I disagree about the constant speed vs stuttering
| progress bar example though - Progress bars which
| progress smoothly are great if they are accurate. But
| because sometimes a UI will show a fake progress bar
| smoothly filling that will empty after filling and fill
| again, I've been trained to become skeptical of them. I
| don't think I've ever seen a stuttery progress bar that
| was "fake" in that way.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I agree, instead of making it look faster, make it actually
| faster. Websites these days are filled with unnecessary crap
| that just slows things down, start by eliminating those things
| ffs.
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