> Most people switch browsers for one reason: speed.

Is that true? Maybe it is and I'm out of the loop but I can't remember the last time someone complained about browser speed. The bottleneck seems to be website bloat more than anything else. Would love to see this argument quantified.

Nowadays users switch browsers to escape from AI nonsense. But in all seriousness, just enabling an ad-blocker significantly increases the speed of the browser, because, as you correctly noticed, website bloat is the largest bottleneck. And usually "raw" website content is only small fraction of all other stuff that gets loaded from various remote sources to show you ads and track you better. And to take speed point even further - disabling JavaScript does wonders to website speeds, you won't believe how quickly some websites are loading. Logging in to banking website might not work at all, though.

It was true, and it was what made Google Chrome popular in the first place. Internet Explorer and Firefox were dead slow to start at the time while Chrome started instantly.

We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.

Unless it's ungodly slow, to the point where it's beyond being noticeable, speed is the last thing I care about when it comes to browser. Most of the options available are reasonably fast and differences are not huge enough.

It is definitely the features that draw me to trying new browsers. The difference in a few milliseconds is not a big deal to me.

I wouldn't say it's only speed. I've been Firefox for years, but eventually ended up surrendering Apple eco-system. with Apple silicon, Firefox at least then wasn't sleeping that well, and the tab sync of FF between my devices was also less than I've desired.

So performance is general is more like it... that includes not hurting my battery life.

It was the primary motivating factor behind the previous major browser shift, though there were also other large factors.

Remember that users often don’t correctly figure out which part of the stack is causing something. I’m guessing people generally don’t ID the browser as the performance bottleneck unless they’re familiar with browsers of significantly differing speed, and when not it comes out as asking for faster internet, faster websites, or a faster computer, all of which we hear constantly.

I have definitely switched in iOS to orion for the support of firefox and chrome extensions. Have not the slightest idea how different browsers in mobile compare in speed. But if it was abysmally slow I would have had seconds thoughts about it probably.

Website bloat also slows you down cognitively, not just in load time.

From my perspective, all browsers are fast enough and within a couple of percent the same performance. I value features, privacy, etc. More than raw speed.

Browsers are slow to startup, that's a common complaint for various browser-based apps, you must've heard that?

It is. That's why I dropped Firefox.

I switched from Firefox to Chromium because of speed.

I switched to zen browser. It was not for speed but feel. It feels nice.