  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.
