A Quick Look At The Firefox 66.0 vs. Chrome 73.0 Performance Benchmarks

[Mavman]

Yes in everyday usage, like switching tabs and browsing history.

Yes, discordian is right!

Firefox is a LOT better on any of those things he mentioned. Beside many others...
I really don't understand why everybody keeps using chrome...

In fact, around here, almost only IT people uses Firefox... every no-IT uses Chrome. Go figure...

Even if Firefox would be noticeable worst, just for the privacy/no-google thing i would keep on using it.

[DeeZiD]

Yes, discordian is right!

Firefox is a LOT better on any of those things he mentioned. Beside many others...
I really don't understand why everybody keeps using chrome...

In fact, around here, almost only IT people uses Firefox... every no-IT uses Chrome. Go figure...

Even if Firefox would be noticeable worst, just for the privacy/no-google thing i would keep on using it.

Huh?
With webrender it's maybe on par with Chromium, but not any better. 4K60p on YouTube still runs slightly better on Chrome.
Both suck in comparison to their Windows versions still - which may be a compositing (Kwin, I'm looking at you) as well.

[FireBurn]

Do Clear linux have a Chromium build they optimise?

[Leprechaunius]

In real world situations in which specific cases is there a noticeable performances difference?

I work on an e-government web app that due to some stupid legal issues has to be able to print a pdf from the browser directly, without showing it on the screen.
To do that we set print() as an open action to the PDF document and then send it to the browser, where we use a simple hidden iframe and 2 lines of JS to set the PDF data as a source to the hidden iframe. Browsers then parse the PDF document and open a print dialog to print the document, while users see nothing.
With moderate size PDF documents - e.g. 1MB the speed difference is massive. Chrome opens up the print dialog and prints the pdf almost instantaneously (less than 1s), while Firefox may take anywhere up to 15 seconds to process the PDF and display the print dialog.

So yeah. Firefox is slow. Good in other ways, but slow.

[MrRtd]

Or you can rely in the safe, Quant search engine...

Because using a browser which protects you,
But then using google for search's...its almost the same, has using Chrome..

I generally agree, that being said, with the Firefox Multi-Account Containers add-on - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...nt-containers/ , you can isolate Google into it's own mini Firefox, same for other data-hungry/spying sites. I cannot say how secure this really is but at the moment I'll trust Firefox that it is doing what it says it's doing and it's easier than switching to Chrome or another browser just to isolate them from your other activities.

[Michael_S]

If Firefox used proper C or C++ instead of that crap called Rust, it would easily beat Chrome. Easily.

Firefox was 0% Rust five years ago and it got crushed by Chrome in all performance comparisons anyway.

The problem is just old code and two orders of magnitude less resources to throw at performance engineering than Google.

[Tvashtar]

Firefox clang vs gcc?

I'm on Gentoo building Firefox with clang/GCC and testing continuously.
Firstly, custom builds for speed gain make less and less sense since upstream builds are built with both LTO and PGO; secondly, current GCC builds are slower than clang especially in rendering benchmarks, since some bits are fine tuned for clang already ( like skia, which was done by Google ) .
Thirdly, webrenderer so far is only speedier with and enabled in betas for Nvidia cards, rest of the GPUs will be optimised after.
Last but not least you can gain maybe 10~% compiling with march=native for rust/clang but it's also valid for chromium.
And current builds are actually faster under Linux than under Windows ( AMD/VEGA )

[zaphod_]

Browser performance matters even if you do not notice it directly! Side effects like fan noise, heat and significantly increased power consumption are huge drawbacks. Watching netflix kills my battery and forces me to boot into windows (while traveling with my laptop for example).

Dont get me wrong, I really like firefox and use it everywhere, on windows/android etc. but linux is only second/third? priority for mozilla and that is sad. Missing video acceleration is the biggest downside.

Do you know more default disabled features? I currently enable webrender by setting the env variables MOZ_ACCELERATED=1 and MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 in /etc/environment.

[OMTDesign]

When I updated to version 66, I was angered to see that Firefox had automatically pinned Google to my top sites. I don't use Google search, and had deleted it from Firefox's settings, but it had come back with this update. Did this happen to anyone else?

[Guest]

What about optimized builds of chromium? At this point there's pretty much no difference besides the name and colors in the logo, but distros are allowed to package it themselves rather than repackaging prebuilt versions.

Also, I'd love to see responsiveness benchmarks on underpowered browsers as well as video decode benchmarks. While chromium is a nice dev tool (dragged down by how google account logins work as well as attempts to neuter WebExtensions) and it works nicely on a machine that's fast enough Firefox seems to shine on underpowered boxes.