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

[vegabook]

The government should be funding Firefox. It's literally a common good even if you're using Chrome.

[starshipeleven]

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

write assember or go home.

[molecule-eye]

I can't notice any difference between the two in real world usage. When running top, I only see a 10% difference in cpu usage between firefox and chromium with vaapi hardware decode acceleration enabled in chromium. If there were a big difference there, then I might consider running chromium at least when streaming videos off battery, but since there isn't, I have no reason to move from firefox, which is by far my favorite browser.

[dremon_nl]

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

And why would that be the case considering that Rust is a language that compiles into native code via LLVM backend without garbage collection and with fine-controlled stack/heap memory allocations?

I can imagine that a certain low level C code can outperform it by marginal 0.1% simply because C is basically an assembler without any safe checks whatsoever but a) Rust can do most of it as well via unsafe blocks and b) the point is not in squeezing few cpu cycles but in writing secure code without losing practical performance and eliminating the biggest source of errors in any non-trivial application - the human.

[paupav]

tldr: don't use rust if you want performance

That is not written in the article at all. Generated code from both Rust and C is almost the same.

[DRanged]

Hopefully the performance of Firefox will soon improve by upcoming WebRender.
It is experimental and can enabled in about:config with the gfx.webrender.all key.

Thx for how to enable WebRender, changed it to true and I noticed when going to https://www.theregister.co.uk/ it comes up almost instantly, same with some other sites, Phoronix for example.
I am running Debian buster/testing and downloaded and installed Firefox from Mozilla directly with a script I made to get the release tarball and Firefox updates itself also fine. Beside offering Firefox-ESR its abt. time they should also offer Firefox stable release in the repos.
Downloaded and installed Thunderbird in the same way.
Cheers.

[Michael_S]

write assember or go home.

Thanks for that.

And why would that be the case considering that Rust is a language that compiles into native code via LLVM backend without garbage collection and with fine-controlled stack/heap memory allocations?

I can imagine that a certain low level C code can outperform it by marginal 0.1% simply because C is basically an assembler without any safe checks whatsoever but a) Rust can do most of it as well via unsafe blocks and b) the point is not in squeezing few cpu cycles but in writing secure code without losing practical performance and eliminating the biggest source of errors in any non-trivial application - the human.

Weasel hates Rust with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Fortunately starshipeleven had the appropriate response.

[smitty3268]

And why would that be the case considering that Rust is a language that compiles into native code via LLVM backend without garbage collection and with fine-controlled stack/heap memory allocations?

Man, you guys have to learn not to respond to trolls.

[Luke]

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?

There is a counter to this, as there is to all of Firefox's nasty anti-features: turn top sites, features sites, and ad links in new tabs all the way off, so a new tab gives a blank page.

I so hate the antifeatures of all modern browsers other than dedicated privacy browsers like EPIC that I configure them offline, turning off all the phone home and monetization shit, then online updating my privacy extensions. I will NOT permit Firefox in default setup to connect to the Internet at all, not even once. My Firefox setup looks like one from 15 years ago would on an Internet totally devoid of ads and to trackers should look like a ghost.

I uninstalled Chromium in the 2012 era when browser fingerprinting became a commonly known cookieless tracking attack mode. In testing browsers with Panopticlick, it wasn't too hard to configure Firefox to be untrackable by a random site when JS is disabled, but was impossible in Chromium, which probably is designed by Google to be as trackable as possible since Google's primary business is targetted advertising.

Indeed, I would rather have a slow browser than a trackable browser. Miniumum standard of performance would be to load bare text in less than 30 seconds if the connection supports it, and an ad and tracker friendly browser cannot be used at all except on sites known in advance to be free of ads and trackers, and not even then if I have any suspicion of covert phoning home with keystroke "snippets"(like Google Keyboard on Android does unless that's turned off), browsing histories, etc. A lack of direct suspicion is not enough, I require my browsers to prove on Wireshark that they are not connecting to anything I don't willfully connect them to.

Chromium (being open source) is theoretically as valid a base for writing a privacy browser as Firefox is, assuming you are forking it and altering the source as needed. With Firefox, all the known antifeatures can be turned off in about:config, and extensions can block ads, trackers, and attackware though it is true extensions will be slower than writing this directly into the browser's native code. Slower but still plenty fast, and trackers should find getting your personal information works about as fast as brute-forcing hugely long and random passphrases does.

[polarathene]

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

One of the major reasons I went back to Chrome was that Firefox wasn't too friendly to use as a heavy tab user. My system would hit 100% CPU usage for a few minutes every 30 mins or so for it to sync tabs/profile to disk(SSD). No idea why it was so slow, and technically it might be the fault of the session manager extension I was using, but FF didn't have an equivalent(the extension also got nerfed with the switch to WebExtensions not having the same feature parity which made it worse to use).