Firefox vs. Chrome Browser Performance On Intel Ice Lake + Power/Memory Usage Tests

[kokoko3k]

If the hardware has limitations, it is a hardware problem and the differences between browsers are trivial. So better to navigate decently with one or two tabs open, than to flood the PC with 30 tabs.
Edit Otherwise, memory consumption is not a big problem on modern devices.

Let me rephrase:
Since nearly everyone uses multitab browsing, and since the memory usage does not grow linear with the number of open tabs, it is more useful to measure how the ram usage behaves when using more than one tab.
Hope it is clear now.

[SofS]

Would it be possible to run some other type of benchmark in parallel with browser benchmarks to measure how much of an effect the browser is having on other programs? My understanding is that we usually run other things in parallel with the browser open so a reasonable question is how expensive this behavior can be, particularly against office productivity software, development suites, compilers, video recording and the like.

[blackshard]

Edit Otherwise, memory consumption is not a big problem on modern devices.

Never say sentences like this. What is a "modern" device? A smartphone is modern? An SBC is modern enough?
Wise use of resources (either CPU, memory or whatever) generally is a good idea for a number of reasons including being future-proof (you don't know what kind of device the program will run on tomorrow)

[Charlie68]

Never say sentences like this. What is a "modern" device? A smartphone is modern? An SBC is modern enough?
Wise use of resources (either CPU, memory or whatever) generally is a good idea for a number of reasons including being future-proof (you don't know what kind of device the program will run on tomorrow)

Obviously I was referring to the desktop world, where notebooks and desktops are now sold with over 8 GB of RAM.
I'm not saying that you don't have to keep an eye on the amount of memory, I'm just saying that you have to be aware of the hardware limit you're working on, with 4 GB of RAM it's not intelliginte to open 50 browser tabs.

[nsneck]

Chrome has a better engine. Firefox is catching up, but slowly. WebRender is a good step-up, but not enough. FireFox' DOM / JS implementations are somewhat lacking still, unfortunately.

[Schugy]

The FF WebExtensions process becomes 2GB in size in resident memory (of 3.4GB physical RAM) and slows down/halts my system. On the other hand if I press "minimize memory usage" on the about:memory?verbose page it easily saves 1.8GB of memory. No idea why FF thinks it should keep all that garbage.

[finalzone]

The FF WebExtensions process becomes 2GB in size in resident memory (of 3.4GB physical RAM) and slows down/halts my system. On the other hand if I press "minimize memory usage" on the about:memory?verbose page it easily saves 1.8GB of memory. No idea why FF thinks it should keep all that garbage.

Which extensions did you use to reach 2GB on Firefox? According the monitor on my side:
- WebExtensions - Memory: 71MiB before minimization , 55.2 MiB after minimization

[archsway]

Obviously I was referring to the desktop world, where notebooks and desktops are now sold with over 8 GB of RAM.
I'm not saying that you don't have to keep an eye on the amount of memory, I'm just saying that you have to be aware of the hardware limit you're working on, with 4 GB of RAM it's not intelliginte to open 50 browser tabs.

My Firefox has got over 300 tabs and is using "only" 1GB.

[Ray_o]

My Firefox has got over 300 tabs and is using "only" 1GB.

most of them are unloaded(lazy loading).

[Daktyl198]

Firefox's devs are slowly killing it anyway. Why bother with benchmarks when every month they change something completely unnecessary with no explanation.

As an example: the upcoming "megabar" on Nightly. Why does the address bar need to gain 40px padding whenever focused? The devs sure don't know, or at least aren't saying. The UX guys won't explain it. Yet by god they're gonna fucking do it whether the users like it or not (seemingly overwhelmingly not). The expansion covers up buttons and destroys workflows? That's fine, rather than NOT EXPANDING THE ADDRESS BAR we're going to ANIMATE EVERYTHING OUT OF THE WAY ON FOCUS so every time you click the address bar half of your browser moves.

And you might think to yourself that the items inside the address bar get bigger, hence the need for expansion, or that the search results take advantage of the extra width, but you'd be wrong. The extra height and width is purely padding and not used by any element inside.

Welcome to Firefox development, guys. They need to make UX changes every other release purely for the sake of "but new users might like it and move from chrome!" all while completely decimating their current user population.