Firefox 109 vs. Chrome 109 Browser Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux + Core i9 13900K

[Ahmad_S792]

Michael - I would personally like to see WebKit Epiphany in the mix as well.

https://webkit.org/downloads/

[kozman]

None of these benchmarks surprise me but they are artificial so take it with a grain of salt. Do most users *really* notice the perf difference if they're on a fairly current machine? Probably not. For the first time in many year I found a page that didn't work properly with FF but did with Edge. Being a Mozilla volunteer for 13+ year, I reported it.

But as for funding and developing both browsers, Google wipes their tears with $100 bills. Mozilla, with $1 bills. When you can pour shit tons of money into a product and pay your devs shit tons of money to make their product awesome, you get Chrome (with all it's evil spying, ad-displaying, sniffing, opted-in-without-user-consent metrics grabbing BS). Firefox is kinda funded by the Bubble Gum * Duct Tape Inc. and the users own pockets to a large degree.

The computer industry remembers well how lock-in to IE bit them later when they wrote ALL their shit to work with the proprietary "One Browser To Rule Them All" premise in mind. And though I mostly use Windows and dabble a lot in Linux and RasPi/RetroPi, fucking Edge switched my default browser to Edge from FF the other day without my consent or knowledge. That's some bullshit right there. Edge Ad revenue loss must be hitting them in the pocketbook hard if that's the shit they're pulling.

Mozilla lost a lot of devs and workforce when they laid off 1/4 of their people a few years back. I don't think they've recovered and they lost a lot of institutional knowledge and long-timers. There's a lot of back end perf-improving components they've been putting off in terms of updating (newer SQLite https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1776566, newer WASI SDK https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1773200, newer OpenH264 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619988). Some of these things are being held back because some other project or issue is holding everything else up because there's just not enough person-power to deal with it.

Don't get me wrong. On my shitty 10 year old laptop at work FF runs pretty decently since at least v103+ as compared to Edge. There's still work to be done but they have come a long way in just the past couple years all things considered.

[avis]

Who needs hw acceleration? Chrome is so fast it can decode any video in software and probably saves energy vs decoder ASIC on GPU chips.

Most laptop users on a battery. My laptop CPU consumes around ~12W while viewing H.264 1080p 60fps youtube videos using software decode, and just ~4.5W using hardware decode. It's even less in Windows. Firefox under Linux for some reasons is a lot more CPU intensive.

Would be great if Michael tested not just these browsers under Linux but also under Windows 11 and measured power consumption and temperatures in the process. Something tells me Windows will win by a large margin.

[JS987]

Who needs hw acceleration? Chrome is so fast it can decode any video in software and probably saves energy vs decoder ASIC on GPU chips.

CPU temperature is over 90C with Chrome, but less than 50C with Firefox.

[avis]

None of these benchmarks surprise me but they are artificial so take it with a grain of salt. Do most users *really* notice the perf difference if they're on a fairly current machine? Probably not. For the first time in many year I found a page that didn't work properly with FF but did with Edge. Being a Mozilla volunteer for 13+ year, I reported it.

But as for funding and developing both browsers, Google wipes their tears with $100 bills. Mozilla, with $1 bills. When you can pour shit tons of money into a product and pay your devs shit tons of money to make their product awesome, you get Chrome (with all it's evil spying, ad-displaying, sniffing, opted-in-without-user-consent metrics grabbing BS). Firefox is kinda funded by the Bubble Gum * Duct Tape Inc. and the users own pockets to a large degree.

The computer industry remembers well how lock-in to IE bit them later when they wrote ALL their shit to work with the proprietary "One Browser To Rule Them All" premise in mind. And though I mostly use Windows and dabble a lot in Linux and RasPi/RetroPi, fucking Edge switched my default browser to Edge from FF the other day without my consent or knowledge. That's some bullshit right there. Edge Ad revenue loss must be hitting them in the pocketbook hard if that's the shit they're pulling.

Mozilla lost a lot of devs and workforce when they laid off 1/4 of their people a few years back. I don't think they've recovered and they lost a lot of institutional knowledge and long-timers. There's a lot of back end perf-improving components they've been putting off in terms of updating (newer SQLite https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1776566, newer WASI SDK https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1773200, newer OpenH264 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619988). Some of these things are being held back because some other project or issue is holding everything else up because there's just not enough person-power to deal with it.

Don't get me wrong. On my shitty 10 year old laptop at work FF runs pretty decently since at least v103+ as compared to Edge. There's still work to be done but they have come a long way in just the past couple years all things considered.

We need better benchmarks for sure. For once, Chrome feels faster both under Windows and Linux. It's really hard to explain but it shows up faster when you launch it, pages load faster, new empty tabs show up faster, everything about Chrome is just faster. I have a Ryzen 5800X and 64GB of RAM, so it's a pretty fast and modern PC yet Firefox is kinda sluggish both under Fedora 37 and Windows 10.

[stormcrow]

Most laptop users on a battery. My laptop CPU consumes around ~12W while viewing H.264 1080p 60fps youtube videos using software decode, and just ~4.5W using hardware decode. It's even less in Windows. Firefox under Linux for some reasons is a lot more CPU intensive.

Would be great if Michael tested not just these browsers under Linux but also under Windows 11 and measured power consumption and temperatures in the process. Something tells me Windows will win by a large margin.

Replying to the bold text. From what I understand, it's because GPU video decode hardware acceleration is more hit and miss on Linux both in support and the quality of that support. It's more uniform in Windows and probably Mac.

Edit to add: As far as Mac is concerned neither Firefox nor Chrome are the king of efficiency. On MacOS the king is Safari. I know from experience. However, I have had cases where Safari wasn't sufficient to display or utilize websites where Firefox was fine. I don't use Chrome My daily tends to be either Firefox Linux-AMD64 or an M1 MBP with Firefox. If I'm concerned about battery life I'll use Safari instead.

[caligula]

I just shrugged when I read the benchmarks. There's no way I'm going to use Chrome nor advocate for it no matter how much faster it is.

Technically it's more advanced. LTO and all the advanced stuff. They're also considering Rust in Chrome.

[Vorpal]

I found that on a moderately modern desktop I can't tell the performance difference between Chromium and Firefox. So Firefox it is for the better features (adblocking that won't go away, multi container, ...)

On android it is diffrent though. Firefox there feels laggy, especially if you have more than one tab open. So I ended up using Brave instead of Chrome there. Mind you, it was probably six months since I last tried Firefox on Android. Things could have changed.

[stormcrow]

Technically it's more advanced. LTO and all the advanced stuff. They're also considering Rust in Chrome.

I still don't care. I haven't used Chrome in years without being forced into doing so, but even the few times I was forced to do so there wasn't any user facing performance gains that made much of a difference in usability on the same hardware (other than the advertising experience is noticeably worse on Chrome). You probably blink slower than either of them renders webpages (assuming same hardware and network throughput/latency and assuming you're not on a one hamster machine like the RPi). The less I have to deal with Google's dark patterns the better. I'm not even fond of their support for Mozilla, because I see it as largely a cynical attempt to help forestall anti-trust actions in the US rather than any real care for market diversification. Not much different in concept than Al Capone's soup kitchens in Chicago, or John Deere & Apple's attempts to forestall right-to-repair legislation by appearing to be the good guy and "letting" users repair their hardware by selling repair kits.

US stealth bombers are arguably the most advanced aircraft on earth, but they're still weapons of war. Likewise Google Chrome may be very advanced, but it's still there to advance Google's surveillance advertising agenda, not its users' privacy interests. Chromium is still tied to Google even in the cases of Brave, Vivaldi, and Edge. Although in Edge all they did was substitute Microsoft's surveillance and ad experience for Google's. Sure you can fork it and remove the Google anchors, but the changes will never get upstreamed because it's against Google's interests to do so. That means a team must support an out of tree fork indefinitely while trying to keep up with Google's Chromium repository code velocity. This isn't viable for small teams on the long term at the pace you need to keep up with security issues and new standards.

[andyprough]

Why is it important to know whether Firefox is as fast as Google spyware?

No matter how fast Chrome is, it's still spyware, there's still no reason to use it.

Why not compare Firefox to Brave? At least they are both actually attempting to browse the web, rather than to steal all your personal data and re-sell it.