A Quick Benchmark Of Mozilla Firefox With WebRender Beta vs. Chrome

[anarki2]

Say no to the Firefox browser that requires you to use pulseaudio. Chrome works with Alsa. Pulseaudio is buggy and uses a lot of CPU resources. The Poetterisation of GNU/Linux is bad and Firefox do just that.

Oh, these purists still exist? One would think 14 friggin' years are enough to just let go, but nope, some people just never grow up.

Say no to systemd, pulseaudio, networkmanager, lvm, uefi! Make the console great again! Always resort to 90s crap, the good old reliable! How dare you innovate! How dare you standardize! Editing randomly formatted /etc files to have working wifi or proper audio routing is perfectly reasonable in 2018! Windows sucks!

Am I forgetting anything?

[pmorph]

No, thanks. PulseAudio works just fine and I don't need a mess that locks audio resources that other applications can't use in parallel. May be another mixing server replacement is better, but raw Alsa is not a solution.

Well, getting alsa mixing to work just fine took about 15 minutes in my system.
Later I spent the whole day trying to get pulse to work, and it still mostly hangs, even when playing from one source. The SW stack is now complicated enough it's a pain to troubleshoot.

[rubdos]

I see in the screenshot that your azure backend is not accelerated. That's also due to some rather weird GPU blacklisting. Set these keys in about:config:

layers.acceleration.force-enabled true
gfx.content.azure.accelerated true
gfx.canvas.azure.accelerated true

Without it, benchmarking is rather pointless.

Firefox Linux releases should really stop this sweeping blacklisting and should enable all this by default. Drivers situation today is very different from five years ago.

Did a very unscientific benchmark on my X250 with i5-5200U with the above options, which gets 57.09 in Firefox, and 1.13 in Chromium. I suppose I did something wrong here :-)

[Charlie68]

Who cares? Likely not a difference anyone will notice in real usage. Also not surprising given the money google has to throw behind the development of Chrome. Would still rather the smaller, open source project that produces a very fine browser nonetheless.

The article refers to Chrome but it would be the exact same thing with Chromium which is an open source project!

[molecule-eye]

The article refers to Chrome but it would be the exact same thing with Chromium which is an open source project!

Ok sure, so I should have made the difference out to be, not between an open and non-open source project, but between a not-for-profit org. like mozilla and a money-grabbing org. like google.

[Charlie68]

Ok sure, so I should have made the difference out to be, not between an open and non-open source project, but between a not-for-profit org. like mozilla and a money-grabbing org. like google.

There's nothing wrong with earning money, we all work to make money. Mozilla has not spat on Google's many money to set Google as the default engine in Firefox.

[molecule-eye]

There's nothing wrong with earning money, we all work to make money. Mozilla has not spat on Google's many money to set Google as the default engine in Firefox.

Never said there's anything wrong with earning money. There's definitely something wrong with the amount any one entity such as google can earn without redistributing those earnings in a fair and just manner.

[H_Celine]

I believe in a few months all Linux users will be using Firefox!

Not in a million years as long as Firefox keeps making it harder-and-harder to have sound without Pulseaudio. Maybe if they started supporting Alsa and Jack agian.

[Brisse]

Wierd, I'm getting better scores than nightly+webrender on stable Firefox 63 despite using lesser hardware AND mining on my GPU at the same time.

When I compared Firefox/Chromium/Epiphany last year, the fastest was actually Epiphany although it did have some visual glitches. Focusing development on Linux and not having to support Windows does seem to pay off.

[Guest]

Damn, it is noticeable in daily use but I still didn't think Blink is that much faster. Those graphs are insane.