The Current Windows 10 vs. Linux Browser Performance For Google Chrome + Mozilla Firefox

[Bsdisbetter]

And yet, Windows has serious memory leaks when running browsers, and often isn't capable of shutting one down without leaving multiple zombie processes running. Maybe there's something to be said for clean code?

And you believe this... LOL

[Bsdisbetter]

You are a scary person, you make me feel bad

Yeah, he's not a zealot, that's scary here...

[Bsdisbetter]

[...snip]
2. For portable code dev on C, nothing beats GCC, by a long shot. Sure, you can cygwin that. But you can't build and distribute the entire world, which is easy in linux (and even more in BSD, especially DragonflyBSD with Synth). You can't instantly create instances of Windows without licence headaches

Horses for courses. Microsoft isn't interested in open source. It's interest revolve around the ms ecosystem of desktop, server, laptop, tablet and [cough] phone.

.Net is and never will be portable as far as ms is concerned. They don't need it to be. It is fast enough for MS and that's all that matters to them.

Obviously you're correct about gcc (and clang) because they're designed from the outset to be portable - from Vax to AIX and everything in between. But is code generated by gcc faster than code from the native cc compiler on an itanium (for example), then the answer is no.

[Michael_S]

this is one of the threads that make me ask myself:

1. I have better battery life in windows
2. I have games, ms office, photoshop and sony vegas on windows
3. browsers are faster on windows
4. My nvidia card works better, no CUDA, gcc and lower level compatibility issues

then I ask myself why am I here?

then I answer myself
1. In linux I can customize my desktop environment with convenient shortcuts
2. code compiles faster
3. I have more free RAM available
4. bash

Hope I don't ask myself for much longer..

I've got a few more things to consider. On the purely technical side:

1. Linux software updates won't interrupt your work.
2. Most distributions - Debian-based, Arch-based, Red Hat -based, etc... - will let you easily find and install thousands of software programs. You can use a GUI for it too, if you like. (You mentioned CUDA and bash, so I'm sure you don't need the GUI. But it's there if you want it.) On Windows you need to find and install things separately. Chocolatey helps, but you have to install that first too.
3. Operations that involve your filesystem are almost always faster, since ntfs pretty consistently loses to ext4 or even btrfs in most kinds of benchmarks.
4. You can install and reinstall as often as you want on bare hardware and VMs without dealing with licensing issues. (This is also a software freedom feature, but even if you don't care about software freedom it's still crazy convenient.)
5. You can usually move your installed disk between desktops and laptops without issues. I bought a new CPU and motherboard earlier this year, put the new one in, started it up, and everything worked flawlessly. I didn't have to change a single thing in my config.
6. You can login as multiple users at the same time without getting a special server version.
7. A lot of the system configuration is controlled by text files and shell scripts, so the same text editing tools you probably use to work in bash and CUDA apply to all kinds of configuration.

On the freedom side:

1. Most or all of the software running on your system has the four famous freedoms: freedom to run, modify, redistribute unmodified, and redistribute modified. You don't have that for a lot of key components on Windows. Admittedly some programs you choose for Linux might not have it either, but most of your installation will.
2. Those same free software components won't spy on you, restrict your use of media, prevent you from uninstalling or modifying them, or serve advertisements in your system menus.

At work I'm forced to use Windows. My home machines have Linux. I'm much happier with my home machines.

[Charlie68]

Given that the benchmarks are always interesting to watch and I always look at them with interest, but I have the impression that many users consider speed as a fundamental parameter. It almost never is, except for a few things ... my brother uses Windows 10 and when I use his PC, I don't have the impression that Chrome is faster, in the same way as I know no differences between Kubuntu 18.10 and Tumbleweed.
There are parameters that, depending on how they are configured, could surely increase or decrease the performance, even if imperceptibly for most jobs, but I don't think we should be chasing speed at all costs or at least it's stupid that it becomes a race. Today, if you have a decent computer, you have no performance problems with any operating system, I believe that safety is much more important than speed.

[Scellow]

You can go home Mozilla, you won't be missed maybe rust will save you, maybe not, you'll have to push your bot army stronger

[Bsdisbetter]

I've got a few more things to consider. On the purely technical side:[LIST=1][*]Linux software updates won't interrupt your work.

Prior to Windows 8? this was not an issue. This is a design decision from MS. It doesn't have to be.

[*]Most distributions - Debian-based, Arch-based, Red Hat -based, etc... - will let you easily find and install thousands of software programs. You can use a GUI for it too, if you like. (You mentioned CUDA and bash, so I'm sure you don't need the GUI. But it's there if you want it.) On Windows you need to find and install things separately. Chocolatey helps, but you have to install that first too.

Yes, packages (and ports) are very handy. Why do they exist? Because often the budgets of developers doesn't spread so far to have a web presence to advertise their wares. I think it also stemmed from the old BBSs and usenet.
Likewise, because of the vast swathe of MS Windows users, dozens of magazines, web site reviews point people to software. Software is in stores, on shelves. It's just a different model, again, and just can't be compared. Of course, finally, there's also cost.

[*]Operations that involve your filesystem are almost always faster, since ntfs pretty consistently loses to ext4 or even btrfs in most kinds of benchmarks.

Benchmarks are nice eye candy, but, realistically, most businesses that have MS windows desktop/server do so for convenience and a better pool of knowledge. I suspect very few would look at benchmarks for the disk filesystem and decline to use MS. Everything looks fast on SANs populated by SSDs.

[*]You can install and reinstall as often as you want on bare hardware and VMs without dealing with licensing issues. (This is also a software freedom feature, but even if you don't care about software freedom it's still crazy convenient.)

Again, this is a matter of commercial versus 'free'. It's comparing Apples/Oranges, basically. Unless you want to correlate it to the browser benchmarks here, which perfectly illustrate that commercial Google sees merit in making their browsers more efficient on MS because GNU/Linux and BSD users have the reputation of not wanting to pay for anything; deserved or not. Mozilla knows it's got more eyeballs in windows than linux. (personally, firefox is a load of garbage now, bloated and slow and tries to look too much like windows 10 gui - ack!).

[*]You can usually move your installed disk between desktops and laptops without issues. I bought a new CPU and motherboard earlier this year, put the new one in, started it up, and everything worked flawlessly. I didn't have to change a single thing in my config.[*]You can login as multiple users at the same time without getting a special server version.

Again, this is a commercial decision. Desktop users have no need to log in other than once. MS knows this, that's how they design it.
The whole HTTP/HTML thing is making logging in by individual users into Unix systems somewhat of an historical legacy. It's all web interfaces and the like.

[*]A lot of the system configuration is controlled by text files and shell scripts, so the same text editing tools you probably use to work in bash and CUDA apply to all kinds of configuration.

I'm not mentioning systemd here...

[xiando]

Since nobody's mentioned this yet: Both Chromium and Firefox disable GPU acceleration by default on GNU/Linux. These tests were done with default settings and are therefore not shocking. While this doesn't excuse the default poor performance on GNU/Linux, it does explain just why
this happens to be the case.

You can test the effect of this yourself by going to chrome://gpu to see what's disabled and chrome://flags where you want to enable "Override software rendering list", "GPU rasterization", "Out of process rasterization", "Zero-copy rasterizer" and Viz Display Compositor (OOP-D).

In Firefox go to about:support and see what's what. Under Graphics you will likely find Compositing "basic" and AzureCanvasAccelerated 0. In Firefox 65+ you can
go to about:config and look for gfx.webrenderer.all and set this to true. Go to about:support again and Compositing should now say WebRender.

You can change this to true if you're using an older version of Firefox which doesn't have WebRender: layers.acceleration.force-enabled and create a New, boolean called gfx.canvas.azure.accelerated and set it to true. Now about:support should show Compositing OpenGL and AzureCanvasAccelerated 1.

It's kind of sad that the GNU/Linux defaults in both Chromium and Firefox ensure poor performance - but that's the situation we're in.

One last related small detail which annoys me: If you go to chrome://gpu in chromium you'll find a list of supposed "Problems detected" and "workarounds". The checks here are typically very broad like "is it MESA?" and if it is any version of MESA, new or old doesn't matter, then it's always best to work around a MESA bug fixed 5 years ago.. because it's MESA. And if it's an AMD GPU using MESA then it's clearly best to work around a bug in AMDs binary blob proprietary driver because it is, in fact, some GPU from AMD and further checks or information seems to be irrelevant. Not sure if the people making these decision don't care or don't have time or what's going on.

[Cape]

this is one of the threads that make me ask myself:

1. I have better battery life in windows
2. I have games, ms office, photoshop and sony vegas on windows
3. browsers are faster on windows
4. My nvidia card works better, no CUDA, gcc and lower level compatibility issues

then I ask myself why am I here?

then I answer myself
1. In linux I can customize my desktop environment with convenient shortcuts
2. code compiles faster
3. I have more free RAM available
4. bash

Hope I don't ask myself for much longer..

You missed the only important point: THE LICENSE

[Bsdisbetter]

Since nobody's mentioned this yet: Both Chromium and Firefox disable GPU acceleration by default on GNU/Linux. These tests were done with default settings and are therefore not shocking. While this doesn't excuse the default poor performance on GNU/Linux, it does explain just why
this happens to be the case.

Firefox by default uses direct3d v?? depending on OS version on MS.