Firefox 68 vs. Chrome 76 Linux Web Browser Performance Benchmarks

[schmidtbag]

The concept I am trying to evoke is return on investment (ROI).

When marekeers invest into an ad campaign, they hope to get something out if it.

The more you ignore ads, the less effect they have (click-through, conversions, brand recognition), the less "worth it" they are, the less marketeers are going to invest money, which eventually will lead to less money to creators.

And they do get an ROI, just indirectly. Again, click-through is not what they (or most) are after. Like I said in my last post, they're aware the amount of people who click on ads is astonishingly low. Getting clicks is not their goal, otherwise, ads on TV, radio, billboards, etc wouldn't exist. This is also why you see content creators wearing logo'd apparel, or sponsorships at live events (where obviously, nobody is going to stop whatever they're at the event for just to look up a product/service).
The ones who base their ad success based on click rates have woefully misunderstood how and why ads are used.

It 's part of the reasons why relying on ads isn't a viable long term solution.

That's a different subject. I don't necessarily disagree, but whether they're a viable long-term solution or not, that doesn't make you righteous to evade them for your own personal convenience.

[Danielsan]

The only one who is making money with online ads is Guggl...

[DrYak]

You clearly don't know why these ads are made or how marketing works. Marketers are very well aware of the incredibly low click-through rates of ads. They know most people aren't paying close attention.

The concept I am trying to evoke is return on investment (ROI).

When marekeers invest into an ad campaign, they hope to get something out if it.

The more you ignore ads, the less effect they have (click-through, conversions, brand recognition), the less "worth it" they are, the less marketeers are going to invest money, which eventually will lead to less money to creators.

This is among others, already happening on youtube, as marketeers realise that they aren't getting as much as they would like out of it and are thus not interested in putting that much money into it, and eventually creators are getting less.

(I am not speaking about adpocalypse = demonetizations due to image/content. I am speaking about the reported lower amount of money per views earned now compared to earlier periods).

It 's part of the reasons why relying on ads isn't a viable long term solution.

[Danielsan]

I think that after you disable trackers, ads, and all the other javascript crap behind a modern website the difference between Chrome and Firefox is not humanly perceptible. Guggl is mainly responsible of all the javacrap that is messing the modern web-site the are mainly focused on making javascript faster because is one of the key of their revenue, last time I checked (here) all these javascript benchmark engines were most of them somehow related with Guggl hence those aren't really trustworthy, and I also consider that Guggl tricks its javascript engine to make it the better in these benchmars, we know the Guggl doest this things...

[Citan]

It literally is piracy. Prove me wrong.
I never said anything about online tracking. You can get ads without tracking. On the other hand, it's kinda pathetic if you're actually worried about your shopping data being collected to give you more relevant ads.

It is literally NOT.

Stop saying such offendingly wrong things plz.
Piracy is when you do something that goes against the terms of use on something protected by intellectual property (also, piracy has actually no legal meaning but that's irrelevant for topic).

Using an adblock could be considered constitutive of an intellectual property infringement (here is the proper term, my pleasure) IF, and ONLY IF...
- The Terms of Use were EXPLICITELY saying something along the lines of "The right of reading content of this website is subjet to your full acceptance of all advertising published on the site, as well as all cookies created by the site. Any attempt to circumvent either (by using third-party software or tampering with the code) will be considered a breach in contract"
- The Terms of Use were required to be EXPLICITELY accepted through a popup or similar on first visit of a user.

Oh, and besides that... While I personally follow the same philosophy as you (no adblock/cookieblock, I just avoid intrusive websites)...
- I know that there are many informations that are siphoned from me through cookies, and it's not "cool". I just don't mind enough (yet) to do something about it, but it's no less immoral and (now) illegal in several situations.
- Nothing prevent adblock users to whilelist a website, so when one really wants to respect the people behind a website, nothing prevents him to do so.

---> Adblocks are but a tool. What's important is the mindset (and avoiding FUD about legal obligations ^^).

[Citan]

I guess my question is, why does browser performance even matter?

Pages render pretty much instantaneously these days regardless of browser even on pretty old hardware.

Any browser comparison should focus more on what is really important: privacy.

I have the sad responsability to inform you you live in Dreamland.

Between...
- websites that just **** on you by implementing all processes in poorly written Javascript (meaning using up resources on load and possibly passively).
- websites that are actually decently written but are really desktop-like apps in disguise (*cough* JIRA *cough*)
- websites that siphon your personal information along with your patience by putting myriads of sniffers and intrusive ads...
Many websites are actually taking perceptible time to load and run.
Unless you make your daily browsing "sequentially" (one website and one tab at a time), you really feel the difference.

One real-life example: I have two newspaper that I like to read online. I usually have an average of 40 tabs open in any situation ("to-do things", other news I just opened and started to read, some webapps I keep open for quick access etc) and browser is 100% smooth.
One of the newspaper, I can open as many tabs as I want, I'll feel no difference (once I opened no less than 80 tabs because I wanted to find an old news and had really no good keyword to find it ^^).
On the other, as soon as I open more than 10 news, browser starts to feel sluggish.
Why the difference? If I had to guess it would be that the first has been designed with as little ads as possible, no privacy disrespect, and with a big budget on development.
On the defense of the other, the latter is generalist, so obviously there is more content to present. Yet it doesn't explain that big of a difference.

That's the day I learned that in spite of being in 21th century, you still need to watch how you browse because there is still much difference depending on skills and goals behind a given website.

Besides that, all webapps like JIRA / Gitlab / Confluence / Collabora take time to load, but it's more excusable for them considering their essence. ^^

[Citan]

Man you probably should not have that many tabs open, that's ridiculus!

Imo unfortunately the performance difference is pretty noticable in day to day usage, which forces me to stick to chrome kinda :/

EDIT:
Btw one thing I have noticed is that chrome just *feels* much faster while scrolling for example. This is becasue firefox scrolling alorithm is designed to have more "drag" and be less responive than the chrome counterpart. At least that's what my testing has suggested.

About the bolded sentence: just know that it is very ordinary to have a number of tags varying from 10 to 300+ during a lifecycle of a browser. It just requires several searches about topics you're not familiar about, or topics on which it's hard to find actual quality information ^^ (explanation: you launch several searches and quickly open results in new tab so the latter load in background while you start checking -and keeping or closing depending on their worth- the first).

As for the performance: Chrome has always been utter crap for me, systematically (all platforms), as soon as you get over 25~30 tabs and/or install an extension.
Firefox? I can have three profiles running at the same time, each under heavy load (average 100, some can peak over 300 when I have to put an unfinished topic under stasis for a while), and the thing is running smoothly. Only if I was stupid enough to order one of them to reload all tabs at once would it break.
AND on top of that I have a handful of completely lifesaver extensions (TreeStyleTabs, Counttabs, and Hugo) and still using an old Firefox (because new one is a big middlefinger pointed at people using vertical tabs and some extensions like Hugo).

Sooo... Yeah. For me, the only reasons Chrome has become the ruler is 1) many people have too basic browsing needs to benefit from extension (+ more and more are browsing for simple information/social network on mobile) and 2) more importantly, it has used the same techniques of silent install as many malwares before to force itself as the default browser on many, many Windows machines.
But it's really all looks. Once you start trying it for real work it falls apart hard.

(And yeah, only reason having such a high number of tabs is perfectly manageable is putting tabs aside and organizing them with Tree Style Tabs. With standard bartab, I don't understand how people could bear having more than 6-7 tabs active, considering how unreadable of a UX mess it is).

[pal666]

wait, i thought when you write program in rust it can't be slow

[schmidtbag]

No. The point for ads and marketing in general is to generate revenue (sold unit) for the company whose marketing department is running the ads. That the people providing the ad display space get some pennies out of the arrangement is just a collateral of how currently this marketing works.

You're an idiot if you think that's the only reason. That's the incentive to creating ads. But nobody in their right mind would host ads with their content without getting something in return. The point of ads (and sponsorships) is so companies can pay content creators to get their product known to the public. It's a mutual benefit: the content creators can make publicly available content at no monetary cost to their audience, and the corporations get publicity. This is why people funded by these companies have to be careful about the content they create, or else they'll get dropped by the companies and therefore get demonetized. Have you seriously not made this connection?

Whether you're blocking it (stopping immediately prints now) or not paying attention to the ads (not increasing sales, and thus the company drop the ad eventually paying less for it) ends up the same final result, only one is quicker than the other.

Except you keep ignoring the fact that the ads cover the cost of creating the content... Whether you ignore ads or block them, you aren't buying the product; the end result for you is the same. The difference is when you block the ads, the content creator doesn't get paid. So when you block ads, it's entirely selfish.

Whether or not they're successful is entirely relevant to whether the marketers will think the ads are worthwhile.
By not watching them you're leading to the marketers realizing that they aren't that worthwhile and eventually leading to the same end result: ad revenue lowering.

You clearly don't know why these ads are made or how marketing works. Marketers are very well aware of the incredibly low click-through rates of ads. They know most people aren't paying close attention. They're lucky to see 0.01% of each ad getting clicked on. Case in point: you can't directly interact with ads on TV. The point of these ads is to just get the name in front of you. Look at all of the most successful brands in the world, and notice how nearly all of them create ads despite already being a household name. A lot of the time, they're not even telling you what the product is. You'll have a hard time finding anyone in the world who never heard of companies like Coca Cola, Apple, Toyota, McDonald's, or Amazon, regardless of whether they were ever a customer. Most people have a good idea of what to expect of the products by those companies. And yet, we see ads for them all the time. These companies know that 99.99% of people are tuning out most of the ad, but, all they need is to just keep burning their brand into people's brains. As long as you see the logo, that's enough to reinforce those neural connections, and at that point, the ad worked.

[DrYak]

You're missing the point here... it doesn't matter if you actually click on the ads or watch them. The point is they generate revenue for content creators. To block the ads means the content creator doesn't get paid. You understand that, right?

No. The point for ads and marketing in general is to generate revenue (sold unit) for the company whose marketing department is running the ads. That the people providing the ad display space get some pennies out of the arrangement is just a collateral of how currently this marketing works.

If ads don't lead to the expected increase in revenue, the company producing the advertised product/services will pull the ad and stop paying, or drastically diminish the budget devoted at this (E.g.: over time the money earned per view on youtube has diminished).

Whether you're blocking it (stopping immediately prints now) or not paying attention to the ads (not increasing sales, and thus the company drop the ad eventually paying less for it) ends up the same final result, only one is quicker than the other.

So long as marketers think ads are worthwhile, they will continue to provide them. Ads are a very easy way for sites like this to operate at a minimal inconvenience to users. Whether or not they're successful is irrelevant.

Whether or not they're successful is entirely relevant to whether the marketers will think the ads are worthwhile.
By not watching them you're leading to the marketers realizing that they aren't that worthwhile and eventually leading to the same end result: ad revenue lowering.

Some people like Michael depend on ads to live, and you're just simply taking that money right out of his pocket and giving nothing in return.

That's why I am paying my membership. (Even more so as my job relies heavily on Linux and this kind of tech news are useful to me. I am a doctor, but work in research, not in clinic).