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

[Hendrix]

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

Depends what you mean by modern. I've got a laptop from 2011 in active use. It's 8GB ram is maxed and it's often nearly all used by mostly a browser.

[tenplus1]

I tend to disable the disk cache in Chromium browser so it doesn't hit the hard-drive constantly, but I feel that Firefox should work towards a chromium front-end with all of their security settings and make a de-googled browser with the best of everything.

[blackshard]

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.

Chrome/Chromium also does some dirty tricks here and there to speed-up the page rendering. This causes headaches to web developers (like me) during page loads with intensive and asynchronous javascript.

[Charlie68]

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

Look I use both Firefox and Chromium, but on my low-end laptop, despite the 8GB of ram, with Firefox I always get monstrous lags, especially when I write, words always appear with an annoying delay, this does not happen in Chromium. I'm not interested in having 100 tabs, if it's all a lag, I prefer a few tabs but reactive and usable.

[Schugy]

Which extensions did you use to reach 2GB on Firefox?

Blur, Fireshot, Livemarks, Video DownloadHelper, visitedlinkenabler

[finalzone]

Blur, Fireshot, Livemarks, Video DownloadHelper, visitedlinkenabler

Based on that information, find the offending add-on that increase the size of RAM.

[Mez']

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.

That's nonsense. Everyone uses its browser differently.

Most of the time, I have more than 100 tabs open.

These tests just don't cover some interesting scenarios. It's pretty obvious when you have a bit of hindsight that if you have more than 10 tabs open, Chrome becomes barely usable, while Firefox handles 100+ tabs without even wincing.

There are many reasons why my use cases and Chrome do not get along (stop videos from playing automatically and tabs below URL bar being absolute must haves), but this 10+ tabs unbearable lag of Chrome by itself is enough to get sold on Firefox.

Since Chromium only comes in flatpaks or snaps, I got rid of it and reinstalled a latest version Chrome for some Facebook-powered comments section (that uBlock on Firefox can't seem to allow even when turned off), and it's now impossible to get group tabs on Chrome without random grouping decisions, and that ugly purple colour default. That's just silly.

[Charlie68]

That's nonsense. Everyone uses its browser differently.

Most of the time, I have more than 100 tabs open.

These tests just don't cover some interesting scenarios. It's pretty obvious when you have a bit of hindsight that if you have more than 10 tabs open, Chrome becomes barely usable, while Firefox handles 100+ tabs without even wincing.

There are many reasons why my use cases and Chrome do not get along (stop videos from playing automatically and tabs below URL bar being absolute must haves), but this 10+ tabs unbearable lag of Chrome by itself is enough to get sold on Firefox.

Since Chromium only comes in flatpaks or snaps, I got rid of it and reinstalled a latest version Chrome for some Facebook-powered comments section (that uBlock on Firefox can't seem to allow even when turned off), and it's now impossible to get group tabs on Chrome without random grouping decisions, and that ugly purple colour default. That's just silly.

I would have no problem using Firefox instead of Chromium, but as I have already written, Firefox often has some monstrous lag on my notebook, especially when I write regardless of the open tabs. Fortunately I have not used Ubuntu for years, so I can have Chromium installed normally without Snap.
As you may have noticed, the behavior of applications can vary greatly, depending on the hardware, most likely on your Firefox hardware works fine, on my no.