Firefox 71 + WebRender vs. Chrome 79 Browser Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

[muncrief]

The saddest part about all is that Mozilla sacrificed backwards compatibility, and broke uncounted Firefox extensions, when they completely rewrote their renderer a few years ago.

And their reason was because they claimed it would be just as fast or faster than Chrome, and it isn't.

But even before that Mozilla had a long history of breaking extensions willy-nilly, for both Firefox and Thunderbird, and every time they did they lost more users.

I've really hated to watch it happen, but the end result was quite predictable. Every year they're losing more and more users, and they sincerely have never seemed to understand why.

[BaumKuchen]

For me, speed is not that important. My private data has better value.

[Ray_o]

The saddest part about all is that Mozilla sacrificed backwards compatibility, and broke uncounted Firefox extensions, when they completely rewrote their renderer a few years ago.

And their reason was because they claimed it would be just as fast or faster than Chrome, and it isn't.

But even before that Mozilla had a long history of breaking extensions willy-nilly, for both Firefox and Thunderbird, and every time they did they lost more users.

I've really hated to watch it happen, but the end result was quite predictable. Every year they're losing more and more users, and they sincerely have never seemed to understand why.

Are you making a connection between webrender and their old extension system ?

They were losing users even before they got rid of their old extension system. if i remember correctly Firefox market share was around 30%(desktop usage) in 2010 and by the time they moved to WebExtensions in 2017, they were around 12%(desktop usage).

I moved to chrome for maybe 7 years not because of extensions but because Firefox has worse performance and stability. Firefox in the past would freeze if there was a problem with a webpage, if you open the same webpage in chrome only the tab that has this webpage would freeze and not the whole browser. I still use chrome in my phone and i will move to Firefox when it has a better performance and when they implement some of the features that chrome has.

[betam4x]

Its hard to believe Chrome is faster. Chrome has been increasingly suffering from frequent freezes and often slows to a crawl and becomes unresponsive with playing video on Linux. Also the Google Maps streetview is basically unuseable on Linux in gnome due to drawing glitches. This is at least the case with hardware acceleration not being used (Xorg+dummy driver, or Xvfb, used with x11vnc), which is common with headless X servers and where the hardware acceleration is not working right.

On the other hand. Firefox is almost always responsive, plays video well, starts up fast, and has no glitches in Google maps.

That sounds like a system issue. I don't have the issues you speak of.

[Termy]

Those things are hard, if not impossible, to benchmark. And probably not Javascript related.

and we already saw in the FF-version benchmark, that those benchmarks do not reflect realworld performance at all ^^

[betam4x]

and we already saw in the FF-version benchmark, that those benchmarks do not reflect realworld performance at all ^^

Or maybe blatant fanboy-ism is getting in the way of objectivity. I was one of the first adopters of Firefox, before Firefox was called 'Firefox'. I've used Firefox off and on throughout the years, but have never been able to stay with it because it has performance issues and doesn't enjoy quite the amount of support as Chrome does. As a developer, Selenium runs significantly faster with Chrome than it does with Firefox. As a user, websites open faster, run faster, and everything is snappier. I STILL have issues with websites taking down Firefox. No crashes, the browser just quits. This is on multiple operating systems and multiple Linux distributions. I run Brave currently, which is chromium based. People often claim that Chrome uses a ton of RAM. That may or may not be the case, however, anyone with at least 4GB of RAM should not have an issue. How do I know that? With 5 tabs open right now (gmail, 2x phoronix, Ars Technica, news.google.com) I'm using 2.3 GB system wide.

[oleid]

Or maybe blatant fanboy-ism is getting in the way of objectivity. I was one of the first adopters of Firefox, before Firefox was called 'Firefox'. I've used Firefox off and on throughout the years, but have never been able to stay with it because it has performance issues and doesn't enjoy quite the amount of support as Chrome does. As a developer, Selenium runs significantly faster with Chrome than it does with Firefox. As a user, websites open faster, run faster, and everything is snappier. I STILL have issues with websites taking down Firefox. No crashes, the browser just quits. This is on multiple operating systems and multiple Linux distributions.

I'm using firefox since version 3. I don't know webpages, which crash the browser. Browser is fast and works fine. Seems like a lot of FUD to me. Or do you have links to share to back your crash claim?

[Termy]

Or maybe blatant fanboy-ism is getting in the way of objectivity. I was one of the first adopters of Firefox, before Firefox was called 'Firefox'. I've used Firefox off and on throughout the years, but have never been able to stay with it because it has performance issues and doesn't enjoy quite the amount of support as Chrome does. As a developer, Selenium runs significantly faster with Chrome than it does with Firefox. As a user, websites open faster, run faster, and everything is snappier. I STILL have issues with websites taking down Firefox. No crashes, the browser just quits. This is on multiple operating systems and multiple Linux distributions. I run Brave currently, which is chromium based. People often claim that Chrome uses a ton of RAM. That may or may not be the case, however, anyone with at least 4GB of RAM should not have an issue. How do I know that? With 5 tabs open right now (gmail, 2x phoronix, Ars Technica, news.google.com) I'm using 2.3 GB system wide.

it's been ages since i had crashes or freezes, performance (outside google maps - but i think we can all guess why THAT is ) is on par with chromium - or WAY better when having open a lot of tabs.
With current FF i've hundreds of tabs open (not all loaded of course) and don't feel any impact on performance, with chromium i get annoyed when i reach 20 or so tabs because it starts to slow down significantly...

[yigitates]

Or maybe blatant fanboy-ism is getting in the way of objectivity. I was one of the first adopters of Firefox, before Firefox was called 'Firefox'. I've used Firefox off and on throughout the years, but have never been able to stay with it because it has performance issues and doesn't enjoy quite the amount of support as Chrome does. As a developer, Selenium runs significantly faster with Chrome than it does with Firefox. As a user, websites open faster, run faster, and everything is snappier. I STILL have issues with websites taking down Firefox. No crashes, the browser just quits. This is on multiple operating systems and multiple Linux distributions. I run Brave currently, which is chromium based. People often claim that Chrome uses a ton of RAM. That may or may not be the case, however, anyone with at least 4GB of RAM should not have an issue. How do I know that? With 5 tabs open right now (gmail, 2x phoronix, Ars Technica, news.google.com) I'm using 2.3 GB system wide.

Interesting. My experience is the exact opposite of that.

[bachchain]

It is enabled on Nightly builds for everything but "large" screens. Did you look at your posted link?

You do know what nightly means, right?