Benchmarking Firefox 83 Nightly With "Warp" Against Google Chrome On Linux

[cl333r]

FOSS is being used to drive out freedom and choice in the very FOSS world we cherish. And everyone accepts that either out of sheer ignorance or apathy. Giant Corporations and their paid for Governments that shield them are the very ones building us "free barns" to house their products. And the products are...us.

It can't work any other way in the long run because money rules the world and just because something is FOSS doesn't mean the aforementioned rule gets magically lifted.
Linus Torvalds was also bought out by big corporations since many years already and the reason we're doing fine with Linux is because the corporations don't need kernel fragmentation or competition. But the browser is a different beast and Google is winning big time, which means in the mid term there will be an anti-Google alliance of companies sponsoring a non-google browser, likely FF or a fork of it. It's not even a prediction, it's just common sense.

[EmbraceUnity]

I was a Firefox user around the time of its first stable releases, and thought there was no reason to use anything else.

Then sometime later, I switched to Linux and KDE and noticed that Konqueror was like lightning compared to Firefox. I was excited when Chrome decided to adopt KHTML and thought more browser competition would be good.

Little did I know that it would lead to a Chrome monoculture. I fought against it on principle by switching back to Firefox just before they started doing rapid releases.

I felt that Firefox had an exciting future and that it was going to compete adequately.

But Big Tech pushed through new web standards at a blinding pace, and Mozilla didn't get ambitious with projects like Servo until far too late.

The unbeatable features Mozilla offers like Multi-Account Containers are a power user feature that would not be usable by most.

The added security of Rust is not something most users care enough about.

Mozilla failed to win with FirefoxOS and VR and every other initiative they tried.

As much as I prefer a diverse browser ecosystem, they should honestly just throw in the towel with gecko. Switch to blink and become a privacy focused brand. They already gave up on almost all the exciting blue sky projects that I care about.

I only still use Firefox out of habit now. Might switch to Falkon.

[scottishduck]

Would make more sense for firefox to switch to webkit at this point.

[marco-c]

The Firefox devs made it perfectly clear in their blog post introducing WARP: they didn't care about synthetic benchmarks at all, as they are not representative of real world usage.
They measured the improvements on real world websites, and the improvements were double-digits. This says a lot about the (very low!) quality of these mostly synthetic benchmarks.

[Jumbotron]

I agree, I have noticed it as well and across different OSes, although I wonder if it has to do with websites (or frameworks) being coded for Chromium and derivatives (just like it was with IE back in the day) instead of using open standards, or if the problem lies with their implementation in Firefox.

Could you elaborate a bit more on this part? - "everyone accepts that either out of sheer ignorance or apathy" [regarding FOSS being used to drive out freedom and choice]

Are you referring to users using any Chromium-based browsers? Or maybe devs contributing to Chromium instead of Firefox? It's tough to convince users to use one thing over another, especially when it's something widespread that works (and even comes preinstalled in many (most?) Android devices).

I don't know what made 3rd parties go for Chromium as a base instead Firefox or continuing with their own thing (Opera, Microsoft), maybe Chrome's dominance or perhaps its performance (it's not like it has to do with licensing, as I understand it the MPL 2 is rather permissive and allows re-licensing), there are but a few browsers based on the Firefox codebase.

Contributing to any of them feels daunting to me, from a coding point of view browsers are vast and complex, but I guess devs tend contribute to what they use. Even if the source is publicly available, most people (virtually all) just want to use the thing.

What I meant about sheer ignorance and apathy is that people i work with, work for or just have a conversation with about things tech, and browsing and privacy in general, just use Chrome because it was...

A: Free ( but then I say...well..so is Firefox )
B: It's Google and "I heard it was the "best""
C: It's what came with my Android phone so I use it on my computer
D: I had a Gmail account so I found out you can sync stuff up when you use Chrome
E: Chromebook.....'nuff said.

That is the "ignorance" part of my statement. The ignorance in the fact there is a more private and secure alternative in Firefox and these people just did not know of any alternative.

Then there is the "apathy" That comes from primarily Millennials, especially the under 40 kind and Gen Z ( god help us ). I guess when you send enough "dick pics" and "top-less trout pout" photos of yourself then privacy doesn't mean shit...so why not Google and Google Chrome.

So when all these people using Chrome start showing up in Browser Metrics, then the propeller head in various IT departments start to look at it as a "Standard" and make the decision that my life is hard enough as it is, why should I make it harder by making sure our web site properly support 8 different browser types. So, it's Chrome first, maybe Safari for the Apple Cult and the rest can screw off.

[Jumbotron]

Would make more sense for firefox to switch to webkit at this point.

Now...THAT...is an intriguing and perhaps WONDERFUL idea. I mean...it's not like Chromium wasn't originally based on Webkit which Google then forked into Blink. Of course all of Apple's iThingies are centered around Safari which is Webkit. Even Gnome Browser, formerly known as "Epiphany" is Webkit based and runs pretty good. In fact, web pages break less under Gnome Browser in my experience than Firefox now does...and that is a farking shame to be honest.

And actually....Firefox for iOS and MacOS IS ACTUALLY based on Webkit. So it does make more than a little sense to unify Firefox for all platforms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Linux, Unix....by going Webkit.

Hmmm....Webkit based Firefox. That is a CAPITAL idea !!

[Jumbotron]

I was a Firefox user around the time of its first stable releases, and thought there was no reason to use anything else.

Then sometime later, I switched to Linux and KDE and noticed that Konqueror was like lightning compared to Firefox. I was excited when Chrome decided to adopt KHTML and thought more browser competition would be good.

Little did I know that it would lead to a Chrome monoculture. I fought against it on principle by switching back to Firefox just before they started doing rapid releases.

I felt that Firefox had an exciting future and that it was going to compete adequately.

But Big Tech pushed through new web standards at a blinding pace, and Mozilla didn't get ambitious with projects like Servo until far too late.

The unbeatable features Mozilla offers like Multi-Account Containers are a power user feature that would not be usable by most.

The added security of Rust is not something most users care enough about.

Mozilla failed to win with FirefoxOS and VR and every other initiative they tried.

As much as I prefer a diverse browser ecosystem, they should honestly just throw in the towel with gecko. Switch to blink and become a privacy focused brand. They already gave up on almost all the exciting blue sky projects that I care about.

I only still use Firefox out of habit now. Might switch to Falkon.

I agree with everything you said...except throw in the towel and rebase Firefox to Blink. See my reply above to scottishduck. He made the suggestion of rebasing to Webkit. I think that is wonderful idea.

Mozilla is bleeding to death. Cut loose Rust. Cut loose Servo. Just as Microsoft threw in the towel with their homegrown IE and Edge code base and decided to just rebase around Blink and Chromium, Mozilla needs to tack in the other direction and team up with Apple and Webkit just like Gnome did with Epiphany, now called Gnome Browser. Mozilla just needs to cut everything loose and made the best damn Webkit based Browser on the planet....even faster than Safari. That could give them a lifeline.

Because let's face it....it's an Apple and Google world now. Even with browser frameworks. Webkit and Blink which is a fork of Webkit.

[creoflux]

And the damnable thing is....FOSS is being used to drive out freedom and choice in the very FOSS world we cherish. And everyone accepts that either out of sheer ignorance or apathy. Giant Corporations and their paid for Governments that shield them are the very ones building us "free barns" to house their products. And the products are...us.

The "Animal Farm" of the future will be arguing about the color of grass from our "free barns". That one over there is Baaaaaaah!

[leipero]

Is there any particular/valid reason why people use Chrome rather than Chromium on GNU/Linux? I know some "features" are missing, such as ancient codecs, WDRM and tracking, but considering the fact that Chromium is free and open source and available in most major distributions repositories, why not using Chromium instead?

I don't know if netflix works on Chromium, that was a valid reason in the past, but it didn't work on Firefox, and now it works (I believe), so it should work on Chromium as well.

[jrch2k8]

WoW, what a load of conspiracy theories.

1.) Chrome is not IE, IE holded that massive market share because Microsoft on purpose broke all web standards for a long time, so any other browser will fail to render <-- this is well documented technically and litigiously.

2.) Sites that fail to render most of the time (if not all) is because it uses standards BUT those still aren't supported by Firefox while they are supported by Blink and a bit less by WebKit(i had this happening on Safari some times as well)

There is no big anti FOSS conspiracy here, Firefox is not up to par with Chrome(ium) simply because of Firefox/Mozilla keep spreading efforts all over the place trying to get the next big thing but never actually finishing anything properly, so at the end of the day Firefox have less CSS support, partial GPU acceleration, slower JS, etc. etc. but hey they used all that time on an OS that never went anywhere and using a new language to fix all the previous but turns out the miracle didn't happens and still have all the same problems, etc ,etc.

On the other hand Apple and Google took that time to polish the living bejesus out of every subsystem in their browser and as expected are now ahead.

If Mozilla want to stay alive, they need a project manager and start focusing on fixing stuff properly instead of being an incubator of dozens of partial ideas. In my opinion Mozilla should freeze the current Firefox tree as LTS and rewrite the damn thing from scratch with a very laser focus set of features in a modern clean and tight fashion and then start improving support for other stuff instead of keep dragging quarter a century of useless baggage around.