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

[rabcor]

So chrome is generally much faster than firefox, and the current firefox nightly builds are major regressions performance wise, great....

[andyprough]

According to Trinity College researchers, Chrome is the worst offender in terms of default phone-home behavior when compared to Firefox and Brave. Chrome by default logs users keystrokes as they are typed, tracks them with unique device identifiers, and tracks users beyond browser restarts and even beyond browser reinstalls. The best of the 3 was Brave, which did not phone home any identifying information. https://www.welivesecurity.com/2020/...privacy-study/

[yuyichao]

Um, so you're saying that the way modern agile software development works is that for every development branch, they first add shitloads of debug stuff that slows everything down, without adding any options for turning it off? Then, at the end of the release process, they quickly remove all the debug stuff and the bugs, and compile a shiny slim production version that nobody could build from the intermediate states? Sounds like a plan.. not. The thing is, there's simply no need to break absolutely everything before every new release.

No, I believe what he was saying is that those options are always there but when you grab the nightly **build**, those are built with the debugging options enabled since, well, these build are for debugging. There's no flipping back and forth, just two completely different build configurations.

-----

At least that's what I understand he was trying to say. I don't know if that's actually the case for the official nightly binaries (though it would make sense) or if those binaries are exactly what's used in the test.

[Tvashtar]

Maybe there is some debug tarpit active in the alpha builds? It would be great to have at least two common tests on PTS and Mozilla's treeherder for some reproducibility sanity check.

There are, multiple, javascript_async and jsgc_poisoning are the ones impairing js, it's possible to turn them off. It was mentioned before but Michael keeps ignoring that.
Guess we'll have to wait for stable for some sanity

[tenplus1]

I'm starting to wish that Mozilla would work on a front-end for the chromium engine and go the way of Internet Explorer, only this time de-google everything and make a better gui that doesnt spy and report back to anyone.

[Brane215]

You mean like webassembly? Or what exactly do you have in mind?

Like what Webassembly should have been.
I 've had in mind "browser" exposing standardised container with basic and optional libraries and having a protocol to download starting "module" that could initialize stuff and dload rest of the application SW. All using efficient binary protocols from ground up, for example.

[Tuxie]

I will still use Firefox because of its superior UI, though. And multi-account containers. And browser specific proxy settings. And bookmark menu delimiters.
Wake me up when any Webkit based browser let me have a compact layout with the bookmark toolbar next to the URL bar instead of below it.

[arQon]

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...

No, they use it because they were on YouTube one day in their old browser, and the video started buffering / not playing correctly / etc. And at that moment, as if by magic, they got a popup that said "Click here to troubleshoot this problem", and when they did it took them to a download page for Chrome. And they did get a better (1) browser, and they never had problems with YT ever again.

The funny thing is, it didn't matter WHAT "their old browser" was: this "just happened" whether it was Firefox, or IE, or Safari. If they weren't running Chrome, YT mysteriously had problems. Maybe it was Google Maps, or GMail, or Google Docs for some people instead of YT, but YT is where I saw it constantly. (On one occasion, there was actually a genuine problem with the wifi: but, understandably, "Try Chrome instead!" was still the suggested fix for it :P).

That's how Chrome went from nothing to dominance in a year. By leveraging Google's other properties to "sell" it. Nobody in the real world cares AT ALL about benchmarks, or FOSS, or - especially - privacy. They just want their websites to work. The only way any other browser can compete at this point is if it's backed by a different megasite - Facebook is about the only one with anything like enough muscle - that also wants all your personal info (FB again, though MS is catching up quickly).

(1) For a given definition of "better".

[Mez']

I will still use Firefox because of its superior UI, though. And multi-account containers. And browser specific proxy settings. And bookmark menu delimiters.
Wake me up when any Webkit based browser let me have a compact layout with the bookmark toolbar next to the URL bar instead of below it.

I agree.
Honestly, what's a couple of milliseconds compared to all the limitations of Chrome in terms of features?
Please Firefox don't listen to people wanting you to become another front-end to Chromium. Just don't.

I'm forced to use Chrome at work (on Windows, which I don't have a choice for either), and I can't believe Chrome doesn't have a bookmark/favorite button you can add to the URL bar. It's blatantly ridiculous.
Plus those idiotic admins (in every company admins always take moronic decisions) force the bookmark bar (even if empty) and we are all using laptops, which is an intolerable waste of space. The only alternative though (going through the settings then sub-folders bookmarks) is taking too long to trigger.

Also, you can't change back the tabs below the URL bar. In Firefox, you can with some CSS additions. And tabs on top are inefficient for me.

Another painful problem with Chrome is that you can't stop GLOBALLY the videos to auto-play. I don't care if the audio is muted, I want them to stop auto-playing. It's ridiculous. And I don't want to have to do it per site. In Firefox, it's just a couple of changes in about:config.

I won't even talk about how Chrome comes to a crawl with more than 20 tabs open (independently of how much RAM you have or on what platform you are) while Firefox rocks with 100+.

I could go on and on about the limitations of Gnome (edit: of chrome, but Gnome works as well ) and why it's unusable for me. At work, all the apps I need to write requirements for are web-based, and I'm between 10 and 20% less efficient with Chrome. This is not something some milliseconds on a benchmark will change. And usage with more than 20 tabs makes up for it anyway.

They need to solve the displaying issues for the users that apparently have them (I don't), but otherwise just keep your line. It's not perfect and sometimes they take bad decisions just to follow others (tabs on top, 6 weeks then monthly releases). but it's still by far the more customizable browser there is, and it can be tailored to several different needs through about:config and CSS. That kind of choices are far more important than some barely noticeable displaying relative slowdowns.

[cl333r]

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

I still remember that before Chrome came along and took over the market with its focus on speed Mozilla was saying a half-truth - that browser users don't really care about speed - what they care about is security and that's what Firefox is all about. Of course when Chrome started eating its lunch Mozilla quickly got off of its high horse to address its speed issue, but by now we know Mozilla is simply incompetent when it comes to speed.
Now Mozilla is saying another half-truth, that only real world usage matters, as if the synthetic benchmarks have nothing to do with real world. For unbiased people it's clear that speed-wise FF still sucks but Mozilla is trying to improve the appearance of being fast - which matters - I don't argue with that.