Firefox 92 vs. Chrome 94 Browser Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

[arQon]

Just read the last post in that bug report. I'm using Wayland and a Radeon 6800 with the open-source driver. The only special env var I use is "MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1". All I did was set the flags as mentioned in that bug report and it works.

Thanks. Doesn't work for me on Intel despite having all those set, so I expect there's just yet another bug in the whole webrender mess disabling it for unrelated reasons.

> Here you can see the cpu usage numbers I experience while playing video on Youtube.

Actually, I can't, because the image has been resized down to about 200x100, so the text is unreadable, but I'll take your word for it.

[krzyzowiec]

Actually, I can't, because the image has been resized down to about 200x100, so the text is unreadable, but I'll take your word for it.

ugh, sorry, image hosts are almost universally awful. What it would show is 7% cpu usage. Interesting to hear that it’s not working on Intel though. I have a laptop with Intel graphics and I just use an extension that launches celluloid when I want video to be hardware accelerated, but I might try it there and see if I can get that to work too. I’ll let you know if I find something interesting.

[krzyzowiec]

Thanks. Doesn't work for me on Intel despite having all those set, so I expect there's just yet another bug in the whole webrender mess disabling it for unrelated reasons.

So I tested a variety of settings on my Intel Broadwell laptop, and you are correct. Unfortunately I can't get hardware accelerated vp9 on Intel no matter what I do for Firefox. That makes me favor AMD for my next laptop purchase...

[arQon]

Thanks for checking - at least now I know it's because of deep-rooted screwups rather than some configuration problem.

Firefox's handling of which pieces of webrender may or may not even *attempt* to work, let alone actually do so, seems to be driven entirely by a lookup table rather than, yknow, anything sane at all, like which GL or Mesa version is running. I can't even get accelerated *h264* on that machine, simply because Mozilla has apparently decided that it's not supported, regardless of what vainfo says.

Oh well. Maybe when they get round to fixing the bug I linked to they'll fix a few more of the underlying bugs too, and maybe in another couple of years it'll finally all start working properly - just in time for them to drop support for older codecs because "my machine decodes h265 just fine in SW, and anything that doesn't have an AV1 block is too old to care about anyway", or abandon vaapi completely because Google tells them to, or whatever.

I mean, we've only been waiting for proper video support on linux for about 15 years - what's one more decade? :P

[old_skull]

What are real world JavaScript cases where Firefox user experience would be severely impacted vs. Chromium? I'm rather happy with its performance on my Z2 Force Android device, which isn't a rocket, but not low-end either (OctanceV2 score is ~7k).

On another note: It is unacceptable how Google treats VAAPI support. Or how poor even mouse scrolling speed is configurable on Linux + dumb defaults. These are real world problems for me that Chromium has but Firefox hasn't.

Gaming? I used to work on a web based game that used to run like an absolute shit in FF. To the point that certain things such as large battles would crashed the browser (only FF, chromium would just stall for a bit) because it was written in a such a horrible way. I fixed a lot of that shit, switched from HTML to WebGL and things improved a lot BUT FF remained slower.

Mind you, that was about 2015-16, so before the last major rewrite. I vastly prefer FF but the speed difference is there.

Still though, FF with NoScript beats anything, no contest there.

[yump]

It's funny you didn't discover the concept of bookmarks or trying to get organized.

Have you ever actually tried to make heavy use of Firefox's bookmarking system?

The search doesn't search directory names. The only way to figure out where a bookmark is in the directory tree is to navigate to it and try to bookmark it again. Using the search box at the top of the bookmark sidebar resets the scroll position of the sidebar itself.

The UI is utterly miserable compared to something like Tree Style Tab. And that's before you even include the fact that creating and destroying bookmarks requires explicit manual action.

[yump]

So I tested a variety of settings on my Intel Broadwell laptop, and you are correct. Unfortunately I can't get hardware accelerated vp9 on Intel no matter what I do for Firefox. That makes me favor AMD for my next laptop purchase...

That's because Broadwell doesn't have hardware accelerated VP9. It wouldn't work even if you had all the ducks lined up.

[krzyzowiec]

That's because Broadwell doesn't have hardware accelerated VP9. It wouldn't work even if you had all the ducks lined up.

https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Intel-Iris-and-HD-Graphics-Driver-update-posted-for-Haswell-and/td-p/456967

[tildearrow]

Who cares about these?

Chrome is a 600bhp racing Dacia, fast but utter crap.

Chrome has been stripped down of everything useful and is fast, like a racing car with the driver's seat only and a bare metal interior.
Like a racing car though, once on the roads there's nothing you can do comfortably with it. And there are so many limitations to it that you prefer the more versatile 150 bhp SUV, that is not as fast but with which you can hit your commute as much as your errands or your holidays travel. Even Microsoft have understood that with Edge.
And indeed it's quickly become the only decent competition to Firefox.

Google is sabotaging Chrome, probably a bit less on the desktop than on the mobile front where it's already unusable. It's already dying the way IE did.

If you think that Chrome is like a racing car with the driver's seat and a bare metal interior, then look at surf. It's like a car without the body. Just an engine, the seat, the fuel tank and one wheel.

[Mez']

If you think that Chrome is like a racing car with the driver's seat and a bare metal interior, then look at surf. It's like a car without the body. Just an engine, the seat, the fuel tank and one wheel.

Out of context, I could have thought you were speaking about Gnome.
Indeed, aesthetics are rather trivial... As if the fancy body giving style to your car was removed, absolutely.