Firefox 95 vs. Chrome 97 Browser Performance On Linux

[Mez']

Edit: Ha 69 posts, guess I won't answer for a while.

Especially with your nickname!
I'm indulging, because you can't take the bait or you'll break the number.

[caligula]

Sounds like you really should use some vertical tab extension Radically simplifies things for people with many tabs.

I only need to open 25 tabs before Firefox opens the new tabs in the background. So it's not such a huge number of simultaneous pages.

[caligula]

interesting, I haven't had that issue myself, and regularly keep 30-50 tabs open

On my system, when I open 25+ tabs, Chrome refuses to render more than one letter per tab title. Firefox always renders at least 7 letters. Chrome feels usable only up to 12 tabs. There might be some plugins that fix this behavior but I can't imagine how to work with tabs when I can only see the icon / icon + one letter.

[brucethemoose]

Except it's comparing apples and oranges. Chrome is completely adrift on Android. It's full of bugs. They're barely maintaining it at this point, and it doesn't work. Comment sections (Facebook, Disqus, vBulletin) do not work most of the time, or some buttons disappear randomly. Plus they've added an annoying tab thing (with rounded icons) at the bottom that eats up your vertical space and is tricky to deactivate. They're trashing it slowly so as to drop it eventually.

This is not my experience at all, though I'm using a Chromium fork (Bromite), not vanilla Chrome.

[Mez']

This is not my experience at all, though I'm using a Chromium fork (Bromite), not vanilla Chrome.

They probably do a great job at fixing all the shortcomings of vanilla Chrome or Chromium, just like Edge does on the desktop.

[Frenzie]

What in particular should I look out for? I just tested youtubes startpage and a random video with both browsers and no add-ons. The browser I entered the website first is also the first in loading and displaying it. If there is a difference it is somewhere under 300 ms and not noticeable atleast on a i5-7500 with 16 GB RAM and M.2 SSD.

Yes, under 300 ms is probably about right. By noticeable I don't mean bothersome, just noticeable. Chromia feel slightly more springy on YT. Put another way, anything between 100 and 300 ms is definitely noticeable to me, but ymmv I suppose. Consider yourself lucky.

Anyway, it's easy to demonstrate in a way you can't miss even if you don't notice it. Open youtube.com in both browsers side by side. Then press F5 in Firefox, quickly also press F5 in a Chromia, and even though the Chromia started slightly later because you had to activate the window and press F5, it'll visibly finish slightly sooner. That confirms I'm not imagining it because of course normally I don't hold them side by side.

The same applies to then clicking on a video, but there they've made it so the video loads immediately while the rest of the page catches up later, so it's less obvious unless you look at the video description or the comments. Unluckily for me, I often like to look at the video description.

As an aside, a year or two ago it was extremely noticeable and bothersome how much slower YT was on Firefox. Either YT fixed the worst of it or Firefox decided to take special action to implement or improve performance on something specific used by YT.

[smitty3268]

As an aside, a year or two ago it was extremely noticeable and bothersome how much slower YT was on Firefox. Either YT fixed the worst of it or Firefox decided to take special action to implement or improve performance on something specific used by YT.

I will say I agree Youtube works better on Chrome. That's really the 1 primary place i notice anything, although I'm also running an ad-blocker and on a fairly fast computer so I'm sure YMMV.

I haven't used anything but Chrome on Android for a long time, so I can't comment on that side. I know the last time i used Firefox there it had a lot of issues.

[clouddrop]

I don't know what the shit happened to Mozilla. Firefox is not as performant, numerous features are either missing or broken on linux. (I just realized it does 60hz on any 60+hz monitor). If Mozilla don't get their shit together, they will lose out on their only forte. And there will be no sensible Webkit/Blink alternative.

Maybe I am looking at the wrong numbers but running Firefox Nightly on a 160Hz VRR monitor I see 160Hz in drm_monitor when scrolling and 48Hz when nothing is changing. Also UFO Test auto detects 160Hz. Are you saying it is still running at 60Hz internally? If I manually modeset my monitor to 60Hz there is quite a visual difference to 160Hz.

[sarfarazahmad]

Maybe I am looking at the wrong numbers but running Firefox Nightly on a 160Hz VRR monitor I see 160Hz in drm_monitor when scrolling and 48Hz when nothing is changing. Also UFO Test auto detects 160Hz. Are you saying it is still running at 60Hz internally? If I manually modeset my monitor to 60Hz there is quite a visual difference to 160Hz.

No I used ufotest to figure out that it was consistently stuck at 60HZ. (At least on manjaro plasma and all bundled packages) the reason video tear was much more evident on my Firefox it because the friggin software was rendering at 60hz. It only took me a year or more to realize that and the software was kind enough to tell me.

[hubick]

The beginning of the end for Firefox was when Mozilla laid off the entire Servo team building their next-gen browser in Rust. I begrudgingly run Chrome, as, at the very least, Google is advancing an open source project, and if it gets stupid bad you can use a fork of that. I wish there was a chromium-freeworld build for RHEL 8, as a browser without H.264 is useless.