Benchmarks Show Firefox 57 Quantum Doing Well, But Chrome Largely Winning

[FishPls]

I guess we won't see improvements on MotionMark until Quantum Render gets in sometime down the line... speedometer is the one they were claiming all the speed ups on though.

They're sort of re-architecting "The Quantum Render" unfortunately. They did an initial implementation of stuffing Webrender to Firefox and (apparently to their surprise) found out that is performed pretty bad. So now they're re-architecting the way quantum render will work, don't remember if the new implementation will be "layer-less" or "with layers", but hopefully it'll show some speed increases. That postponed the already far-away being release date though, I don't think we'll see quantum render stuff until 2018.

[Darakus]

Sad day for Mozilla, as they'll lose a shitton of users because of this.

I hope this is not the case. I have a feeling the extension developers will eventually release updated ad blockers. Also, and this is just a guess, but I have a feeling many of the people who care enough about privacy to install adblock extensions are also the same people who care about the security enhancements of the new extension API as well as the software freedom aspect of using Firefox. Hopefully that will be enough to keep them using Firefox. I know it is for me.

[Tomin]

In Nightly you had to enable the new CSS engine on about:config page. Is that still the case?

[suberimakuri]

What do you use for syncing bookmarks passwords and history across devices on Firefox?

[Vash63]

In Nightly you had to enable the new CSS engine on about:config page. Is that still the case?

No, it's been default in 57 (nightly and beta) for weeks now.

Anyway, these tests are pretty pointless. Most of the speed improvements have been aimed at CSS and DOM and Michael goes and only tests JavaScript benchmarks. You need actual website load comparisons to be useful here.

[Vash63]

What do you use for syncing bookmarks passwords and history across devices on Firefox?

I use Firefox sync. It's been built into the browser for a while now.

[andyprough]

Wish I had your luck with Chrome, Michael. Every time I touch it, it rapidly turns into a bloated whale that tries to take down the entire system. You must have the magic touch.

I'd to try running each browser through a series of websites with images and video for 20-30 minutes, and then look at the same tests. Must be that Chrome has horrendous cache handling.

[andyprough]

I hope this is not the case. I have a feeling the extension developers will eventually release updated ad blockers. Also, and this is just a guess, but I have a feeling many of the people who care enough about privacy to install adblock extensions are also the same people who care about the security enhancements of the new extension API as well as the software freedom aspect of using Firefox. Hopefully that will be enough to keep them using Firefox. I know it is for me.

I'm running the 57.03 beta version with ublock ad blocker extension, working without a hitch.

[Luke]

I will not be updating to FF57 or any later version unless all the security and privacy extensions I use get ported over or equivalents appear (if even possible). That means NoScript, Disconnect, Canvasblocker, and I also need a working extension to force-download streams. All the extensions I have come up as "legacy" in FF55, meaning I cannot run FF57. I do not permit any unprotected browser to connect to any website I do not know in advance to be free of all ads, trackers, and 3ed party widgets.

I require per-site control of JS and the ability to send back random number results for canvas tracking while still able to use the canvas drawing interface. This cannot be done systemwide in /etc/hosts, otherwise I would run something like Epiphany or Konqueror. Legacy Firefox can do all of this with extensions, I do not know if the newer "webextension" format is even capable of these things or not. If no browser could do these things, I would be forced to stop using all of the Internet except known safe sites. Probably would use a hosts.allow whitelist file for that, blocking all other sites. Nobody's content is worth having my browsing history sold to alt-right doxing sites and police by tracking networks selling to the highest bidder.

For now my I should probably roll Firefox back to FF52 ESR and wait to see what the authors of these extensions do. Also wondering how Torbrowser devs will handle this?

EDIT: it looks like FF56 (last version to support traditional FF extensions) will also be an ESR release, so security updates should be available for it.

[Morbis55]

Somebody who cares about privacy wouldn't even think for a second about using Chrome.
No matter how much better it may be, there is no way I'd be supporting the worlds largest data mining company.

Anyway Firefox 57 is running great, better than ever before.
Speed is without complains for me. Privacy and security is more important though and that is ++ for Firefox