Some Additional Chrome vs. Firefox Benchmarks With WebRender, 67 Beta / 68 Alpha

A few days ago I posted some Chrome vs. Firefox benchmarks using the latest Linux builds. Some readers suggested Firefox could be more competitive if forcing WebRender usage and/or moving to the latest nightly builds, so here are some complementary data sets looking at such combinations.

In addition to Firefox 66 stable and Chrome 73 stable, here are results when using Firefox 67 Beta 4 and Firefox 68 Alpha 1 as the latest at the time of testing. In addition to testing those two development channels, additional runs were done on each of them after forcing WebRender with the "MOZ_ACCELERATED=1 MOZ_WEBRENDER=1" environment variables.

Here are the benchmark results via the Phoronix Test Suite:

In the case of ARES-6, Firefox 67 Beta 4 is faster than Firefox 66 stable while Firefox 68 was slightly slower. But Firefox still wasn't competing with Chrome in this benchmark.

In the old Octane browser benchmark, the newer releases came in a little bit slower than Firefox 66 stable.

WebXPRT is the lone test where Firefox beats out Google Chrome 73 and there wasn't any benefit to the newer releases.

With Basemark, Firefox is still a great deal behind Chrome.

The MotionMark benchmark with it being focused on the graphics performance is a benchmark where WebRender is stressed and does pay off albeit still doesn't make it as fast as Google Chrome.

There wasn't much difference out of the Speedometer web browser benchmark.

Lastly is a look at the geometric mean of the benchmarks carried out. Personally, as a devout Firefox user going back to the Firebird/Phoenix days, this is sad to see albeit are seeing similar results on other Linux desktop systems too between Chrome and Firefox. If any premium supporters have any other web browser benchmark requests, be sure to let me know.