Firefox 71 Linux Performance Isn't Looking All That Great

With each new release of Firefox we set out to see how the performance is looking on the Linux desktop. One discovery we've made is that when using Intel's Clear Linux the Firefox performance is a lot more competitive to Google Chrome than we traditionally see on Ubuntu Linux. But with Firefox 71 we're seeing the performance trending lower compared to Firefox 69 and 70.

Here are some benchmarks of Firefox 69 / 70 / 71 builds using the official Mozilla binaries along with Chrome 78. All of the benchmarks freshly done from the same system that this time around was running Clear Linux.

Considering the end of the year is quickly approaching, I'm also working on a much larger Firefox Linux performance comparison going back many more releases. Stay tuned for that soon.

In some of the JavaScript benchmarks, Chrome continues to win over Firefox by a landslide. In the case of ARES-6, the performance is unchanged with Firefox 71.

With Octane, the Firefox 71 performance is pulling back slightly while Chrome remained faster than Firefox on Linux.

WebXPRT was also trending lower with Firefox 71 but at least here the Mozilla browser outperformed Chrome.

Basemark was also slower with the newly-minted Firefox 71 while Chrome 78 is much faster.

JetStream regressed with Firefox 71.

The HTML5 Canvas benchmark of CanvasMark was about the same and doing much better with Firefox at least on the Intel graphics.



Firefox 71 tended to be either the same speed or slower compared to Firefox 70.

Firefox continues running faster than Chrome at least with WebAssembly. Firefox 71 though overall wasn't too exciting on the Linux performance front with either being the same speed as Firefox 70 or slower. At least though Firefox 71 does bring a few new features.