Firefox 77 / 78 Beta vs. Chrome 83 Linux Browser Benchmarks

Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.

For this series of benchmarking, Chrome 83 stable was benchmarked against Firefox 76.0.1 and Firefox 77.0 stable. Additionally, the Firefox 78.0 beta was also included as the latest Mozilla development release.

All tests were done on the same Intel Core i9 10900K + Radeon RX 5700 XT system for benchmarking and with each browser configuration at its defaults. Normally with our Firefox benchmarking we do a run with WebRender enabled since Mozilla still hasn't enabled MOZ_WEBRENDER by default on Linux. But in our testing for this Intel CPU + AMD Radeon Navi/GFX10 system, enabling WebRender tended to severely hurt the performance.

Basemark was seeing better performance on Firefox 77/78b with WebRender enabled on this system...

StyleBench for CSS style performance saw minor uplift from WebRender.

But the CanvasMark HTML5 canvas test meanwhile saw a big performance hit. At least for the Intel Linux graphics systems, we normally don't see this regression with WebRender so presumably it's an issue with the Radeon graphics stack.

Similarly, the MotionMark test was failing with WebRender enabled on the Radeon RX 5700 XT...

So for this Chrome 83 vs. Firefox 76/77/78b, all browsers were at their defaults without WebRender. Let's look at all this fresh data.