Firefox 68 Performance Is Looking Good With WebRender On Linux

With Firefox 67 having released this week, Firefox 68 is in beta and its performance from our tests thus far on Ubuntu Linux are looking real good. In particular, if enabling the WebRender option that remains off by default on Linux, there are some nice performance gains especially.

Curious how the Firefox performance is looking following the optimization work in Firefox 67 and the maturing state of WebRender, I ran some benchmarks. On an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX + AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 workstation running Ubuntu 19.04 with the Linux 5.1 kernel, I ran various benchmarks using the generic Firefox Linux x86_64 binaries. Tests were done on Firefox 66.0.5, Firefox 67.0, and Firefox 68.0b3. With both Firefox 67 and Firefox 68 Beta, secondary runs were also done when forcing WebRender usage.

All of these web browser benchmarks were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite which was orchestrating popular web browser benchmarks via Selenium/WebDriver. The Firefox setup was a clean profile with no extra plug-ins / settings changes besides switching over to WebRender where noted.