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

Here is a look at the CPU utilization during running each of these benchmarks across the four tested 64-bit web browsers on the Linux desktop. The peak CPU utilization was with the Firefox Quantum beta, but as you can see it was a brief spike while rest of the time it was in line with the other browsers. There were actually a few higher spikes with Chrome 60 that weren't matched by Firefox.

The final metric to pass along today is a look at the RAM usage during the benchmark tests on each of the browsers. Firefox Quantum is showing slightly higher memory use than Firefox 56 on average, but still below Firefox 52. However, the peak memory usage has crept higher with these newer Firefox releases. Chrome 60 meanwhile led on both the average memory use and the lowest peak memory use by close to 200MB.

That's where things stand today. When Firefox Quantum is officially released in November, I can run some benchmarks on more Linux hardware to see how things compare with the latest Chrome release at that time. Firefox Quantum (and Firefox 56) are showing some improvements at least compared to the current Firefox 52 ESR series, but Chrome 60 generally still led in performance. In the cases where Firefox was doing better than Chrome, the margins tended to be quite close, and in full disclosure I have been -- and continue to be -- a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days.