A Quick Benchmark Of Mozilla Firefox With WebRender Beta vs. Chrome

Now that WebRender has reached beta within Firefox Nightly, I decided to run some fresh web-browser benchmarks to see how this GPU-accelerated web rendering is working out for Firefox and how it compares to that of Google Chrome in some popular browser benchmarks.

Within Firefox 65 Nightly builds, WebRender is now considered to be of beta quality though it will likely be a few release cycles before it hits the release population.

Enabling WebRender within the latest Firefox builds can be done using the gfx.webrender.all boolean setting on the "about:config" page. Due to GPU blacklisting, it's also best to set the MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 environment variable prior to running Firefox for ensuring the settings work out.

Confirmation of WebRender enabled/disabled can be found via the Firefox about:support page.

I ran some cursory benchmarks this weekend on an Intel Core i9 9900K box with Ubuntu 18.10 while testing an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 graphics cards. Tested were the builds of Firefox 63.0, Firefox 65 Nightly, Firefox 65 Nightly with WebRender enabled, and Google Chrome 70 using the official builds from Mozilla/Google.