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

Of the currently popular web-browser benchmarks, MotionMark seems to be most equipped for showing off the potential of WebRender for GPU-accelerated web rendering with this test really stressing the DOM and plenty of visuals. MotionMark saw a 18% speed-up with WebRender enabled on Firefox 65 Nightly or 54% faster when using the NVIDIA GPU and its OpenGL graphics driver. But it was really a shock to see how much Chrome 70 on Linux out-of-the-box was performing than the Firefox 63/65 builds.

Basemark showed some benefit as well with WebRender forced on, but Chrome 70 on Ubuntu 18.10 remained much faster than any of the tested Firefox configurations.

Speedometer's tests really didn't have any affect with WebRender, but I included this run anyways for showing off the difference compared to Chrome 70... Chrome 70 still had a big lead but at least not by the huge margins saw for MotionMark.

As a Firefox user going back to the Firebird/Phoenix days on my main production systems, these benchmark results certainly drew my surprise... In the few tests carried out this weekend, Chrome 70 came out much faster than Firefox Stable/Nightly at least in these synthetic performance tests. But fortunately as shown with MotionMark, WebRender has the potential of helping close some of that gap with Chrome when this feature gets flipped on by default in the coming releases while for now Firefox Nightly users can easily enable the support.