11 ms·
As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago...
by DiabloD3 9y ago
As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago...
Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.
Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.
Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.
Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.
I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.
Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74
So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.
Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fhood 9y agoChrome is an insane ram hog. It is inexcusable to be using >400MB per tab, but I see that all the time.
- eximius 9y agoI don't know how much my tabs use, but it isn't 400MB or I'd have ran out of RAM a hundred tabs ago...
- rocketraman 9y agoAgreed. Microsoft Azure Portal is taking up 934 MB, Gmail is 502 MB, Pocket is 309 Mb. Google Keep takes 180 Mb or so.
- vthriller 9y agoWhat really amused me a couple of years ago is that even processes handling about:newtab were constantly leaking on linux.
- foolfoolz 9y agoI never thought I'd say this but the 2 fastest bowsers on my computer are Firefox and Edge
- kosi28 9y agoWell that's because Chrome is busy doing random crap like this in the background - chrome://site-engagement/
- staticassertion 9y agoI really doubt that that feature has any performance impact. It looks like a bunch of counters.
- gciruelos 9y agoevery browser needs to have some counter like that if it wants to suggest pages when you open a new tab or something like that. i think it's cool that you can see the actual ranking.
- jacobparker 9y agoIntended use cases are documented here: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-engagement https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-en... If you want to trace uses of it in the code, here is a reasonable place to start, I imagine: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/engagement/site_engagement_service.h?l=77 https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/engageme...
- derobert 9y agoI guess you've never checked ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR-PROFILE/places.sqlite which includes a record, including date & referer, for every time you visit a site. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places/Database https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places... for documentation (or http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox_3_History_File_Format http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox_3_History_... for unofficial documentation). Several hundred thousand rows here...
- k__ 9y agoI switched to Chrome years ago and every time I try Firefox it feels sluggish, so I don't switch back. Last time was a week ago :\
- steveklabnik 9y agoThe key is, which version a week ago? Unless it was nightly you wouldn't have seen any of the stuff in the OP.
- k__ 9y agoI see, okay. I just had the feeling that Firefox has news to be on-par with Chrome for years now, but I never really "felt" it, hehe.
- AsyncAwait 9y agoThe current news relates to merging parts of Servo (web engine written in Rust) to Firefox, which started relatively recently.
- k__ 9y agoI know that. And I have high hopes :) I just wanted to say, that it isn't the first news about Firefox getting faster since Chrome came out. I tried the new versions every now and then and Chrome always felt faster to me. Maybe it really is, maybe it just uses some perceptional tricks, I don'T know.
- mort96 9y agoFirefox really has been slowly getting faster for a while; especially with Firefox 54, I no longer felt as if I was taking a significant performance hit as the price for not using Chrome. Firefox 55 got even a bit faster, but still was not quite as fast as Chrome. However, the recent changes in Nightly (Firefox 57), which now landed in the developer edition, really was a huge leap forward in performance. I encourage you to try out Nightly now (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/). I’m not promising that it’ll be faster than Chrome, but it just might be fast enough now.
- driverdan 9y agoI'd like to see the same comparison on a Mac. The Windows version of Firefox has been close to Chrome performance for a while. The Mac version has been significantly slower.
- tapoxi 9y agoI've been using Firefox Nightly (57) for a while on a 2013 MBP running Sierra. Firefox definitely feels significantly faster than it used to, and the new UI is great. But this comes at the cost of battery life. I moved back to Chrome because it was constantly chewing CPU.
- madmax108 9y ago+1 for the significantly improved performance on Firefox on OSX (I'm on a 2015 MBP), not just in the current 57 nightly, but since Firefox 55 came out. Absolutely stunning improvement in performance! Great work by team FFx! :D
- ece 9y agoYep, switched to FF from Chromium since 54/55 when multi-threaded tabs became default. Don't need to restart once in a while when Chromium has eaten up all the RAM. The extension support is just as good, and some of the labs features are very interesting.
- jorvi 9y agoBut Chrome is also guilty of absolutely guzzling battery. I always try other browsers on macOS but in the end keep switching back to Safari because it easily gets me ~2-3h more battery life. This means that on 10h average battery life you'd pay a ~20-33% battery life premium just to run a different browser. At that point, finding replacement Safari extensions is well worth the bother. What I don't understand: why is it that other browsers don't put battery life before all else? We live in a portable world after all..
- coldtea 9y ago
- bluejekyll 9y agoNightly has been amazing. I’m just waiting on LastPass before I switch full time.
- DiabloD3 9y agoSwitch to Bitwarden, already has a WebExtension extension. Lastpass is basically dead ever since LogMeIn proved they don't care about security of the vault.
- bluejekyll 9y agoHmm. Yeah I’ve been wondering about lastpass for a little while now. Is there a comparison of these tools that you’d recommend?
- DiabloD3 9y agoThere is no good comparison website I'm aware of, but Bitwarden ticks every box Lastpass does, and is already working on ticking boxes Lastpass doesn't.
- eradicatethots 9y agoBitwarden doesn’t have support for credit cards/ addresses/ SSNs...
- colemickens 9y agoYes, it does. Source: I just switched hours ago and it imported my CCs from LastPass. You can see the stuff they're working on via their Twitter account too.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bonsai80 9y ago
- baby 9y agoI run 60 tabs in Firefox atm, takes 2.14GB (obviously I'm using Tree Style Tabs). Runs smoothly.
- maturz 9y agoI'm at 204 with about 1 GB of usage. Firefox is great with many tabs http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-huge-numbers-of-tabs-leaves-chrome-in-the-dust http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-hu...
- jlgaddis 9y agoI've become a big fan of "The Great Suspender" extension since I am always opening new tabs in the background and may not get around to them until hours -- or sometimes days! -- later.
- mistermann 9y agoOn Chrome I presume? Not available on FF, and afaik FF doesn't even support unloading tabs (actually unloading from memory rather than making it appear that way but still consuming the memory).
- jlgaddis 9y agoAhhh, yes, on Chrome, sorry. I didn't realize it wasn't also available for FF.
- vertebrate 9y agoHere's mine (fx55): http://i.cubeupload.com/AvH2Cc.png http://i.cubeupload.com/AvH2Cc.png profile1: 6 windows, ~900 tabs; profile2: 2 windows, ~300 tabs. cold start takes about 2 minutes (on nvme ssd), next are slightly better. Startup time improvements were supposed to be in 55, right?
- drzaiusapelord 9y agoI used Firefox Focus on my Pixel for a few weeks and was blown away by how fast it was. The mobile web went from borderline unusable to borderline pleasant with it, I imagine largely due to its tracking and limited ad blocking. Sadly, I migrated back to Chrome because anything that needs to work with Google login or opening an app simply doesn't work. This causes issues with a lot of things I use. I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly. Not sure how feasible it is to use a different mobile browser until Mozilla and Google work together to make sure they're all on the same API page on Android. Ironically enough, Windows is far more open and friendly to competing browsers than Android.
- sf_rob 9y agoIt's not as fast as Focus, but if you want an alternative to Chrome Firefox for Android should work better with Google Apps that are (probably) broken due to Focus's anti-tracking features. It is based on the same rendering engine as desktop and should benefit from many of the future speed improvements of Firefox 57. On Android Chrome is arguably better if you want Google account integration or raw speed, but Firefox for Android has a more traditional UI, extensions, and is fast enough for most of my browsing.
- gilrain 9y agoI haven't had any issues using Firefox for Android... Firefox Focus is not a general purpose browser, so some issues are probably expected. Try Firefox for Android and install uBlock, or any of your other favorite desktop extensions!
- chickenbane 9y agoI was blown away by Firefox Focus as well. I ended up making it the default browser, so its used when I read an article on HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, etc. But when I need the "logged in" experience - autofill passwords, bookmarks, cookies, etc. - I launch Chrome. Best of both worlds!
- mderazon 9y agoI'm the same but my "logged in" mode browser is Brave. It's chrome + privacy
- low_battery 9y agoUnfortunately, as long as Firefox security infrastructure does not match Chrome, I can not use it. Note that errors like use-after-free and buffer overflows are marked as Critical (run arbitrary code on computer) for Firefox, but marked as High (execute code in the context of, or otherwise impersonate other origins.) for Chrome because of sandboxing. Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... Chrome: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20updates https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20... Hopefully with their sandboxing project done (Also with Rust) will make Firefox much better in the security department, but until then, no.
- pcwalton 9y agoFirefox sandboxing does not use Rust. Servo sandboxing (work in progress) does. It's not accurate to say that Firefox has no sandbox. Sandboxing work has been rolling out for many months now, and later versions have increasingly restrictive sandboxes. You can see the current status per version here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Current_Status https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Current_Status Hardening the sandbox is a constant work in progress, but it's not as simple as "compromise of browser engine automatically means arbitrary code execution as running user" any longer.
- low_battery 9y agoSorry I didn't mean Sandboxing used Rust, It was a separate thing (That Rust is less susceptible to such class of errors, so the more code written in Rust the better) Also didn't mean it has no sandboxing (I knew about efforts), my point was its security is not a match for Chrome yet, as seen from the amount and type of critical errors. When it is there I would definitely use it along with Chrome.
- pcwalton 9y agoIn case it wasn't clear, it is now the case that content process compromise is no longer critical unless combined with sandbox escape. Looking at historical vulnerability reports can be misleading in this regard, as the sandboxing features are rather recent (pre-stable-version in some cases).
- typon 9y agoAnd here I am just enjoying my Opera. Built-in ad blocker, built-in WhatsApp Web, great UI, ultra fast, supports all modern web technologies.
- jagermo 9y agothe WhatsApp web feature is something that i never thought i use as much as i do. Really nice to have in the sidebar.
- milankragujevic 9y agoOpera is just rebranded Chrome, with some badly-advertised "VPN" slapped on top of it, a shadow of it's former self (the Presto version).
- floatboth 9y agoOpera is using Chromium's engine ("Blink"), but the whole UI shell ("chrome") is custom, with many UI conventions from old Opera.
- roryisok 9y agoI use that built in whatsapp a lot more than I expected. It's great. I love opera, it's my go to browser for dev. That said, I'm definitely going to give quantum a try
- dingdingdang 9y agoEnjoying the Chinese consortium that owns Opera too? I am not even joking here, given China's recent track record with WeChat I would think twice before using Opera to handle all your https (banking..etc.) traffic. Of course Chrome (US) suffers from somewhat similar issues. Firefox really has unique position in the market in that it's fully Open Source and has non-profit driven org behind it.
- KGIII 9y agoI am not a Chinese dissident, so Opera being owned by a Chinese company doesn't concern me. China has absolutely no interest in my activities.
- grincho 9y ago> It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now. That's because we've been making a dedicated effort to find and stamp out sources of UI lag! It's called Quantum Flow; see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow for more.
- Qrius1 9y agoI beg you to boost performance at least upto the level of chrome even WITH addons. That's the main issue. With addons like ublock origin and other content filters, the cpu usage reaches 50-60% and the page rendering is not that quick as compared to chrome even with addons. Chrome's UI is seriously so liquid smooth that after being with firefox for so many years for my love for privacy, I HAD to switch to chrome sacrificing my privacy. I still use heavy privacy addons but chrome still doesn't get slow noticeably. I highly appreciate what you doing. Hoping to get back on Firefox as soon as possible. Once again please take care of those sudden cpu and ram usage with almost necessary addons like ublock, tab suspender etc.
- mahyarm 9y agoI've found that google maps performs worse in firefox and I get random %100 cpu spikes from websites in firefox that I didn't get in chrome. I'm on a mac using firefox 55.
- dr_zoidberg 9y agoI've found out that many google products (web pages) have bad performance outside of Chrome[0]. But I've used Netscape/Mozilla my whole life, and I will not change from it, specially now that its performance is measurably rising (again). [0] which is of course something google devs should consider and fix the sites, but hey... why do that when you're the market leader?
- mintplant 9y agoFirefox 55 doesn't have any of the (massive) improvements from 57 and Project Quantum which are being discussed here. Give Beta, Developer Edition, or Nightly a spin.
- DiabloD3 9y agoFor historical note: that is Speedometer 2.0-r221659. Somehow missed the last two digits when I wrote this comment originally. Also, with gfx.webrender.enabled, gfx.webrendest.enabled, gfx.webrender.blob-images, and gfx.webrender.layers-free all enabled, same version of Speedometer and Firefox on the workstation scores 63.47 (or 4% faster), but has render errors on the Speedometer's tach needle (SVG?) and renders fonts with very strong (very fatiguing to read) subpixel rendering.