7 ms·

About time. I don't know why, but for me in Linux Chromium has had much better performance than Firefox. Maybe this will help.

gtirloni 5y ago
I think Chrome/Chromium don't use hw acceleration on Linux, right?
- eptcyka 5y ago
  It does, if it deems your drivers good enough.
- Comevius 5y ago
  With Chromium 95 and Nvidia 470.74 driver for me hardware acceleration is enabled for canvas, and can be enabled for rasterization. For video decode it can be enabled, but it's VA-API, which is not supported by Nvidia. Vulkan can be enabled. GpuMemoryBuffers is software only.
  - fubbyy 5y ago
    Have you tried vulkan? Curious if it offers any performance benefits.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Actually, that is one the main reasons I get better performance on Chromium is because you can use HW acceleration. I just use some of the settings documented in the Arch wiki. Firefox isn't terrible, but there is a noticeable startup lag and I get random freezes a lot more often.
flipbrad 5y ago
The only websites I've noticed Chromium having an advantage, are those run by or embedding Google content (eg Google maps)
- exyi 5y ago
  It also seems to me. At least it motivates me to use anything which is not owned by Google :]
- iotku 5y ago
  At this point I have enough confidence in Google's developers to consider bad performance in Firefox not an accident.
  - watermelon0 5y ago
    It's much more believable that they are developing with Chromium in mind, and testing primarily on it. I've seen many webapps that are completely unrelated to Google, that are more performant on Chromium browsers, just because most developers are using them for development. It's also easier to justify spending time fixing bugs/improving performance if it affects the majority of users, instead of spending effort for 4% of users.
    - dralley 5y ago
      Google has, in the past, made YouTube reliant on non-standard browser APIs and shipped a polyfill for other browsers that had terrible performance. It's not just that they passively focus on Chromium, they will deliberately trash performance on every other browser without a second thought.
      - diegocg 5y ago
        Google didn't have much of a choice. It's either a polyfill or not supporting Firefox at all. Or having two different frontends, or stopping feature development to make Firefox developers happy. Which are terrible choices. And going beyond of what standards offer is pretty much how web evolution had always happened.
        dralley 5y ago
        What? Of course they had a choice. Google built their redesign on top of a prototype set of APIs that didn't end up being standardized. That's their own fault, and it should be their problem. It's not just Firefox devs, it's everyone else apart from Chrome, because Chrome had gone and implemented said APIs that were never standardized, so they didn't need a polyfill. And I would bet money that ShadowDOM v0 would have been removed from the Chrome codebase earlier if not for the fact that Youtube was using it - they wouldn't have forced themselves to use the same polyfill as everyone else. Shipping a new, standards incompliant frontend was a choice, not an immutable fact of nature. There was nothing wrong with the previous frontend apart from the fact that nobody is going to get promoted for not shipping the new thing. And since the consequences of shipping impact everyone except for Google, who cares, let's ship the garbage UI anyway. Don't make excuses for this kind of behavior. Google absolutely has the resources to do these things properly but they didn't.
mhd 5y ago
For a while. Wirth's Law still applies. Web developers will find further ways to mess up rendering some basic shapes and letters.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I think firefox has cache management problems. I got to the point where even opening an nginx test page off localhost took 1-2 seconds, but clearing the cache seems to have fixed it back to tolerable levels again.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  If you can afford, just set on disk cache to 0 and increase on memory cache. Firefox have bad defaults.
butz 5y ago
As Firefox is lagging a bit with new feature implementation, Chromium based browsers usually are using native implementation that is faster and Firefox is left using slower polyfills. And web app developers sure love using most recent web browser features and APIs.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  well most api that is not implemented in firefox has high probably of not being implemented in safari too. So I don't think web app developer should use recent web browser features and API that is available in chromium browser only. 20-30% represent a large number of users so I think devs should show more pragmatism.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
darthrupert 5y ago
This won't help. Firefox's latency problems seem to be deeper.

gtirloni 5y ago

I think Chrome/Chromium don't use hw acceleration on Linux, right?

eptcyka 5y ago
It does, if it deems your drivers good enough.
Comevius 5y ago
With Chromium 95 and Nvidia 470.74 driver for me hardware acceleration is enabled for canvas, and can be enabled for rasterization. For video decode it can be enabled, but it's VA-API, which is not supported by Nvidia. Vulkan can be enabled. GpuMemoryBuffers is software only.
- fubbyy 5y ago
  Have you tried vulkan? Curious if it offers any performance benefits.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Actually, that is one the main reasons I get better performance on Chromium is because you can use HW acceleration. I just use some of the settings documented in the Arch wiki. Firefox isn't terrible, but there is a noticeable startup lag and I get random freezes a lot more often.

flipbrad 5y ago

The only websites I've noticed Chromium having an advantage, are those run by or embedding Google content (eg Google maps)

exyi 5y ago
It also seems to me. At least it motivates me to use anything which is not owned by Google :]
iotku 5y ago
At this point I have enough confidence in Google's developers to consider bad performance in Firefox not an accident.
- watermelon0 5y ago
  It's much more believable that they are developing with Chromium in mind, and testing primarily on it. I've seen many webapps that are completely unrelated to Google, that are more performant on Chromium browsers, just because most developers are using them for development. It's also easier to justify spending time fixing bugs/improving performance if it affects the majority of users, instead of spending effort for 4% of users.
  - dralley 5y ago
    Google has, in the past, made YouTube reliant on non-standard browser APIs and shipped a polyfill for other browsers that had terrible performance. It's not just that they passively focus on Chromium, they will deliberately trash performance on every other browser without a second thought.
    - diegocg 5y ago
      Google didn't have much of a choice. It's either a polyfill or not supporting Firefox at all. Or having two different frontends, or stopping feature development to make Firefox developers happy. Which are terrible choices. And going beyond of what standards offer is pretty much how web evolution had always happened.
      - dralley 5y ago
        What? Of course they had a choice. Google built their redesign on top of a prototype set of APIs that didn't end up being standardized. That's their own fault, and it should be their problem. It's not just Firefox devs, it's everyone else apart from Chrome, because Chrome had gone and implemented said APIs that were never standardized, so they didn't need a polyfill. And I would bet money that ShadowDOM v0 would have been removed from the Chrome codebase earlier if not for the fact that Youtube was using it - they wouldn't have forced themselves to use the same polyfill as everyone else. Shipping a new, standards incompliant frontend was a choice, not an immutable fact of nature. There was nothing wrong with the previous frontend apart from the fact that nobody is going to get promoted for not shipping the new thing. And since the consequences of shipping impact everyone except for Google, who cares, let's ship the garbage UI anyway. Don't make excuses for this kind of behavior. Google absolutely has the resources to do these things properly but they didn't.

mhd 5y ago

For a while. Wirth's Law still applies. Web developers will find further ways to mess up rendering some basic shapes and letters.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I think firefox has cache management problems. I got to the point where even opening an nginx test page off localhost took 1-2 seconds, but clearing the cache seems to have fixed it back to tolerable levels again.

lobocinza 5y ago
If you can afford, just set on disk cache to 0 and increase on memory cache. Firefox have bad defaults.

butz 5y ago

As Firefox is lagging a bit with new feature implementation, Chromium based browsers usually are using native implementation that is faster and Firefox is left using slower polyfills. And web app developers sure love using most recent web browser features and APIs.

cute_boi 5y ago
well most api that is not implemented in firefox has high probably of not being implemented in safari too. So I don't think web app developer should use recent web browser features and API that is available in chromium browser only. 20-30% represent a large number of users so I think devs should show more pragmatism.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

darthrupert 5y ago

This won't help. Firefox's latency problems seem to be deeper.