19 ms·

Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider

850 points by marcodiego 3y ago

ur-whale 3y ago
While that's great news, in recent years, AFAIC, the decision to use firefox over Chrome has been entirely unrelated to performance issues. In my book, Chrome is now officially in the same doghouse IE6 was confined to back in the days: a buggy spying machine that is mostly a vehicle designed to shove Google's policies down the collective throats of internet users.
ozim 3y ago
I am using Firefox on principle - I don’t care about some benchmarks or that Firefox is only browser that still has connecting to local host so owning developers somewhere on backlog. But at work there is no real way I could use Firefox and I am web dev. Dev tools in Firefox are nowadays also behind what Chrome has. Biggest upside for Firefox was Firebug but now it is only history. Let alone mentioned security issue…. I think here it is easy to understand that if all web devs work in chrome we have IE situation back again.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Depends on what you need from dev tools. Firefox's built in dev tools keeps some response bodies that Chrome's tools don't.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  Google owns internet advertising so I'm not surprised that they also own web devs.
ErneX 3y ago
Unrelated to this benchmark but Chrome vs Firefox on the same Mac has significantly worse scrolling performance on pages with a reasonable amount of images. Or at least that’s what I have observed. In Chrome while you scroll you get these moments of empty white space while it is probably loading the content in and out. On Firefox I don’t get these empty white chunks at all it is just a smooth content scroll all the way. To me this is more jarring than being faster in JS.
p1mrx 3y ago
Given all the recent chatter about Chrome turning evil, I spent a few days polishing my Chrome extension (IPvFoo, for observing the IPv6 transition) to run properly on Firefox. Technically it's been available since 2017, but there were numerous compatibility bugs that I was hoping Firefox would fix eventually. I finally decided to just hack around the remaining ones, so Chrome/Firefox are now at feature parity from a common codebase: https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
kitanata 3y ago
[flagged]
jve 3y ago
Pay attention to vertical x axis scale for the graphs - it doesn't scale visually.
- postalrat 3y ago
  What am I suppose to see?
hinkley 3y ago
I knew NodeJS and Chrome were in for darker times when v8.dev discontinued their engineering blog. That spoke to me of engineering losing steam. Either will or manpower or both. Congratulations to Firefox of course. The hare is napping under a tree and you just keep trucking.
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  I feel like you are reading way too much into this. You can look up thread and see both a SpiderMonkey and V8 dev/xdev agree SunSpider is basically worthless to almost harmful to benchmark against and that V8 continues to absolutely dominate SpiderMonkey overall.
- uluyol 3y ago
  What did they discontinue? https://v8.dev/blog/speeding-up-v8-heap-snapshots https://v8.dev/blog/speeding-up-v8-heap-snapshots was posted less than a month ago.
- zero_shift 3y ago
  You know. That actually highlights an understated risk of the Chromium monopoly. What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just mismanaged? What happens if the team loses personnel and gains too much tech debt? What happens if Chromium is run into the ground just by happenstance? I don't know, maybe they give it to a product manager, or they try Scrum or something. It's a lot of influence to put in the hands of a single fallible team.
  - VancouverMan 3y ago
    As we've seen happen before with other formerly-popular browsers like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, the users just move on to whichever other browser works better for them at the time.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Internet Explorer was a lot of wandering in the desert. Let’s not repeat IE 6 mkay?
gottorf 3y ago
I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium; having a giant like Microsoft support a third browser engine would really have been a boon to the health of the ecosystem.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  Me too. I wonder though what would have happend if we had given $7B to Andreas Kling. I guess with WebDRM this point is moot though.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    You would need to spend at least a billion to clone him first - this whole project is moving forward because the man is an exceptional programmer.
    - stephen_g 3y ago
      I think now with the sponsorships he’s hired one of the contributors full time, and I think Linus Groh was also going full time so that makes three people dedicated to working on it as well as the other contributors. Better than nothing, and just incredible what they’ve achieved so far!
- yummypaint 3y ago
  I do the same thing but it isn't much of a sacrifice. It feels icky to use google's software knowing it's actively working against my interests.
  - ReptileMan 3y ago
    Kinda like Brave.
    - Calamitous 3y ago
      How is Brave working against the user’s interests? Not being snarky, I’ve been using it for a while and it seems fine.
alexisbear 3y ago
Worth noting that SunSpider hasn't been updated since 2013. JetStream is more representative of modern JavaScript workloads, but the gap is also getting closer on that benchmark.
vorticalbox 3y ago
> Firefox easily beating Chrome in this decade-old JavaScript benchmark while also > Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox
- baliex 3y ago
  Big firefox fan here and it's kinda sad to read that
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    fwiw, https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... tracks a number of benchmarks.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    I wouldn't, firefox has less resources and faced an uphill battle for years. The fact that they keep improving regularly and significantly, even though late on some front is applaud worthy to me.
    - insanitybit 3y ago
      Can someone tell me how much Chrome has in terms of resources? Firefox, a company with one main product, has hundreds of millions of dollars coming in + millions in donations. That should pay for a sizeable engineering team. Is the Chrome engineering team much larger? Is the V8 team larger than the SpiderMonkey team, significantly so?
      - tristan957 3y ago
        Donations don't pay for Firefox development. Chromium is a bit more than Google these days. Mozilla's largest failure to date has been their inability to attract other significant corporate interest, which Google has done with Chromium
      - 3y ago
ape4 3y ago
Congrats Firefox team! No mention of Rust - but I imagine it helped.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  How much of SpiderMonkey (JS engine) is Rust? AFAIK, besides the bindings, it is still mostly C++ and my guess is that it would be difficult to get the core parts in Rust without a full rewrite.
  - tristan957 3y ago
    Chromium is fairly invested in cxx[0]. Firefox could do the same if they haven't already. [0]: https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx
- toyg 3y ago
  I wouldn't think so. It's not like Rust in FF replaces slow Python or Java code, it replaces heavily-optimized C++. If anything, Rust would likely impede speedup efforts (even if it might improve overall code quality and safety). Also, I believe the project to rewrite the entirety of Gecko in Rust has long been abandoned.
mmastrac 3y ago
I'm working with the v8 engine and it's a minefield of de-optimizations and random slowdowns for things that you would not expect to be slow. Exception handler structures can dramatically change performance characteristics of code. async/await is a real crapshoot -- sometimes promises are faster, sometimes async blocks are. We can blame the poor specs for some slowdowns (why does `...` destructuring use iterators??), but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly written.
- zero_shift 3y ago
  > why does `...` use iterators?? If you couldn't use the iterator protocol, generators in particular would be a lot less powerful
  - mmastrac 3y ago
    I think the JS spec would have been better served with a different syntax for generator/iterator destructuring. Most code I've seen assumes that: [a, b, ...rest] = array is implemented like this: a = array[0] b = array[1] rest = array[2...] When instead it is a giant performance footgun to the point where it should only be used outside of performance critical code. EDIT "next -> rest"
    - postalrat 3y ago
      I don't assume it's implemented like "next = array[2...]". I don't even know what that means.
      - mmastrac 3y ago
        Sorry, I assumed that most people could understand the pseudocode syntax for a subarray operation. In Javascript, this is: array.slice(2)
        depressedpanda 3y ago
Sporktacular 3y ago
Firefox is so good. It's fast, modern, extensible and worth almost any downside if only because of Google's approach to privacy.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  If privacy is a concern of yours, especially when it might involve Google, you should probably read Firefox's privacy notice: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ There are more data and participants involved than one might expect, especially considering the prominent "At Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet." notice at the top. You'll find the name "Google" in there a number of times, for example. It could be argued that some of the privacy-compromising functionality can be disabled, or that Firefox is still the "least worst" option, and so on. Ultimately, though, I don't think that Firefox is as privacy-respecting as some people seem to mistakenly believe it is. If Firefox truly did respect the privacy of its users, that privacy notice would be a lot simpler than it actually is.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Perfect is the enemy of the good. I'll self-godwinize myself, but: if Google is the Hitler of privacy, Firefox is like Churchill - still quite the racist and imperialist guy, but a last bastion of defense against absolute evil and deserving of all the support.
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    I don't see anything objectionable at all on that page. If anything, seeing that Firefox makes stuff like this opt-in makes me feel better about using it: > If you enable "Improve the Firefox Suggest Experience," we and our partners may also receive your search queries. Learn more below. All the other data being sent is pretty standard. It uses location data to configure search and show Recommended by Pocket articles (though, I'm not sure they actually use location data for this - unless it's really high level, such as country). And they use analytics to know how often you click on items - which practically every app does these days.
- 3y ago
putlake 3y ago
I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords. Google password manager is only available on Chrome. So unfortunately I'm locked into Chrome. I do like Edge and Firefox but the passwords are an issue.
- ur-whale 3y ago
  > I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords. At this stage in their corporate life-cycle, where greed and complete and utter lack of care towards user happiness reigns supreme, trusting google with anything is a rather large mistake IMO.
- cyberlurker 3y ago
  You trust Google with your passwords? And you trust them more than 1Password, Apple, etc.? I’d love to hear more about that statement.
  - andersa 3y ago
    Is the Apple password manager available on non-Apple devices? It could be argued that Google has significantly more resources to invest in security of the password storage than these smaller companies. We've recently seen LastPass implode, but I've never heard of any successful attack on Google password manager. Still prefer to keep them offline though.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I don’t really get how people keep falling for online password managers. The only thing I can think is there must be some psychological effect: “well, this person is suggesting something that I know to be very dumb. So, I guess they must know something I don’t, better trust them!”
      - tristan957 3y ago
        Or we just appreciate convenience. I trust Bitwarden to operate a great secure service.
hpb42 3y ago
The article links to the benchmarks in https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays... Some benchmarks evaluate "execution time", so the lower the better. Some benchmarks have a "score" instead, that the lower the higher in the chart. I'm not familiar with these benchmarks and don't know how to interpret it. Is higher score worse or better?
- alecmg 3y ago
  I think that site opted for consistent graphs - points lower on the graph is faster/better, indicated by blue down arrow
- snet0 3y ago
  I'd also appreciate some kind of notes about what these tests actually represent. What's "Assorted DOM", and why is Firefox so much better (if the scale is representative of anything useful)?
titzer 3y ago
Speaking from the perspective of a (former) V8 engineer, SunSpider is crappy benchmark, and I can't believe people still track it. It has misdirected JavaScript performance engineering work for going on 15 years now, leading to all kinds of weird contortions in JavaScript engines that do not benefit real world sites. Years ago, V8 switched away from microbenchmarks for the most part. See: https://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditional-javascript-benchmarks/ https://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditi... edit to add: Don't take the above to mean that Firefox's performance improvements aren't significant, and welcome. It's just that SunSpider is the absolute worst benchmark to look at.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  This isn’t an agreement or disagreement: Having benchmarks based on real-world sites seems like both a good and a bad idea. Good for obvious reasons. Bad because it creates a feedback loop. People develop based on performance. Performance is improved based on what people develop. Did you/your colleagues tackle this in some way?
  - titzer 3y ago
    Here's one example from 2016: https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance
- olliej 3y ago
  In fairness, when sun spider was first released it did accurately reflect the core pain points in JS engines, as present on the web. That applied to V8 as well (though V8 introduced its own benchmark suite as well on release, it was overly focused on property access, and insufficiently on the parts of initial page load that sun spider just happened to cover). Of course all of that was _15 years ago_, no benchmark from back then is really reflective of anything useful, and they are largely no longer valuable for anything other than catching regressions.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  As the saying goes any compiler engineer can make their compiler the fastest if they know what the code is.
simula67 3y ago
> Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox It is a good outcome that we have for the web: good standards and a reference implementation in the form of WebKit/Blink. This is a boon for web developers: follow the standards, but if there are gaps in the standard, check the behavior on Chrome. If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split market share; it would be painful for web developers. Large amounts of time and energy would be wasted on testing the web apps on every possible browser implementation. This is probably why platform technologies such as Operating Systems, browsers, etc. trend towards monopolies or duopolies. A highly fragmented market is not in users, developers, or even platform developers' best interests. Chrome also has well-resourced competition in the form of Apple and Microsoft. As Chrome adds more user-hostile changes, users will switch away to friendlier browsers, such as Brave, Edge, Safari, etc.
- Spivak 3y ago
  > If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split market share; it would be painful for web developers. But good for users which is the tension. Having multiple browsers that have significant differences that you can't not develop for means that you actually have to gracefully degrade instead of demanding everyone else behave more like Chrome. If we're at the point where were calling Chrome the reference then what's even the point of other browser engines? What would they even bring to the table except the skin? This is one of those weird arguments that actually supports iOS forcing developers to use Webkit. The only differentiating features of browsers are the skins so quit caring about the engine /s.
kwanbix 3y ago
I used to love Firefox, and I even was part of the organization team that make Asas Dotler's presentation in Argentina. I have pictures with him, an original Firefox bag, and an actual Firefox push. I also put money for the NY times add. But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember that to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2 years. Crazy slow. Today is much faster and is really nice, but I don't like the UI, i really prefer the one by chrome, it is much slim.
- tgv 3y ago
  I like FF's UI better than Chrome's, but the small differences can be overcome quickly once you start using it. There is much more at stake than a few pixels here and a button there: do you want Google to control "the internet"?
  - ur-whale 3y ago
    > do you want Google to control "the internet"? Also: do you care at all about Google knowing every single thing you do on the internet?
    - lost_tourist 3y ago
      this is the main reason for me.
- KORraN 3y ago
  > But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember that to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2 years. Crazy slow. Back in the days, increasing major version number meant something. What are the major changes between Chrome 114 and 115? For some reason, Mozilla decided to take part in this race that Google has started.
  - kwanbix 3y ago
    But that is the problem. I rather see progressive improvements each 3/6 months, then a big-bang change each 2 years.
flas9sd 3y ago
having recently looked at a firefox performance regression for filing a bugreport, tooling that tracks performance (quite publicly) sees attention, easy upload to share tracing profiles also helps: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/perfdocs/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/perfdocs/ind... Their dedicated blog keeps you posted if firefox perf is your interest https://blog.mozilla.org/performance/ https://blog.mozilla.org/performance/ If you have a particular website you notice chromium being significantly faster with, for an easy report, there's https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/ - though bugzilla is better than it seems when coming from github issues
huggingmouth 3y ago
M6 one and only problem with Firefox is its signed add on policy. I want to write my own add ons and istall them on mobile and desktop without creating an account on some random website. With chrome and kiwi, I can do this.
nottorp 3y ago
But how is which browser is faster relevant? Can you set up a google container in Chrome? :) And even if there is such an extension, can you trust the browser not to send everything you do to Google behind your back?
duringmath 3y ago
Bragging about your sunspider score is like bragging about how many myspace followers you have. Besides I'm not sure how much these benchmark tests are relevant to real world performance anyway.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It doesn’t look like bragging to me. The only comment Phronix has from a Firefox person is: > We’re now apparently beating Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark! “Apparently” seems to indicate that it isn’t something they are putting a ton of stock in.
  - duringmath 3y ago
    I think that's what you'd call a "humble brag".
    - chippiewill 3y ago
      It would only be a humble brag if it was something that the Firefox developers thought others would be impressed by. It's a single line item on their internal dev blog, the bar for entry is not exactly high.
lovasoa 3y ago
That is great news. I hope Mozilla's PR team will use this as a chance to bust the old myth that firefox is slow. We need more firefox users if we don't want to end up in a world where the web is Google's thing.
jasfi 3y ago
Is Firefox + uBlockOrigin close enough to Brave's protections?
- eco 3y ago
  It seems like it's somewhat close (assuming uBlock Origin grabs most of the tracking query/content). https://privacytests.org/ https://privacytests.org/ HTTPS Only can be enabled (it's still off by default) to score a few more points. It gets better in Nightly and even more so in Nightly Private.
FractalHQ 3y ago
As much as I hate monopolies, I hate having to write apps for 5 platforms at once even more. If my app works on Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Android, and Edge, and I have to jump through hoops and litter the code with if (isSafari) workarounds to get it working on iPhone, the last thing I want to do with the remainder of my time is start from scratch to fix all of the bugs or missing apis so Firefox can run it for 1% of users. I understand the risk of a chrome monopoly, but boy do I feel a the conflict of interest when these conversations come up…
- amatecha 3y ago
  why checking for specific browser rather than using feature detection to properly handle different browser capabilities? ( Good docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_testing/Cross_browser_testing/Feature_detection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes... )
  - mattnewton 3y ago
    For safari, I used to run into a lot of graphical bugs, (especially when pushing things into layers on the gpu with transforms). The second big category would be things that are performant on low end android phones with chrome are not performant on older iPhones and vice versa.
    - no_way 3y ago
      Semi related, I was suprised just how many bugs Safari has with animation timing while using Web Animation API. You can't possibly feature detect that, Motion one lib even disables GPU acceleration for them in Safari. In that case parsing user agent is the only option. https://motion.dev/guides/waapi-improvements#webkit-bugfixes https://motion.dev/guides/waapi-improvements#webkit-bugfixes
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  1% is an interesting number [0] Instinctively it feels small, but in practice increasing your CVR on your registration page by 1% is usually a big deal. What kind of other costs in ads or marketing would you pay to get a 1% increase to your user base ? For most company I worked for, a bug affecting 1% of the users would be a critical show stopper. [0] Setting aside if you really have 1% in firefox vs more % in Brave or Vivaldi,
rumdz 3y ago
I am pleased with the performance of Firefox over Chrome in every area except GPU-related tasks. I've noticed most (all?) sites that use my GPU (1080 Ti) regularly run around an order of magnitude slower on Firefox than Chrome on my Windows desktop.
thatcherthorn 3y ago
Will Brave ever separate from Google?
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  not as long as google provides a completely free render engine and javascript engine.
AtNightWeCode 3y ago
Some years ago it was common that some sites did not work or was slow in FF. I can't remember that I've had that problem for years. Good work by the FF team regardless of these benchmarks.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Okay, time to risk a switch back.
codedokode 3y ago
I think that benchmarks are made wrong way. They typically calculate how many times per second a browser can run some code. But this causes browser vendors to do trade-offs, for example, increase memory consumption which increases the probability of swapping which causes everything to stall. A more fair way would be to account for memory usage: score = speed ÷ (RAM usage)² Or they should run their tests at 2Gb system with lot of other applications running in background.
adventured 3y ago
I have been using Firefox on a daily basis since 2005-2006. When Chrome leaped far out ahead in terms of speed, responsiveness, Firefox nearly lost me as a user (as it was quite slow at the time). Since Firefox largely caught up all has been well. I'd give Firefox an 8.5 out of 10 in terms of how happy I am as a user. They would have to do something atrocious to lose me at this point. I also prefer their engine over Chrome in terms of visual rendering. The sole meaningful complaint I have about Firefox is its memory usage, which still seems high. It wants 1-2gb of ram no matter what I do.
- toastal 3y ago
  I remember that time & feeling the absolute need to run Minefield (for Fx v4.x) over stable since the next gen features/performance were too important even without add-on compatibility. The 4.0 release took forever in testing & Chrome flew out like a rocket. And even thru the lulls, Fx performance has always been good enough to stick around (tho eventually I moved to LibreWolf due to management of the new browser feature defaults).
mezobeli 3y ago
Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers due to their limitations
- ur-whale 3y ago
  >Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers due to their limitations THIS.
elashri 3y ago
That's great. Also on a side note regarding performance. Does anyone else use Firefox developer edition as their main browser because they feel that the performance is better than Firefox vanilla itself? I feel that based on a heuristic measurements (that is probably not reproducible)
gadders 3y ago
I don't know what version of Firefox this is, but the version I use is so slooooow using Gmail. It takes close to a minute to finish loading if I refresh the screen, compared to seconds with Chrome.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  I"ve never seen it take anywhere near that long. Surely chrome seems a little bit faster but not that noticeable...
- exceptione 3y ago
  Oh no, Google must be really sorry about that! EDIT to clarify: Google is known to make sure the web experience breaks for firefox, same story for youtube, so this is not an accident. Don´t use chrome and don´t use gmail if you want to keep the web open.
  - gadders 3y ago
    Well, exactly. I used to work for Lotus when every new release of Windows or Dos broke something in 1-2-3.
- foob 3y ago
  I use Firefox for nearly everything, but I need to keep a Chrome window open because Gmail and Google Meet will max out my CPU and barely work in Firefox. Google properties are literally the only sites where I experience this issue. Does anybody know technical details about why this is the case? The anti-competitive incentives for them doing this are obvious, but I imagine that there must be some technical explanation that makes for a plausible excuse. Something like them using Chrome only APIs with slow polyfills on other browsers?
  - liminalsunset 3y ago
    For what it's worth, you can add YouTube to the list of Google sites with CPU consuming bugs - particularly in dark mode. I'm not sure whether Chrome entirely fixes it, but if you watch YouTube in dark mode, there was a UI upgrade that they added that puts a "glow" behind the YouTube video player. It's intended to look like a light strip behind your TV (but to me, I originally thought there was just something wrong with the monitor or my eyes), but in reality it's just more Canvas/GPU bound calculations running at 60fps constantly which would cause the CPU/GPU in the laptop to pull tens of watts, killing battery life. There is no way to turn this "feature" off, other than disabling dark mode or blocking the "effects (do not remember exact item name)" DOM item in uBlock Origin. If you want to replicate this, go to a video on YouTube and use the three dots near the sign in button on the top right to enable the dark theme (may already be enabled). Play a video with bright picture, and after about ten seconds, you should start seeing "stuff" show up under the video as if it was a reflection.
monooso 3y ago
I can't say I've ever considered switching browsers because of concerns about JS performance. I'm pretty confident this is the case for most "average" users, but I'm curious whether it makes me an outlier on HN. Anyone else share my indifference?
fulafel 3y ago
The graph shows a cliff, presumably there's a specific code change associated, anyone have a link?
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I would love to switch to Firefox but I'm stuck trying to deploy the Firefox Sync server myself in a way that 'just' works. The old version is not developed anymore, and the new version isn't easily deployable without going through 10 separate issues and trial and error (and I've never succeeded in it).
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  That's an interesting reason not to use Firefox. Do you just not sign in to Chrome at all? It's not like it has ever offered a self-hosted version of Google Accounts. Sync says all data is E2E encrypted. If you trust that (and you've been close enough to source to verify it yourself, it sounds like), it shouldn't matter who hosts Firefox Sync for you.
makeitdouble 3y ago
I got back to firefox 3 or 4 years ago on mac and it's truely excelent. The only chokepoint were occasional Google properties, the same way Safari chokes on them, so I ended up compartimenting them in Chrome. Otherwise it has been pleasant to use. I also use it on android, but surprisingly it was really hard to use on Windows tablets. It performs well enough as a mouse and keyboard browser, but touch support is too accurate and mechanical to be useful. An example: on HN the upvote arrow is a really small target and clicking everywhere else should result in either nothing or opening the link next to the arrow. Chrome "fuzzies" the click area to include the upvote arrow even if I click completely on the left of it. Firefox will accurately send the click to text part left of the arrow, making it crazy hard to hit the upvote button. Firefox is technically accurate, but the extra "magic" on Chrome's side is really helpful as a user. Performance wise I think it's already on the right track, from there I hope we can get UX improvements as well. Touch optimizations on the desktop feels like a hard nut to crack, but it would be so nice.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  Firefox has some about:config variables to tweak the touch support. The out of box behaviors should definitely be improved, and maybe even a real settings panel would be nice instead of just about:config hidden things.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    Thanks! I actually tried it a while ago but completely forgot about it. The touch radius can be expanded and adjusted but the behavior really comes down to "should it let the user set a caret at any text position", and fuzzing the touch radius will still let the user hit a plain text target and select it, where Chrome (and mobile firefox, coms to think of it) won't let you. For instance on HN's comment link bar ("WorldMaker 5 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in S...") I can set a text selection carret on the "|" between "parent" and "context" in firefox with a touch radius of 32 mm, largely touching both "parent" and "context" links. I am actually getting motivated into looking deeper into this and see what they did to have the mobile version work differently.
mihaic 3y ago
Honestly, for me Firefox is a second choice until their debugging tools match Chrome's and they tighten up their tab UI just a bit. I really want use firefox daily it's just that I do feel a development speed hit when using it.
- hruzgar 3y ago
  Same, the UI needs a bit of change. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. Just something simple like basic chromium would be nice
- arendtio 3y ago
  If the UI is a problem try twitching the userchrome.css. I have done so in order to make it work with treestyletab as I like it and if you care about ht UI, the userchrome.css gives you a lot of freedom. In addition, I sync it via Nextcloud across my devices, so that I don't have to make changes per device.
- majestic5762 3y ago
  Same for me
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Interesting, I find Firefox's devs tools a lot easier to work with. Firefox's design doesn't sit right with me, but there are themes and addons to fix that.
  - hooch 3y ago
    Agreed. The dev tools in Firefox are beautifully designed and a joy to use. Chrome is a dogs breakfast in comparison.
  - mihaic 3y ago
    What themes and addons do you use? I never changed more than the stock color scheme.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
freediver 3y ago
The gain is real. Just tested with latest Speedometer 3.0 [1] (unreleased, but open source). Latest versions of the browser were used. Firefox Nightly (Gecko) 11.6 Safari TP (WebKit) 11.4 Chrome Canary (Blink) 9.9 [1] https://github.com/WebKit/Speedometer https://github.com/WebKit/Speedometer
everdrive 3y ago
I’m really not excited about JavaScript performance. You know what happens when everyone’s JavaScript performance improves? Webpages just add more JavaScript until it becomes just as slow as it was before. People won’t optimize on a large scale until we hit some upper limit.
omoikane 3y ago
I hope Chrome team send Firefox team a cake for this milestone.
demizer 3y ago
I don't care. Firefox is fast enough for me, even on my Pixel 4a, and without ads.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
butz 3y ago
Are there any "real life" benchmarks, e.g. comparing how long each browser takes for a typical popup, banner and autoplay video laden website to load and finally become responsive for user? And of course this should be a moving target, as website sizes just keep increasing.
aidenn0 3y ago
Doing well on benchmarks is fine, but real-world code is what matters and programmers will write their javascript to match what is fast on Chrome and not test on Firefox, meaning there will be some code that is accidentally fast on Firefox, the balance will be purposefully fast on Chrome.
liendolucas 3y ago
I only run Firefox on every computer and phone that I own. I'm extremely satisfied with its performance so far and sincerely hope they keep improving. My second alternative is Brave, just in case I can't use Firefox. My very last choice is Chromium. On Firefox I highly recommend these plugins: AdNauseam: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ Consent-O-Matic: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat... Firefox Multi-Account containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... I don't care about cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a... Edit: As mentioned below, avoid Consent-O-Matic unless you trust Avast.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- takoid 3y ago
  Just so you know, "I don't care about cookies" was sold to Avast last year: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_care_about_cookies_addon/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_car... There is a fork called "I still don't care about cookies" which is probably worth switching to unless you trust Avast: https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies
  - liendolucas 3y ago
    Thanks for that and I wasn't aware it's owned by Avast. I'll switch to the one that you suggested!
    - kristofferR 3y ago
      Your edit makes no sense though, 'I don't care about cookies' is the tainted one, not Consent-O-Matic.
Nellyz 3y ago
[dead]

850 points by marcodiego 3y ago

While that's great news, in recent years, AFAIC, the decision to use firefox over Chrome has been entirely unrelated to performance issues. In my book, Chrome is now officially in the same doghouse IE6 was confined to back in the days: a buggy spying machine that is mostly a vehicle designed to shove Google's policies down the collective throats of internet users.

ozim 3y ago

I am using Firefox on principle - I don’t care about some benchmarks or that Firefox is only browser that still has connecting to local host so owning developers somewhere on backlog. But at work there is no real way I could use Firefox and I am web dev. Dev tools in Firefox are nowadays also behind what Chrome has. Biggest upside for Firefox was Firebug but now it is only history. Let alone mentioned security issue…. I think here it is easy to understand that if all web devs work in chrome we have IE situation back again.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Depends on what you need from dev tools. Firefox's built in dev tools keeps some response bodies that Chrome's tools don't.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
Google owns internet advertising so I'm not surprised that they also own web devs.

ErneX 3y ago

Unrelated to this benchmark but Chrome vs Firefox on the same Mac has significantly worse scrolling performance on pages with a reasonable amount of images. Or at least that’s what I have observed. In Chrome while you scroll you get these moments of empty white space while it is probably loading the content in and out. On Firefox I don’t get these empty white chunks at all it is just a smooth content scroll all the way. To me this is more jarring than being faster in JS.

p1mrx 3y ago

Given all the recent chatter about Chrome turning evil, I spent a few days polishing my Chrome extension (IPvFoo, for observing the IPv6 transition) to run properly on Firefox. Technically it's been available since 2017, but there were numerous compatibility bugs that I was hoping Firefox would fix eventually. I finally decided to just hack around the remaining ones, so Chrome/Firefox are now at feature parity from a common codebase: https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo

kitanata 3y ago

[flagged]

jve 3y ago

Pay attention to vertical x axis scale for the graphs - it doesn't scale visually.

postalrat 3y ago
What am I suppose to see?

hinkley 3y ago

I knew NodeJS and Chrome were in for darker times when v8.dev discontinued their engineering blog. That spoke to me of engineering losing steam. Either will or manpower or both. Congratulations to Firefox of course. The hare is napping under a tree and you just keep trucking.

tick_tock_tick 3y ago
I feel like you are reading way too much into this. You can look up thread and see both a SpiderMonkey and V8 dev/xdev agree SunSpider is basically worthless to almost harmful to benchmark against and that V8 continues to absolutely dominate SpiderMonkey overall.
uluyol 3y ago
What did they discontinue? https://v8.dev/blog/speeding-up-v8-heap-snapshots https://v8.dev/blog/speeding-up-v8-heap-snapshots was posted less than a month ago.
zero_shift 3y ago
You know. That actually highlights an understated risk of the Chromium monopoly. What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just mismanaged? What happens if the team loses personnel and gains too much tech debt? What happens if Chromium is run into the ground just by happenstance? I don't know, maybe they give it to a product manager, or they try Scrum or something. It's a lot of influence to put in the hands of a single fallible team.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  As we've seen happen before with other formerly-popular browsers like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, the users just move on to whichever other browser works better for them at the time.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Internet Explorer was a lot of wandering in the desert. Let’s not repeat IE 6 mkay?

gottorf 3y ago

I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium; having a giant like Microsoft support a third browser engine would really have been a boon to the health of the ecosystem.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
Me too. I wonder though what would have happend if we had given $7B to Andreas Kling. I guess with WebDRM this point is moot though.
- Tade0 3y ago
  You would need to spend at least a billion to clone him first - this whole project is moving forward because the man is an exceptional programmer.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    I think now with the sponsorships he’s hired one of the contributors full time, and I think Linus Groh was also going full time so that makes three people dedicated to working on it as well as the other contributors. Better than nothing, and just incredible what they’ve achieved so far!
yummypaint 3y ago
I do the same thing but it isn't much of a sacrifice. It feels icky to use google's software knowing it's actively working against my interests.
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  Kinda like Brave.
  - Calamitous 3y ago
    How is Brave working against the user’s interests? Not being snarky, I’ve been using it for a while and it seems fine.

alexisbear 3y ago

Worth noting that SunSpider hasn't been updated since 2013. JetStream is more representative of modern JavaScript workloads, but the gap is also getting closer on that benchmark.

vorticalbox 3y ago

> Firefox easily beating Chrome in this decade-old JavaScript benchmark while also > Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox

baliex 3y ago
Big firefox fan here and it's kinda sad to read that
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  fwiw, https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... tracks a number of benchmarks.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I wouldn't, firefox has less resources and faced an uphill battle for years. The fact that they keep improving regularly and significantly, even though late on some front is applaud worthy to me.
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    Can someone tell me how much Chrome has in terms of resources? Firefox, a company with one main product, has hundreds of millions of dollars coming in + millions in donations. That should pay for a sizeable engineering team. Is the Chrome engineering team much larger? Is the V8 team larger than the SpiderMonkey team, significantly so?
    - tristan957 3y ago
      Donations don't pay for Firefox development. Chromium is a bit more than Google these days. Mozilla's largest failure to date has been their inability to attract other significant corporate interest, which Google has done with Chromium
    - 3y ago

ape4 3y ago

Congrats Firefox team! No mention of Rust - but I imagine it helped.

GuB-42 3y ago
How much of SpiderMonkey (JS engine) is Rust? AFAIK, besides the bindings, it is still mostly C++ and my guess is that it would be difficult to get the core parts in Rust without a full rewrite.
- tristan957 3y ago
  Chromium is fairly invested in cxx[0]. Firefox could do the same if they haven't already. [0]: https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx
toyg 3y ago
I wouldn't think so. It's not like Rust in FF replaces slow Python or Java code, it replaces heavily-optimized C++. If anything, Rust would likely impede speedup efforts (even if it might improve overall code quality and safety). Also, I believe the project to rewrite the entirety of Gecko in Rust has long been abandoned.

mmastrac 3y ago

I'm working with the v8 engine and it's a minefield of de-optimizations and random slowdowns for things that you would not expect to be slow. Exception handler structures can dramatically change performance characteristics of code. async/await is a real crapshoot -- sometimes promises are faster, sometimes async blocks are. We can blame the poor specs for some slowdowns (why does `...` destructuring use iterators??), but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly written.

zero_shift 3y ago
> why does `...` use iterators?? If you couldn't use the iterator protocol, generators in particular would be a lot less powerful
- mmastrac 3y ago
  I think the JS spec would have been better served with a different syntax for generator/iterator destructuring. Most code I've seen assumes that: [a, b, ...rest] = array is implemented like this: a = array[0] b = array[1] rest = array[2...] When instead it is a giant performance footgun to the point where it should only be used outside of performance critical code. EDIT "next -> rest"
  - postalrat 3y ago
    I don't assume it's implemented like "next = array[2...]". I don't even know what that means.
    - mmastrac 3y ago
      Sorry, I assumed that most people could understand the pseudocode syntax for a subarray operation. In Javascript, this is: array.slice(2)
      - depressedpanda 3y ago

Sporktacular 3y ago

Firefox is so good. It's fast, modern, extensible and worth almost any downside if only because of Google's approach to privacy.

VancouverMan 3y ago
If privacy is a concern of yours, especially when it might involve Google, you should probably read Firefox's privacy notice: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ There are more data and participants involved than one might expect, especially considering the prominent "At Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet." notice at the top. You'll find the name "Google" in there a number of times, for example. It could be argued that some of the privacy-compromising functionality can be disabled, or that Firefox is still the "least worst" option, and so on. Ultimately, though, I don't think that Firefox is as privacy-respecting as some people seem to mistakenly believe it is. If Firefox truly did respect the privacy of its users, that privacy notice would be a lot simpler than it actually is.
- toyg 3y ago
  Perfect is the enemy of the good. I'll self-godwinize myself, but: if Google is the Hitler of privacy, Firefox is like Churchill - still quite the racist and imperialist guy, but a last bastion of defense against absolute evil and deserving of all the support.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  I don't see anything objectionable at all on that page. If anything, seeing that Firefox makes stuff like this opt-in makes me feel better about using it: > If you enable "Improve the Firefox Suggest Experience," we and our partners may also receive your search queries. Learn more below. All the other data being sent is pretty standard. It uses location data to configure search and show Recommended by Pocket articles (though, I'm not sure they actually use location data for this - unless it's really high level, such as country). And they use analytics to know how often you click on items - which practically every app does these days.
3y ago

putlake 3y ago

I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords. Google password manager is only available on Chrome. So unfortunately I'm locked into Chrome. I do like Edge and Firefox but the passwords are an issue.

ur-whale 3y ago
> I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords. At this stage in their corporate life-cycle, where greed and complete and utter lack of care towards user happiness reigns supreme, trusting google with anything is a rather large mistake IMO.
cyberlurker 3y ago
You trust Google with your passwords? And you trust them more than 1Password, Apple, etc.? I’d love to hear more about that statement.
- andersa 3y ago
  Is the Apple password manager available on non-Apple devices? It could be argued that Google has significantly more resources to invest in security of the password storage than these smaller companies. We've recently seen LastPass implode, but I've never heard of any successful attack on Google password manager. Still prefer to keep them offline though.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I don’t really get how people keep falling for online password managers. The only thing I can think is there must be some psychological effect: “well, this person is suggesting something that I know to be very dumb. So, I guess they must know something I don’t, better trust them!”
    - tristan957 3y ago
      Or we just appreciate convenience. I trust Bitwarden to operate a great secure service.

hpb42 3y ago

The article links to the benchmarks in https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays... Some benchmarks evaluate "execution time", so the lower the better. Some benchmarks have a "score" instead, that the lower the higher in the chart. I'm not familiar with these benchmarks and don't know how to interpret it. Is higher score worse or better?

alecmg 3y ago
I think that site opted for consistent graphs - points lower on the graph is faster/better, indicated by blue down arrow
snet0 3y ago
I'd also appreciate some kind of notes about what these tests actually represent. What's "Assorted DOM", and why is Firefox so much better (if the scale is representative of anything useful)?

titzer 3y ago

Speaking from the perspective of a (former) V8 engineer, SunSpider is crappy benchmark, and I can't believe people still track it. It has misdirected JavaScript performance engineering work for going on 15 years now, leading to all kinds of weird contortions in JavaScript engines that do not benefit real world sites. Years ago, V8 switched away from microbenchmarks for the most part. See: https://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditional-javascript-benchmarks/ https://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditi... edit to add: Don't take the above to mean that Firefox's performance improvements aren't significant, and welcome. It's just that SunSpider is the absolute worst benchmark to look at.

Waterluvian 3y ago
This isn’t an agreement or disagreement: Having benchmarks based on real-world sites seems like both a good and a bad idea. Good for obvious reasons. Bad because it creates a feedback loop. People develop based on performance. Performance is improved based on what people develop. Did you/your colleagues tackle this in some way?
- titzer 3y ago
  Here's one example from 2016: https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance
olliej 3y ago
In fairness, when sun spider was first released it did accurately reflect the core pain points in JS engines, as present on the web. That applied to V8 as well (though V8 introduced its own benchmark suite as well on release, it was overly focused on property access, and insufficiently on the parts of initial page load that sun spider just happened to cover). Of course all of that was _15 years ago_, no benchmark from back then is really reflective of anything useful, and they are largely no longer valuable for anything other than catching regressions.
mhh__ 3y ago
As the saying goes any compiler engineer can make their compiler the fastest if they know what the code is.

simula67 3y ago

> Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox It is a good outcome that we have for the web: good standards and a reference implementation in the form of WebKit/Blink. This is a boon for web developers: follow the standards, but if there are gaps in the standard, check the behavior on Chrome. If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split market share; it would be painful for web developers. Large amounts of time and energy would be wasted on testing the web apps on every possible browser implementation. This is probably why platform technologies such as Operating Systems, browsers, etc. trend towards monopolies or duopolies. A highly fragmented market is not in users, developers, or even platform developers' best interests. Chrome also has well-resourced competition in the form of Apple and Microsoft. As Chrome adds more user-hostile changes, users will switch away to friendlier browsers, such as Brave, Edge, Safari, etc.

Spivak 3y ago
> If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split market share; it would be painful for web developers. But good for users which is the tension. Having multiple browsers that have significant differences that you can't not develop for means that you actually have to gracefully degrade instead of demanding everyone else behave more like Chrome. If we're at the point where were calling Chrome the reference then what's even the point of other browser engines? What would they even bring to the table except the skin? This is one of those weird arguments that actually supports iOS forcing developers to use Webkit. The only differentiating features of browsers are the skins so quit caring about the engine /s.

kwanbix 3y ago

I used to love Firefox, and I even was part of the organization team that make Asas Dotler's presentation in Argentina. I have pictures with him, an original Firefox bag, and an actual Firefox push. I also put money for the NY times add. But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember that to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2 years. Crazy slow. Today is much faster and is really nice, but I don't like the UI, i really prefer the one by chrome, it is much slim.

tgv 3y ago
I like FF's UI better than Chrome's, but the small differences can be overcome quickly once you start using it. There is much more at stake than a few pixels here and a button there: do you want Google to control "the internet"?
- ur-whale 3y ago
  > do you want Google to control "the internet"? Also: do you care at all about Google knowing every single thing you do on the internet?
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    this is the main reason for me.
KORraN 3y ago
> But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember that to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2 years. Crazy slow. Back in the days, increasing major version number meant something. What are the major changes between Chrome 114 and 115? For some reason, Mozilla decided to take part in this race that Google has started.
- kwanbix 3y ago
  But that is the problem. I rather see progressive improvements each 3/6 months, then a big-bang change each 2 years.

flas9sd 3y ago

having recently looked at a firefox performance regression for filing a bugreport, tooling that tracks performance (quite publicly) sees attention, easy upload to share tracing profiles also helps: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/perfdocs/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/perfdocs/ind... Their dedicated blog keeps you posted if firefox perf is your interest https://blog.mozilla.org/performance/ https://blog.mozilla.org/performance/ If you have a particular website you notice chromium being significantly faster with, for an easy report, there's https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/ - though bugzilla is better than it seems when coming from github issues

huggingmouth 3y ago

M6 one and only problem with Firefox is its signed add on policy. I want to write my own add ons and istall them on mobile and desktop without creating an account on some random website. With chrome and kiwi, I can do this.

nottorp 3y ago

But how is which browser is faster relevant? Can you set up a google container in Chrome? :) And even if there is such an extension, can you trust the browser not to send everything you do to Google behind your back?

duringmath 3y ago

Bragging about your sunspider score is like bragging about how many myspace followers you have. Besides I'm not sure how much these benchmark tests are relevant to real world performance anyway.

bee_rider 3y ago
It doesn’t look like bragging to me. The only comment Phronix has from a Firefox person is: > We’re now apparently beating Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark! “Apparently” seems to indicate that it isn’t something they are putting a ton of stock in.
- duringmath 3y ago
  I think that's what you'd call a "humble brag".
  - chippiewill 3y ago
    It would only be a humble brag if it was something that the Firefox developers thought others would be impressed by. It's a single line item on their internal dev blog, the bar for entry is not exactly high.

lovasoa 3y ago

That is great news. I hope Mozilla's PR team will use this as a chance to bust the old myth that firefox is slow. We need more firefox users if we don't want to end up in a world where the web is Google's thing.

jasfi 3y ago

Is Firefox + uBlockOrigin close enough to Brave's protections?

eco 3y ago
It seems like it's somewhat close (assuming uBlock Origin grabs most of the tracking query/content). https://privacytests.org/ https://privacytests.org/ HTTPS Only can be enabled (it's still off by default) to score a few more points. It gets better in Nightly and even more so in Nightly Private.

FractalHQ 3y ago

As much as I hate monopolies, I hate having to write apps for 5 platforms at once even more. If my app works on Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Android, and Edge, and I have to jump through hoops and litter the code with if (isSafari) workarounds to get it working on iPhone, the last thing I want to do with the remainder of my time is start from scratch to fix all of the bugs or missing apis so Firefox can run it for 1% of users. I understand the risk of a chrome monopoly, but boy do I feel a the conflict of interest when these conversations come up…

amatecha 3y ago
why checking for specific browser rather than using feature detection to properly handle different browser capabilities? ( Good docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_testing/Cross_browser_testing/Feature_detection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes... )
- mattnewton 3y ago
  For safari, I used to run into a lot of graphical bugs, (especially when pushing things into layers on the gpu with transforms). The second big category would be things that are performant on low end android phones with chrome are not performant on older iPhones and vice versa.
  - no_way 3y ago
    Semi related, I was suprised just how many bugs Safari has with animation timing while using Web Animation API. You can't possibly feature detect that, Motion one lib even disables GPU acceleration for them in Safari. In that case parsing user agent is the only option. https://motion.dev/guides/waapi-improvements#webkit-bugfixes https://motion.dev/guides/waapi-improvements#webkit-bugfixes
makeitdouble 3y ago
1% is an interesting number [0] Instinctively it feels small, but in practice increasing your CVR on your registration page by 1% is usually a big deal. What kind of other costs in ads or marketing would you pay to get a 1% increase to your user base ? For most company I worked for, a bug affecting 1% of the users would be a critical show stopper. [0] Setting aside if you really have 1% in firefox vs more % in Brave or Vivaldi,

rumdz 3y ago

I am pleased with the performance of Firefox over Chrome in every area except GPU-related tasks. I've noticed most (all?) sites that use my GPU (1080 Ti) regularly run around an order of magnitude slower on Firefox than Chrome on my Windows desktop.

thatcherthorn 3y ago

Will Brave ever separate from Google?

lost_tourist 3y ago
not as long as google provides a completely free render engine and javascript engine.

AtNightWeCode 3y ago

Some years ago it was common that some sites did not work or was slow in FF. I can't remember that I've had that problem for years. Good work by the FF team regardless of these benchmarks.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Okay, time to risk a switch back.

codedokode 3y ago

I think that benchmarks are made wrong way. They typically calculate how many times per second a browser can run some code. But this causes browser vendors to do trade-offs, for example, increase memory consumption which increases the probability of swapping which causes everything to stall. A more fair way would be to account for memory usage: score = speed ÷ (RAM usage)² Or they should run their tests at 2Gb system with lot of other applications running in background.

adventured 3y ago

I have been using Firefox on a daily basis since 2005-2006. When Chrome leaped far out ahead in terms of speed, responsiveness, Firefox nearly lost me as a user (as it was quite slow at the time). Since Firefox largely caught up all has been well. I'd give Firefox an 8.5 out of 10 in terms of how happy I am as a user. They would have to do something atrocious to lose me at this point. I also prefer their engine over Chrome in terms of visual rendering. The sole meaningful complaint I have about Firefox is its memory usage, which still seems high. It wants 1-2gb of ram no matter what I do.

toastal 3y ago
I remember that time & feeling the absolute need to run Minefield (for Fx v4.x) over stable since the next gen features/performance were too important even without add-on compatibility. The 4.0 release took forever in testing & Chrome flew out like a rocket. And even thru the lulls, Fx performance has always been good enough to stick around (tho eventually I moved to LibreWolf due to management of the new browser feature defaults).

mezobeli 3y ago

Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers due to their limitations

ur-whale 3y ago
>Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers due to their limitations THIS.

elashri 3y ago

That's great. Also on a side note regarding performance. Does anyone else use Firefox developer edition as their main browser because they feel that the performance is better than Firefox vanilla itself? I feel that based on a heuristic measurements (that is probably not reproducible)

gadders 3y ago

I don't know what version of Firefox this is, but the version I use is so slooooow using Gmail. It takes close to a minute to finish loading if I refresh the screen, compared to seconds with Chrome.

lost_tourist 3y ago
I"ve never seen it take anywhere near that long. Surely chrome seems a little bit faster but not that noticeable...
exceptione 3y ago
Oh no, Google must be really sorry about that! EDIT to clarify: Google is known to make sure the web experience breaks for firefox, same story for youtube, so this is not an accident. Don´t use chrome and don´t use gmail if you want to keep the web open.
- gadders 3y ago
  Well, exactly. I used to work for Lotus when every new release of Windows or Dos broke something in 1-2-3.
foob 3y ago
I use Firefox for nearly everything, but I need to keep a Chrome window open because Gmail and Google Meet will max out my CPU and barely work in Firefox. Google properties are literally the only sites where I experience this issue. Does anybody know technical details about why this is the case? The anti-competitive incentives for them doing this are obvious, but I imagine that there must be some technical explanation that makes for a plausible excuse. Something like them using Chrome only APIs with slow polyfills on other browsers?
- liminalsunset 3y ago
  For what it's worth, you can add YouTube to the list of Google sites with CPU consuming bugs - particularly in dark mode. I'm not sure whether Chrome entirely fixes it, but if you watch YouTube in dark mode, there was a UI upgrade that they added that puts a "glow" behind the YouTube video player. It's intended to look like a light strip behind your TV (but to me, I originally thought there was just something wrong with the monitor or my eyes), but in reality it's just more Canvas/GPU bound calculations running at 60fps constantly which would cause the CPU/GPU in the laptop to pull tens of watts, killing battery life. There is no way to turn this "feature" off, other than disabling dark mode or blocking the "effects (do not remember exact item name)" DOM item in uBlock Origin. If you want to replicate this, go to a video on YouTube and use the three dots near the sign in button on the top right to enable the dark theme (may already be enabled). Play a video with bright picture, and after about ten seconds, you should start seeing "stuff" show up under the video as if it was a reflection.

monooso 3y ago

I can't say I've ever considered switching browsers because of concerns about JS performance. I'm pretty confident this is the case for most "average" users, but I'm curious whether it makes me an outlier on HN. Anyone else share my indifference?

fulafel 3y ago

The graph shows a cliff, presumably there's a specific code change associated, anyone have a link?

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I would love to switch to Firefox but I'm stuck trying to deploy the Firefox Sync server myself in a way that 'just' works. The old version is not developed anymore, and the new version isn't easily deployable without going through 10 separate issues and trial and error (and I've never succeeded in it).

WorldMaker 3y ago
That's an interesting reason not to use Firefox. Do you just not sign in to Chrome at all? It's not like it has ever offered a self-hosted version of Google Accounts. Sync says all data is E2E encrypted. If you trust that (and you've been close enough to source to verify it yourself, it sounds like), it shouldn't matter who hosts Firefox Sync for you.

makeitdouble 3y ago

I got back to firefox 3 or 4 years ago on mac and it's truely excelent. The only chokepoint were occasional Google properties, the same way Safari chokes on them, so I ended up compartimenting them in Chrome. Otherwise it has been pleasant to use. I also use it on android, but surprisingly it was really hard to use on Windows tablets. It performs well enough as a mouse and keyboard browser, but touch support is too accurate and mechanical to be useful. An example: on HN the upvote arrow is a really small target and clicking everywhere else should result in either nothing or opening the link next to the arrow. Chrome "fuzzies" the click area to include the upvote arrow even if I click completely on the left of it. Firefox will accurately send the click to text part left of the arrow, making it crazy hard to hit the upvote button. Firefox is technically accurate, but the extra "magic" on Chrome's side is really helpful as a user. Performance wise I think it's already on the right track, from there I hope we can get UX improvements as well. Touch optimizations on the desktop feels like a hard nut to crack, but it would be so nice.

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WorldMaker 3y ago
Firefox has some about:config variables to tweak the touch support. The out of box behaviors should definitely be improved, and maybe even a real settings panel would be nice instead of just about:config hidden things.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  Thanks! I actually tried it a while ago but completely forgot about it. The touch radius can be expanded and adjusted but the behavior really comes down to "should it let the user set a caret at any text position", and fuzzing the touch radius will still let the user hit a plain text target and select it, where Chrome (and mobile firefox, coms to think of it) won't let you. For instance on HN's comment link bar ("WorldMaker 5 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in S...") I can set a text selection carret on the "|" between "parent" and "context" in firefox with a touch radius of 32 mm, largely touching both "parent" and "context" links. I am actually getting motivated into looking deeper into this and see what they did to have the mobile version work differently.

mihaic 3y ago

Honestly, for me Firefox is a second choice until their debugging tools match Chrome's and they tighten up their tab UI just a bit. I really want use firefox daily it's just that I do feel a development speed hit when using it.

hruzgar 3y ago
Same, the UI needs a bit of change. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. Just something simple like basic chromium would be nice
arendtio 3y ago
If the UI is a problem try twitching the userchrome.css. I have done so in order to make it work with treestyletab as I like it and if you care about ht UI, the userchrome.css gives you a lot of freedom. In addition, I sync it via Nextcloud across my devices, so that I don't have to make changes per device.
majestic5762 3y ago
Same for me
jeroenhd 3y ago
Interesting, I find Firefox's devs tools a lot easier to work with. Firefox's design doesn't sit right with me, but there are themes and addons to fix that.
- hooch 3y ago
  Agreed. The dev tools in Firefox are beautifully designed and a joy to use. Chrome is a dogs breakfast in comparison.
- mihaic 3y ago
  What themes and addons do you use? I never changed more than the stock color scheme.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago

freediver 3y ago

The gain is real. Just tested with latest Speedometer 3.0 [1] (unreleased, but open source). Latest versions of the browser were used. Firefox Nightly (Gecko) 11.6 Safari TP (WebKit) 11.4 Chrome Canary (Blink) 9.9 [1] https://github.com/WebKit/Speedometer https://github.com/WebKit/Speedometer

everdrive 3y ago

I’m really not excited about JavaScript performance. You know what happens when everyone’s JavaScript performance improves? Webpages just add more JavaScript until it becomes just as slow as it was before. People won’t optimize on a large scale until we hit some upper limit.

omoikane 3y ago

I hope Chrome team send Firefox team a cake for this milestone.

demizer 3y ago

I don't care. Firefox is fast enough for me, even on my Pixel 4a, and without ads.

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butz 3y ago

Are there any "real life" benchmarks, e.g. comparing how long each browser takes for a typical popup, banner and autoplay video laden website to load and finally become responsive for user? And of course this should be a moving target, as website sizes just keep increasing.

aidenn0 3y ago

Doing well on benchmarks is fine, but real-world code is what matters and programmers will write their javascript to match what is fast on Chrome and not test on Firefox, meaning there will be some code that is accidentally fast on Firefox, the balance will be purposefully fast on Chrome.

liendolucas 3y ago

I only run Firefox on every computer and phone that I own. I'm extremely satisfied with its performance so far and sincerely hope they keep improving. My second alternative is Brave, just in case I can't use Firefox. My very last choice is Chromium. On Firefox I highly recommend these plugins: AdNauseam: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ Consent-O-Matic: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat... Firefox Multi-Account containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... I don't care about cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a... Edit: As mentioned below, avoid Consent-O-Matic unless you trust Avast.

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takoid 3y ago
Just so you know, "I don't care about cookies" was sold to Avast last year: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_care_about_cookies_addon/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_car... There is a fork called "I still don't care about cookies" which is probably worth switching to unless you trust Avast: https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies
- liendolucas 3y ago
  Thanks for that and I wasn't aware it's owned by Avast. I'll switch to the one that you suggested!
  - kristofferR 3y ago
    Your edit makes no sense though, 'I don't care about cookies' is the tainted one, not Consent-O-Matic.

Nellyz 3y ago

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