11 ms·

Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks

119 points by mikece 1y ago

Night_Thastus 1y ago
I find that these days the browsers are all about the same performance-wise and it ends up not mattering much. PCs are so fast that it's very rarely the browser that is the bottleneck. Cool that they're still working to keep it snappy though. I will say mobile is a bit different. I prefer mobile browser to apps when possible so I can have ad-blocking, but some websites run like complete garbage on mobile browser. They're so slow it's almost unusable. I'm almost 100% certain that's not on the browser itself though.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  In my experience speed differences between browsers are indeed negligible on properly engineered sites/apps. Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit. Some of it might come down to poorly pruned or outdated polyfills, which in many cases are filling in for features that those engines gained support for quite some time ago. I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs, because it’s making the web worse than it needs to be.
  - internet_points 1y ago
    > Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit and invariable it's under a google domain
  - OkayPhysicist 1y ago
    I daily drive Firefox serving a Chrome User-Agent, out of frustration with a couple applications that work perfectly on Firefox, but because they didn't test on Firefox, they just assume it won't work and block my connection (If there's any Devs at Snapchat who wants a free ticket completion, you can "Add Firefox support" by deleting your UA check) I noticed this exact thing. While a lot of sites worked perfectly fine when I was informing them I was using Firefox, when I started lying, they ran faster. Drove me nuts. Frontend Devs: If your code reads the user-agent string for any reason but logging/spying, you're doing it wrong.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      This is the natural consequence of the notion at large that non-Blink web engines are lightyears behind, which was never true in the strictest sense and has only become less true with time as the gap has narrowed. Besides that, even if you’re relying on some feature that Chrome has implemented as an early draft spec thing or something, maybe consider toggling off that one feature instead of blocking off the whole app.
      - OkayPhysicist 1y ago
        To clarify, I didn't mean don't check if the feature you want to use exists on the user's browser. I meant don't come to that conclusion using User-Agent strings. JavaScript makes if very easy to check if a method you want to use exists or not: just check if the function is undefined. If you do it the right way, if/when another browser implements the feature you used, suddenly you support that browser, with no code changes. If you check UAs, then you need to keep tabs on browser updates and manually update your website when features get added to browsers, and you need to check what version people are using because maybe it's out of date, it's a whole thing. What drives me nuts is that the right way is the easy way.
        cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        We’re in full agreement here, all I was saying is that the menality that leads to user agent sniffing is likely the idea that engines that aren't Blink are so incapable and will break the site/app so badly that it’s better to just rule out their usage altogether. Checking on a per-function basis (or alternatively, just not insisting on using bleeding edge features in the first place) is absolutely the way to go about avoiding brokeness.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    The past few projects I've done, I've made some effort to just not polyfill anything, it's always too easy to wind up with fills for things long supported in every major browser for the past 3-5 years. On the flip side... if you're running something bespoke relying on an older JS engine, it's becoming harder to find pure polyfills/shims that aren't a tangled mess relying on DOM specific features. While there are some newer features I don't mind seeing early, I've mostly just avoided touching some of the more recent features for now, only to avoid the mess that are the current state of fills.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    > I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs... I don't think that is possible. It used to be that lazy devs assumed people were on IE, these days lazy devs assume people are on Chrome. In the future if there is a new browser with a majority of the market, lazy devs will assume people use that browser. The problem isn't any one browser, it's that some people are lazy and seek out shortcuts rather than doing things the correct way.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
  This feels generally true but there's some exceptions. For example: I use Firefox as my daily driver, but if I want to watch more than one Twitch stream in parallel I'm forced to use Chromium. Opening multiple Twitch streams on Firefox grinds the browser to a halt.
  - qualeed 1y ago
    I wonder how experiences can differ so much with the same program. I've never had an issue having 3-5 twitch streams open at the same time, across multiple computers and multiple FireFox versions.
    - Night_Thastus 1y ago
      Addons and configuration can make a big difference. It's why FF likes to push the 'refresh' of the browser if you'd had it installed awhile.
      - ahartmetz 1y ago
        Possibly video drivers and hardware for the Twitch issue.
  - kokada 1y ago
    As a counter example, I remember that I needed to do big reviews in GitHub using Firefox because Chrome would slow to a crawl in the Files tab in GitHub, while Firefox was just as fast as it was with small reviews. I don't think this is an issue anymore, but it shows that a few things have completely performance in different browsers.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  Memory and battery usage matters on desktop browser for laptops as well.
- xigoi 1y ago
  FWIW, you can have ad blocking in all apps with Blokada. https://blokada.org/ https://blokada.org/
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
amendegree 1y ago
Firefox has the worst update process. Idk how they haven’t figured this out yet, but the fact that I regularly get “restart to finish update and continue browsing” when opening new tabs or links is totally unacceptable. Also the fact that it can’t just update in the background and still requires me to manually accept a UAC prompt is crazy. Especially bec sometimes if you don’t accept the prompt… you can’t open Firefox until you allow it to finish updating. So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.
- jlokier 1y ago
  I find it's worse with Chromium than Firefox. After an update, new tabs don't load properly and links fail, until I manually restart it. In the past I've joined Google Meet meetings in Chromium and found the audio not working because I'd forgotten to restart the browser since the last update.
  - afeuerstein 1y ago
    Then it sounds like Firefox has the "restart page" to mitigate this exact edge case. Better than having undefined behavior like that imo. As I get it from other comments, this is not a problem with the built-in updater (as on Windows). On linux, when updating via package manager, you should now this can be an issue with any program. Yes, most programs survive running while being updated, but for a complicated piece of software (like a browser) this behavior is understandable. See the Arch wiki for updating on Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Restart_or_reboot_after_upgrades https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Restart_...
    - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
      On linux I use kill -9 before any update, on the parent of ff's entire process tree. Works for me every single time, reliably getting my tabs back without the need for any extension.
- potato-peeler 1y ago
  It’s just few minutes of update time. If one is so short of time, perhaps they need to re-evaluate other things.
alberth 1y ago
It seems like battery life is no longer a major difference between browsers now either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413
lend000 1y ago
This finally convinced me to press the update and restart button. Nice to see that not all commercial software projects tend towards bloat.
Milpotel 1y ago
On modern machines I blame websites (and maybe network connections) for being slow and not the browser anymore.
- tracker1 1y ago
  That's largely my own take as well. And while many hate SPAs or client-driven web apps, it reduces the server surface a lot. It should be faster/better... that people make really crappy front ends doesn't mean the tech itself is bad. There is some really bloated crap out there, and you can create every bit as much bloat on the server as in the client.
chrisweekly 1y ago
OMG the phoronix website is appalling. Reader mode made it tolerable but masked the "next page" link, which just, come on. That link led to a full-screen interstitial ad, at which point nope.
blinding-streak 1y ago
TLDR: "On average Firefox 141 Beta was around 12% faster than the Firefox 120 release from November 2023."
saubeidl 1y ago
Firefox is good these days! Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody. Manifest v2 will stay supported on FF - uBlock will keep working properly. It's time to switch. If you would rather have a UI like Arc, give Zen a shot! (It's what I use!)
- edhelas 1y ago
  Long live the Red Panda <3
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- BuckRogers 1y ago
  I used Firefox for roughly 19 years at least or a bit more. I switched to Edge and have been very happy for years now. I didn't know they committed to supporting V2 but it does appear they intend to as long as it serves user choice and privacy needs. I left because they kept stripping features out that I was used to whether it was my RSS toolbar feeds or something else. I forgot which feature removal was the final straw, or if it was a bug or two that irked me. While I was never a Chrome user, I found Edge was an alternative that I was happy with. I also see a lot of benefit to native browsers. Ironically, that I learned about from Mozilla's own devblogs. Supporting V2 like this is the exact opposite of what drove me away. I'm cruising so happily on Edge that I'm unsure if I'm willing to do another shift, but I am going to reconsider my life choices.
  - DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
    sounds great, how do I install Edge on Debian?
    - ossusermivami 1y ago
      you have a .deb there https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/download?form=MM145U https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/download?form=MM145U (i don't use it, just saying)
eastbound 1y ago
[flagged]
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Your point being?
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  How do you figure that this is "evil" in any way? Who cares about the CEO
  - eastbound 1y ago
    Everyone can choose what they consider evil. I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. Privately held political opinions. And Mozilla barred itself from working with a top engineer, inventor of Javascript, for privately-held political reasons, and gave reigns from engineers to business types of people. They kept Mozilla dependent on Google, an economic tie which sidesteps Mozilla from being an alternative to Google. Some comments say I’m holding a grudge, but Brendan Eich is not the only one harassed, it was a statement from Mozilla, it meant We do not tolerate other opinions I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. You are free to believe differently, but at least you cannot say with a straight face that Mozilla has a moral standing against Google.
    - remram 1y ago
      Do you have any evidence at all of Mozilla doing anything? The facts are he resigned as CEO after visible external pressure.
    - dmit 1y ago
      > Privately held Which part of donating money to ensure a class of people don't get the same rights as the donor is private? That's as public of a move as one can imagine.
- Moomoomoo309 1y ago
  Do you think those opinions would have made it more difficult to work with certain employees at Mozilla based on certain protected traits in the law? If so, I think the donation is a red herring, it's the opinion itself that's the problem. Firing people for their opinions is actually fine - if you believe that certain types of people don't deserve rights, for example, and your company has those types of people in it, that's a problem. Freedom of opinion is not guaranteed.
butz 1y ago
Best way to improve performance on the web is to install an ad blocker.
em500 1y ago
Firefox (and Chromium according to their own blog) might be objectively faster (and hardware is certainly much faster), but getting anything done on websites doesn't feel any faster than 20 years ago. In the end we keep bumping into some form of Wirth's law / Jevons Paradox: both browser and hardware speed gains will be eaten by more abstract web frameworks, more authentication walls, more ads, etc.
abhaynayar 1y ago
[flagged]
taf2 1y ago
Until Firefox acknowledges and takes serious https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195654 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195654 I refuse to accept it. It served it's purpose to help us defeat IE6. That's it. Now it's useless and needs to die IMO.
- drooopy 1y ago
  So that we can have a worse "IE6" situation where blink (and its distant cousin, webkit) is the only engine available?
- muizelaar 1y ago
  Why is that bug important to you?
  - taf2 1y ago
    When you build a phone and want that phone to work with salesforce classic- every time a page reloads. You must put the WebRTC in a pop out window. This window will not have focus because they are in salesforce . Even in lightning people want a pop out for the call. Firefox is broken
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      This seems incredibly niche, to the point I still don't fully understand what exactly your use case is.
      - taf2 1y ago
        Salesforce has over 150,000 companies using it's platform, with estimates around 150 million users... The percentage that use OpenCTI powered by five 9, ctm, gensys, twilio, telnyx, etc... that are WebRTC based if even let's say 10%... that is still like 15 million users daily... not exactly niche for Firefox to be breaking a feature for that many users? Oh and consider that salesforce method for embedding a phone is fairly common, then you have other CRM's zoho, hubspot and customer service platform zendesk etc... all broken with firefox's position on WebRTC...
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Firefox is excellent. I use it exclusively on my mac and am grateful to all the humans who make such great software. Pleasantly it also has working adblock and using it helps prevent browser monoculture. So that’s nice too.

119 points by mikece 1y ago

I find that these days the browsers are all about the same performance-wise and it ends up not mattering much. PCs are so fast that it's very rarely the browser that is the bottleneck. Cool that they're still working to keep it snappy though. I will say mobile is a bit different. I prefer mobile browser to apps when possible so I can have ad-blocking, but some websites run like complete garbage on mobile browser. They're so slow it's almost unusable. I'm almost 100% certain that's not on the browser itself though.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
In my experience speed differences between browsers are indeed negligible on properly engineered sites/apps. Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit. Some of it might come down to poorly pruned or outdated polyfills, which in many cases are filling in for features that those engines gained support for quite some time ago. I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs, because it’s making the web worse than it needs to be.
- internet_points 1y ago
  > Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit and invariable it's under a google domain
- OkayPhysicist 1y ago
  I daily drive Firefox serving a Chrome User-Agent, out of frustration with a couple applications that work perfectly on Firefox, but because they didn't test on Firefox, they just assume it won't work and block my connection (If there's any Devs at Snapchat who wants a free ticket completion, you can "Add Firefox support" by deleting your UA check) I noticed this exact thing. While a lot of sites worked perfectly fine when I was informing them I was using Firefox, when I started lying, they ran faster. Drove me nuts. Frontend Devs: If your code reads the user-agent string for any reason but logging/spying, you're doing it wrong.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    This is the natural consequence of the notion at large that non-Blink web engines are lightyears behind, which was never true in the strictest sense and has only become less true with time as the gap has narrowed. Besides that, even if you’re relying on some feature that Chrome has implemented as an early draft spec thing or something, maybe consider toggling off that one feature instead of blocking off the whole app.
    - OkayPhysicist 1y ago
      To clarify, I didn't mean don't check if the feature you want to use exists on the user's browser. I meant don't come to that conclusion using User-Agent strings. JavaScript makes if very easy to check if a method you want to use exists or not: just check if the function is undefined. If you do it the right way, if/when another browser implements the feature you used, suddenly you support that browser, with no code changes. If you check UAs, then you need to keep tabs on browser updates and manually update your website when features get added to browsers, and you need to check what version people are using because maybe it's out of date, it's a whole thing. What drives me nuts is that the right way is the easy way.
      - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        We’re in full agreement here, all I was saying is that the menality that leads to user agent sniffing is likely the idea that engines that aren't Blink are so incapable and will break the site/app so badly that it’s better to just rule out their usage altogether. Checking on a per-function basis (or alternatively, just not insisting on using bleeding edge features in the first place) is absolutely the way to go about avoiding brokeness.
- tracker1 1y ago
  The past few projects I've done, I've made some effort to just not polyfill anything, it's always too easy to wind up with fills for things long supported in every major browser for the past 3-5 years. On the flip side... if you're running something bespoke relying on an older JS engine, it's becoming harder to find pure polyfills/shims that aren't a tangled mess relying on DOM specific features. While there are some newer features I don't mind seeing early, I've mostly just avoided touching some of the more recent features for now, only to avoid the mess that are the current state of fills.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs... I don't think that is possible. It used to be that lazy devs assumed people were on IE, these days lazy devs assume people are on Chrome. In the future if there is a new browser with a majority of the market, lazy devs will assume people use that browser. The problem isn't any one browser, it's that some people are lazy and seek out shortcuts rather than doing things the correct way.
TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
This feels generally true but there's some exceptions. For example: I use Firefox as my daily driver, but if I want to watch more than one Twitch stream in parallel I'm forced to use Chromium. Opening multiple Twitch streams on Firefox grinds the browser to a halt.
- qualeed 1y ago
  I wonder how experiences can differ so much with the same program. I've never had an issue having 3-5 twitch streams open at the same time, across multiple computers and multiple FireFox versions.
  - Night_Thastus 1y ago
    Addons and configuration can make a big difference. It's why FF likes to push the 'refresh' of the browser if you'd had it installed awhile.
    - ahartmetz 1y ago
      Possibly video drivers and hardware for the Twitch issue.
- kokada 1y ago
  As a counter example, I remember that I needed to do big reviews in GitHub using Firefox because Chrome would slow to a crawl in the Files tab in GitHub, while Firefox was just as fast as it was with small reviews. I don't think this is an issue anymore, but it shows that a few things have completely performance in different browsers.
rafaelmn 1y ago
Memory and battery usage matters on desktop browser for laptops as well.
xigoi 1y ago
FWIW, you can have ad blocking in all apps with Blokada. https://blokada.org/ https://blokada.org/

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

amendegree 1y ago

Firefox has the worst update process. Idk how they haven’t figured this out yet, but the fact that I regularly get “restart to finish update and continue browsing” when opening new tabs or links is totally unacceptable. Also the fact that it can’t just update in the background and still requires me to manually accept a UAC prompt is crazy. Especially bec sometimes if you don’t accept the prompt… you can’t open Firefox until you allow it to finish updating. So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.

jlokier 1y ago
I find it's worse with Chromium than Firefox. After an update, new tabs don't load properly and links fail, until I manually restart it. In the past I've joined Google Meet meetings in Chromium and found the audio not working because I'd forgotten to restart the browser since the last update.
- afeuerstein 1y ago
  Then it sounds like Firefox has the "restart page" to mitigate this exact edge case. Better than having undefined behavior like that imo. As I get it from other comments, this is not a problem with the built-in updater (as on Windows). On linux, when updating via package manager, you should now this can be an issue with any program. Yes, most programs survive running while being updated, but for a complicated piece of software (like a browser) this behavior is understandable. See the Arch wiki for updating on Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Restart_or_reboot_after_upgrades https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Restart_...
  - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
    On linux I use kill -9 before any update, on the parent of ff's entire process tree. Works for me every single time, reliably getting my tabs back without the need for any extension.
potato-peeler 1y ago
It’s just few minutes of update time. If one is so short of time, perhaps they need to re-evaluate other things.

alberth 1y ago

It seems like battery life is no longer a major difference between browsers now either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413

lend000 1y ago

This finally convinced me to press the update and restart button. Nice to see that not all commercial software projects tend towards bloat.

Milpotel 1y ago

On modern machines I blame websites (and maybe network connections) for being slow and not the browser anymore.

tracker1 1y ago
That's largely my own take as well. And while many hate SPAs or client-driven web apps, it reduces the server surface a lot. It should be faster/better... that people make really crappy front ends doesn't mean the tech itself is bad. There is some really bloated crap out there, and you can create every bit as much bloat on the server as in the client.

chrisweekly 1y ago

OMG the phoronix website is appalling. Reader mode made it tolerable but masked the "next page" link, which just, come on. That link led to a full-screen interstitial ad, at which point nope.

blinding-streak 1y ago

TLDR: "On average Firefox 141 Beta was around 12% faster than the Firefox 120 release from November 2023."

saubeidl 1y ago

Firefox is good these days! Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody. Manifest v2 will stay supported on FF - uBlock will keep working properly. It's time to switch. If you would rather have a UI like Arc, give Zen a shot! (It's what I use!)

edhelas 1y ago
Long live the Red Panda <3
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
BuckRogers 1y ago
I used Firefox for roughly 19 years at least or a bit more. I switched to Edge and have been very happy for years now. I didn't know they committed to supporting V2 but it does appear they intend to as long as it serves user choice and privacy needs. I left because they kept stripping features out that I was used to whether it was my RSS toolbar feeds or something else. I forgot which feature removal was the final straw, or if it was a bug or two that irked me. While I was never a Chrome user, I found Edge was an alternative that I was happy with. I also see a lot of benefit to native browsers. Ironically, that I learned about from Mozilla's own devblogs. Supporting V2 like this is the exact opposite of what drove me away. I'm cruising so happily on Edge that I'm unsure if I'm willing to do another shift, but I am going to reconsider my life choices.
- DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
  sounds great, how do I install Edge on Debian?
  - ossusermivami 1y ago
    you have a .deb there https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/download?form=MM145U https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/download?form=MM145U (i don't use it, just saying)

eastbound 1y ago

[flagged]

saubeidl 1y ago
Your point being?
MangoToupe 1y ago
How do you figure that this is "evil" in any way? Who cares about the CEO
- eastbound 1y ago
  Everyone can choose what they consider evil. I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. Privately held political opinions. And Mozilla barred itself from working with a top engineer, inventor of Javascript, for privately-held political reasons, and gave reigns from engineers to business types of people. They kept Mozilla dependent on Google, an economic tie which sidesteps Mozilla from being an alternative to Google. Some comments say I’m holding a grudge, but Brendan Eich is not the only one harassed, it was a statement from Mozilla, it meant We do not tolerate other opinions I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. You are free to believe differently, but at least you cannot say with a straight face that Mozilla has a moral standing against Google.
  - remram 1y ago
    Do you have any evidence at all of Mozilla doing anything? The facts are he resigned as CEO after visible external pressure.
  - dmit 1y ago
    > Privately held Which part of donating money to ensure a class of people don't get the same rights as the donor is private? That's as public of a move as one can imagine.
Moomoomoo309 1y ago
Do you think those opinions would have made it more difficult to work with certain employees at Mozilla based on certain protected traits in the law? If so, I think the donation is a red herring, it's the opinion itself that's the problem. Firing people for their opinions is actually fine - if you believe that certain types of people don't deserve rights, for example, and your company has those types of people in it, that's a problem. Freedom of opinion is not guaranteed.

butz 1y ago

Best way to improve performance on the web is to install an ad blocker.

em500 1y ago

Firefox (and Chromium according to their own blog) might be objectively faster (and hardware is certainly much faster), but getting anything done on websites doesn't feel any faster than 20 years ago. In the end we keep bumping into some form of Wirth's law / Jevons Paradox: both browser and hardware speed gains will be eaten by more abstract web frameworks, more authentication walls, more ads, etc.

abhaynayar 1y ago

[flagged]

taf2 1y ago

Until Firefox acknowledges and takes serious https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195654 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195654 I refuse to accept it. It served it's purpose to help us defeat IE6. That's it. Now it's useless and needs to die IMO.

drooopy 1y ago
So that we can have a worse "IE6" situation where blink (and its distant cousin, webkit) is the only engine available?
muizelaar 1y ago
Why is that bug important to you?
- taf2 1y ago
  When you build a phone and want that phone to work with salesforce classic- every time a page reloads. You must put the WebRTC in a pop out window. This window will not have focus because they are in salesforce . Even in lightning people want a pop out for the call. Firefox is broken
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    This seems incredibly niche, to the point I still don't fully understand what exactly your use case is.
    - taf2 1y ago
      Salesforce has over 150,000 companies using it's platform, with estimates around 150 million users... The percentage that use OpenCTI powered by five 9, ctm, gensys, twilio, telnyx, etc... that are WebRTC based if even let's say 10%... that is still like 15 million users daily... not exactly niche for Firefox to be breaking a feature for that many users? Oh and consider that salesforce method for embedding a phone is fairly common, then you have other CRM's zoho, hubspot and customer service platform zendesk etc... all broken with firefox's position on WebRTC...

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Firefox is excellent. I use it exclusively on my mac and am grateful to all the humans who make such great software. Pleasantly it also has working adblock and using it helps prevent browser monoculture. So that’s nice too.