10 ms·

Chrome 27, Firefox 22, IE10, And Opera Next, Benchmarked

149 points by blueveek 13y ago

rhelmer 13y ago
Firefox edges ahead of Chrome in performance, memory usage, startup time, reliability.
- halban 13y ago
  Firefox used ~50% less memory than Chrome on open pages, but the composite memory score was slightly for Chrome because after closing the tabs Firefox used more memory over its starting amount. Tom's basically treated this as a leak when really it was just fixed overhead (wouldn't grow when opening and closing the tabs over and over). FF 'won' this benchmark despite a unfair memory score against it.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_v... Pages that were recently visited are stored in memory in such a way that they don't have to be re-parsed I guess the same applies for closed tabs, since those can be re-opened as well. What does Tom think caching is, or what unused RAM is good for? To be a pretty and useless number in the task manager? That not all users understand this is one thing, but a so-called reviewer? Just wow. Thanks for actively making people worse informed, Mr. Expert.
- stack0v3erfl0w 13y ago
  And privacy.
programminggeek 13y ago
I'm not sure I can pinpoint why, but I have grown to dislike Firefox more and more with each release. First it was the memory leak issues that were there for a long time, then it was the feature creep of things I didn't care about, then it was Mozilla's stances on formats and junk that seemed a bit to self-interested, and then Mozilla making their own OS instead of just making webOS or Android more awesome. It's weird, but I get the vibe that Mozilla is sort of selfish and is becoming less relevant over time. That is a stark contrast to Firefox making the web awesome back in the pre 1.0 days. Maybe they haven't changed and I have, but it's kind of odd
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Ok, but I've learn to take a liking to Firefox. And more. Their initiatives have pushed web further and further. Subjectively, I like their initatives a bit more than GOOGs so far. And there is the whole PRISM fiasco. Their experiment with FxOS will repay itself as their API will make way into a W3C standard for mobile connectivity.
- mehrzad 13y ago
  They need to make money; would Android let them do that?
  - claudius 13y ago
    Even if Android let them make money, it is broken beyond repair with its funny idea to run everything in Java sandboxes, invent a new packaging format and releasing source code months after the actual release. No thank you.
- ww520 13y ago
  Mozilla selfish? May be to a few of the for-profit competing companies. I like Firefox more and more. Their memory leak issues have been fixed. Their memory leaks in add-on have been contained. Mozilla make other tech besides browsers to advance the state of computing - Persona, Rust, Thunderbird, PDF.js, asm.js, FirefoxOS, etc. All incredibly useful and innovative. All these benefit most people and advance the web.
- brownbat 13y ago
  > It's weird, but I get the vibe that Mozilla is sort of selfish and is becoming less relevant over time. Funny, I'm starting to swing the other way. I keep wondering how we let a web advertiser on all our boxes. The dominant browser shapes standards. It was true with Navigator, it was true with IE. Decisions on cookies, tracking, even some protocol designs over the next ten years will occasionally pit the interests of users against the interests of advertisers. I like Google, a lot. But I do not trust Google to lobby on my behalf on these issues. (Also, I really miss Ubiquity.)
ippa 13y ago
I switched from FF -> Chrome some years ago. Sometimes I try to switch back. Maybe FF is fast.. but it feels clunky, I wish they would copy Chromes GUI right off :). Also the "screen" flickers when I scroll, in Chrome it doesn't. And that's on a high-end windows PC. I like what Mozilla is doing with regards to privacy and so on though...
- webwanderings 13y ago
  Thanks for confirming about the screen scrolling. I thought I was the only one.
- callahad 13y ago
  Firefox's UI is heading generally in this direction: https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/0/0c/Australis-i02-Tabs.jpg https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/0/0c/Australis-i02-Tabs.jpg Try out a UX Nightly http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ to get a feel for the work-in-progress version.
- magic_haze 13y ago
  Try FxChrome: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome I switched from Chrome a few weeks back and had the same opinion about firefox's native UI. FxChrome and Close-Tabs-to-the-Right [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-tabs-to-the-right https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-tabs-to...] made the switch completely worth it. Edit: I noticed a difference in the default scrolling as well. Try disabling smooth scrolling (Options -> Advanced -> General.)
  - padenot 13y ago
    Just wanted to note that a close-tabs-to-the-right menu entry was recently added in Nightly builds.
- sp332 13y ago
  Firefox downloads image data but doesn't decode it until you browse to that spot on the page. Do you think that's what you're seeing? You can disable that in about:config, just toggle image.mem.decodeondraw to false.
mehrzad 13y ago
Just a suggestion while the comments are still sparse: When we're posting about new Firefox features a lot of us already use Aurora or Nightly, so it's not really news. When a feature hits the beta or stable channel we might've used it for weeks. This problem exists on 4chan's /g/ board as well.
- sp332 13y ago
  Most people don't use channels other than Release, so I think it's still useful to post about them since it's news to most people.
KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
Firefox is still far behind in rendering images, something that's untested in this benchmark. In real world use this makes FF slow as hell. I really do hope FF catches up.
- ksec 13y ago
  Can you elaborate on that? I am pretty sure those bugs about rendering ( lots ) of images were fix a few versions ago.
  - bri3d 13y ago
    It looks like they tried to land a patch which would discard images that were outside of the viewport, but it broke so they backed it out of FF 22 ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=872235 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=872235 ). Then, there's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223 where all downloaded images are decoded and live forever regardless of if they are shown.
    - nnethercote 13y ago
      The backed-out-of-FF22 patch has been fixed and is present and enabled in FF24 (currently in Aurora). > all downloaded images are decoded and live forever regardless of if they are shown. Nope. Before the backed-out-of-FF22 patch landed, all images in a page were decoded and kept in memory as long as that page was in the foreground. But if you switched to another tab, the decoded images would be discarded. With the backed-out-of-FF22 patch in place, most images that are downloaded are decoded temporarily, but those that aren't visible are discarded quickly. When bug 847223 is done, the not-visible images won't even be decoded on page loading. So, to summarize: in FF24, on image-heavy pages you'll see a memory spike on first load, but it'll quickly drop down. And once bug 847223 is done (hopefully soon, though these things are hard to predict), you won't even see that spike.
- padenot 13y ago
  I you are talking about rendering speed, you'll be pleased to know that people have been working on multithreaded image decoding. Not sure when it will be available in release, but it is in my Firefox Nightly.
soundgecko 13y ago
Would be interesting to see how IE11 fares since it's close to release. Also sad to see one less engine because of Operas' Presto being retired because of things like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298
- callahad 13y ago
  We're still at the same net number of engines, since shortly thereafter Google forked WebKit into Blink.
  - brokenparser 13y ago
    Also, a new engine is being built which goes by the name Servo. Mozilla, Samsung and independent contributors from the open source community are actively working on it. Git: https://github.com/mozilla/servo https://github.com/mozilla/servo
SeanDav 13y ago
Well, as a long time fan of Firefox, I am sitting here with quite the smile on my face. Not sure how long it will last but this little victory is rather sweet.
- altrego99 13y ago
  This is sweet. Also because I love what they are doing on javascript development. For example, 1. Destructuring references is not yet supported on Chrome [a,b,c]=[c,d,f] [a,b]=[b,a+b] 2. Shorthand functions are sweet [1,2,3,4].map(function(x) x*x)) // [1,4,9,16] 3. Chrome doesn't have an inbuilt shell (Shift+F4 in Firefox) Granted CoffeeScript makes some of these easy, but they are too paranoid in my opinion to support new and useful syntaxes (e.g. yield keyword for generators, getters/setters).
  - epidemian 13y ago
    I didn't know about that function syntax. Does it work just like the arrow function syntax? [1,2,3,4].map(x => x * x) // [1,4,9,16] I wonder why they included two new shorter function syntax alternatives. Is one of them recommended/deprecated?
    - camus 13y ago
      one is standard the other is not.
    - altrego99 13y ago
      This doesn't seem to work on Firefox 21 shell. Does it work on FF 22?
      - epidemian 13y ago
        Yep, it seems it was added on Firefox 22: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/arrow_functions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe.... It also seems it's the proposal for ES6: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:arrow_function_syntax http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:arrow_functio.... This blog post explains the differences between these functions and current functions: http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/javascript-fat-city/; http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/javascript-... i wish the unbound "->" alternative is included, so that functions used as methods can also use the new syntax.
thezilch 13y ago
These mechanical benchmarks may be true, but FF still feels sluggish and the dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired. Even in recreational browsing, I tend to use dev tools and would get bothered easily having to open another browser. The memory efficiency doesn't explain much to me. It's like complaining that linux is holding memory hostage in buffers/cache or that Chrome should lose points for its process model. The test surely doesn't tell the whole story; not to mention, I can't be bothered to worry about a couple 100M when I can get 160 of them for the price of dinner. For all I know, the chunking I experience with FF could very well be a relic of their process and/or memory model. And security is just a smudge on the score? No thanks.
- zobzu 13y ago
  I find it interesting that when Firefox consumed too much memory it was bashed for it. When it fixed that and became one of the most efficient browser, while Chrome uses tons of memory, Firefox still gets bashed for "spending time on making the browser efficient". This only leads to one conclusion: unless your product is largely better than the competition, its all about who's the cool kid on the block and who has the most financial interests. "news at 11" i guess
  - thezilch 13y ago
    Firefox was and is chided for feeling sluggish, crashing, and the likes. Most assume(d) these problems are related to the memory and process model. As well, the "memory bashing" was largely related to presuming the memory was "leaked," which turned out to be true. Such assumption have not been applied to Chrome, as far as I know. It was never anything I was much concerned with -- Firefox consuming too much memory. It was better than IE, in speed (re: not appearing to be sluggish) and tooling. Now Chrome takes a lead in those regards; mechanical test-results do not parallel my experiences.
    - claudius 13y ago
      Curiously, I went back to Iceweasel from Chromium after the latter kept crashing reproducible on some sites – among them plus.google.com and many others with Flash. So far, I have no encountered Iceweasel to crash, and the dev tools are only slightly worse than Chromium’s. Last time Opera crashed on me? Hmmm…
HugoDias 13y ago
Even so, the chrome browser has a great integration with google products and with my android, so I will stay here for now....
nolok 13y ago
What's truly impressive to me (in a bad/sad way), is how despite all it's great features Firefox manages to feel so, I don't know, I guess clunky would be the word. And it's not a habit thing because I use it every day, although for disclosure Chrome is my personal browser. It just doesn't feel like a piece of software that I enjoy using, like it used to some long years ago. Fix that, and you win me back. PS: I think the memory score is not so relevant as a few years ago. People talked a lot about FF memory, but that was because it was leaking like crazy and ultimately lead to crashes of your browser. I don't care how much ram my browser is using as long as it doesn't start swapping nor crashing.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  There are many different, relevant parameters: 1) Start-up time. 2) Performance with 25+ tabs open. 3) Performance on older devices. 4) Performance with a "basic" set of extensions. I don't really care about benchmarks these days; I am much more interested in whether a browser supports HTML5, WebGL, etc. I'm currently bummed that Opera 13 doesn't display shapefiles on GitHub. :(
- brokenparser 13y ago
  Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME (This is a tough one to debug, perhaps if Firefox had a pixel perfect Chrome theme it'd work for you?)
  - nolok 13y ago
    It's not a theme thing, it's a behavior thing. Firefox feels like Eclipse to me.
    - brokenparser 13y ago
      Well, I still wouldn't be able to reopen the bug on a hand-waving comparison between two unrelated software projects. Also, I'll have it known that I love Eclipse and think it's way better than IntelliJ. I know that's not a very popular opinion around these parts, but still.
HugoDias 13y ago
In the 'real world' when it comes to memory I believe the google chrome is still winning. If you keep these two browsers with more than 10 tabs open for a while (1h+) and then close a few tabs, google chrome will have an immediate reduction in memory usage, unlike Firefox, which continues to consume the same amount.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  This was accounted for in the tests (and I think that in general the effect of fragmentation is overstated).
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  Maybe Firefox simply holds longer on to cached stuff if the system has still free memory? Unless it fails to release it when needed, I would see this as a plus.
  - HugoDias 13y ago
    Well, it isnt for me. I use Google+ and Youtube frequently and these services consume a LOT of memory. When i close these tabs , Firefox keeps holding this memory space alocated. Generally i need to use some app to remove the 'inactive' memory alocated by FF. I don't think this is a 'plus'.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Why? Unused RAM is just wasted RAM. In an ideal world, we would use all unused RAM for aggressive caching, and release it just before it's needed by something other than caching. That Firefox frees up the memory when you start other apps seems to indicate it does it exactly right.
- slacka 13y ago
  If you're on a limited memory machine, like my 2GB netbook, Firefox is the best choice. Chrome is a pig in both the real world and these tests with 768 vs 1521 MB used. Congratulations to the memshrink team for fixing all the memory leaks in FF 4. Now if they could only do something about the UI responsiveness when multiple intensive tabs are open, I might consider switching back from Chrome on my desktop.
swah 13y ago
Some people I know, myself included, have the perception that Chrome is "not as good as it used to be", loosely. Anyone else noticed this?
- camus 13y ago
  it definetly applies to Firefox,which is worse than IE now.
- nobodysfool 13y ago
  No, I've noticed it much improved. Of course, I'm on the 'beta' channel where there is deferred rendering.
- qu4z-2 13y ago
  When Chrome first came out, I remember double-clicking the icon and having it appear almost before I registered that I finished clicking. Now it takes like a second. I use suckless.org's surf now, and it "feels" faster than any of the other browsers, despite no doubt faring worse in benchmarks (and not being generally accessible, lagging tabbing and a url bar)
- scholia 13y ago
  I used Chrome from when it came out until recently, when I switched back to Firefox. I gave up on Chrome because of Flash crashes, general crashes (two or more per day), and pages showing up as plain, pale blue pages (instead of the web page content). Maybe I had too many tabs open and not enough RAM (3GB). Either way, the tabs were too small to show what the pages were, which wasn't helpful. Firefox has worked perfectly, and it doesn't feel any slower, so I've no complaints....
FilterJoe 13y ago
Pinned tabs on demand (introduced early 2012) is Firefox's killer feature that got me using Firefox again after using Chrome almost exclusively for a year. When you pin tabs, and then restart the browser, the tabs are not loaded until you click on them (not yet loaded, pinned tabs, are visually dim). Pinned tabs are not included in any benchmarks I've seen but have a drastic positive impact on memory usage and speed. I typically have 20 or so pinned tabs and only 1-3 unpinned tabs when I quit Firefox. A cold start takes just a few seconds and about the only time I restart the browser is when I restart my system (2-3x per week). Chrome loads all tabs on start so it can take around a minute to load the same 21-23 tabs. And furthermore Chrome tends to operate sluggishly after a couple hours of use with so many open tabs, so when using Chrome I tend to close then reopen the browser every couple hours. Chrome 5 had a similar feature called phantom tabs but it was removed in Chrome 6. I loved that feature and was very unhappy when it was removed.
- Arelius 13y ago
  The option "Don't load tabs until selected" gives similar behavior for unpinned tabs too. This helps significantally where I use tabs and tabgroups as something a little more temporary than bookmarks.
digitalzombie 13y ago
Yay, I love firefox and still with it even when Chrome was out way back then. They fixed the memory leaks a long time ago guys... One of the big one was each extension have a copy of the DOM tree I believe. And firefox is the only webbrowser I know that can handle 100+ tabs. >___<. Aurora is very very stable btw.

149 points by blueveek 13y ago

rhelmer 13y ago

Firefox edges ahead of Chrome in performance, memory usage, startup time, reliability.

halban 13y ago
Firefox used ~50% less memory than Chrome on open pages, but the composite memory score was slightly for Chrome because after closing the tabs Firefox used more memory over its starting amount. Tom's basically treated this as a leak when really it was just fixed overhead (wouldn't grow when opening and closing the tabs over and over). FF 'won' this benchmark despite a unfair memory score against it.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_v... Pages that were recently visited are stored in memory in such a way that they don't have to be re-parsed I guess the same applies for closed tabs, since those can be re-opened as well. What does Tom think caching is, or what unused RAM is good for? To be a pretty and useless number in the task manager? That not all users understand this is one thing, but a so-called reviewer? Just wow. Thanks for actively making people worse informed, Mr. Expert.
stack0v3erfl0w 13y ago
And privacy.

programminggeek 13y ago

I'm not sure I can pinpoint why, but I have grown to dislike Firefox more and more with each release. First it was the memory leak issues that were there for a long time, then it was the feature creep of things I didn't care about, then it was Mozilla's stances on formats and junk that seemed a bit to self-interested, and then Mozilla making their own OS instead of just making webOS or Android more awesome. It's weird, but I get the vibe that Mozilla is sort of selfish and is becoming less relevant over time. That is a stark contrast to Firefox making the web awesome back in the pre 1.0 days. Maybe they haven't changed and I have, but it's kind of odd

Ygg2 13y ago
Ok, but I've learn to take a liking to Firefox. And more. Their initiatives have pushed web further and further. Subjectively, I like their initatives a bit more than GOOGs so far. And there is the whole PRISM fiasco. Their experiment with FxOS will repay itself as their API will make way into a W3C standard for mobile connectivity.
mehrzad 13y ago
They need to make money; would Android let them do that?
- claudius 13y ago
  Even if Android let them make money, it is broken beyond repair with its funny idea to run everything in Java sandboxes, invent a new packaging format and releasing source code months after the actual release. No thank you.
ww520 13y ago
Mozilla selfish? May be to a few of the for-profit competing companies. I like Firefox more and more. Their memory leak issues have been fixed. Their memory leaks in add-on have been contained. Mozilla make other tech besides browsers to advance the state of computing - Persona, Rust, Thunderbird, PDF.js, asm.js, FirefoxOS, etc. All incredibly useful and innovative. All these benefit most people and advance the web.
brownbat 13y ago
> It's weird, but I get the vibe that Mozilla is sort of selfish and is becoming less relevant over time. Funny, I'm starting to swing the other way. I keep wondering how we let a web advertiser on all our boxes. The dominant browser shapes standards. It was true with Navigator, it was true with IE. Decisions on cookies, tracking, even some protocol designs over the next ten years will occasionally pit the interests of users against the interests of advertisers. I like Google, a lot. But I do not trust Google to lobby on my behalf on these issues. (Also, I really miss Ubiquity.)

ippa 13y ago

I switched from FF -> Chrome some years ago. Sometimes I try to switch back. Maybe FF is fast.. but it feels clunky, I wish they would copy Chromes GUI right off :). Also the "screen" flickers when I scroll, in Chrome it doesn't. And that's on a high-end windows PC. I like what Mozilla is doing with regards to privacy and so on though...

webwanderings 13y ago
Thanks for confirming about the screen scrolling. I thought I was the only one.
callahad 13y ago
Firefox's UI is heading generally in this direction: https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/0/0c/Australis-i02-Tabs.jpg https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/0/0c/Australis-i02-Tabs.jpg Try out a UX Nightly http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ to get a feel for the work-in-progress version.
magic_haze 13y ago
Try FxChrome: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome I switched from Chrome a few weeks back and had the same opinion about firefox's native UI. FxChrome and Close-Tabs-to-the-Right [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-tabs-to-the-right https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-tabs-to...] made the switch completely worth it. Edit: I noticed a difference in the default scrolling as well. Try disabling smooth scrolling (Options -> Advanced -> General.)
- padenot 13y ago
  Just wanted to note that a close-tabs-to-the-right menu entry was recently added in Nightly builds.
sp332 13y ago
Firefox downloads image data but doesn't decode it until you browse to that spot on the page. Do you think that's what you're seeing? You can disable that in about:config, just toggle image.mem.decodeondraw to false.

mehrzad 13y ago

Just a suggestion while the comments are still sparse: When we're posting about new Firefox features a lot of us already use Aurora or Nightly, so it's not really news. When a feature hits the beta or stable channel we might've used it for weeks. This problem exists on 4chan's /g/ board as well.

sp332 13y ago
Most people don't use channels other than Release, so I think it's still useful to post about them since it's news to most people.

KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago

Firefox is still far behind in rendering images, something that's untested in this benchmark. In real world use this makes FF slow as hell. I really do hope FF catches up.

ksec 13y ago
Can you elaborate on that? I am pretty sure those bugs about rendering ( lots ) of images were fix a few versions ago.
- bri3d 13y ago
  It looks like they tried to land a patch which would discard images that were outside of the viewport, but it broke so they backed it out of FF 22 ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=872235 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=872235 ). Then, there's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223 where all downloaded images are decoded and live forever regardless of if they are shown.
  - nnethercote 13y ago
    The backed-out-of-FF22 patch has been fixed and is present and enabled in FF24 (currently in Aurora). > all downloaded images are decoded and live forever regardless of if they are shown. Nope. Before the backed-out-of-FF22 patch landed, all images in a page were decoded and kept in memory as long as that page was in the foreground. But if you switched to another tab, the decoded images would be discarded. With the backed-out-of-FF22 patch in place, most images that are downloaded are decoded temporarily, but those that aren't visible are discarded quickly. When bug 847223 is done, the not-visible images won't even be decoded on page loading. So, to summarize: in FF24, on image-heavy pages you'll see a memory spike on first load, but it'll quickly drop down. And once bug 847223 is done (hopefully soon, though these things are hard to predict), you won't even see that spike.
padenot 13y ago
I you are talking about rendering speed, you'll be pleased to know that people have been working on multithreaded image decoding. Not sure when it will be available in release, but it is in my Firefox Nightly.

soundgecko 13y ago

Would be interesting to see how IE11 fares since it's close to release. Also sad to see one less engine because of Operas' Presto being retired because of things like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298

callahad 13y ago
We're still at the same net number of engines, since shortly thereafter Google forked WebKit into Blink.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  Also, a new engine is being built which goes by the name Servo. Mozilla, Samsung and independent contributors from the open source community are actively working on it. Git: https://github.com/mozilla/servo https://github.com/mozilla/servo

SeanDav 13y ago

Well, as a long time fan of Firefox, I am sitting here with quite the smile on my face. Not sure how long it will last but this little victory is rather sweet.

altrego99 13y ago
This is sweet. Also because I love what they are doing on javascript development. For example, 1. Destructuring references is not yet supported on Chrome [a,b,c]=[c,d,f] [a,b]=[b,a+b] 2. Shorthand functions are sweet [1,2,3,4].map(function(x) x*x)) // [1,4,9,16] 3. Chrome doesn't have an inbuilt shell (Shift+F4 in Firefox) Granted CoffeeScript makes some of these easy, but they are too paranoid in my opinion to support new and useful syntaxes (e.g. yield keyword for generators, getters/setters).
- epidemian 13y ago
  I didn't know about that function syntax. Does it work just like the arrow function syntax? [1,2,3,4].map(x => x * x) // [1,4,9,16] I wonder why they included two new shorter function syntax alternatives. Is one of them recommended/deprecated?
  - camus 13y ago
    one is standard the other is not.
  - altrego99 13y ago
    This doesn't seem to work on Firefox 21 shell. Does it work on FF 22?
    - epidemian 13y ago
      Yep, it seems it was added on Firefox 22: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/arrow_functions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe.... It also seems it's the proposal for ES6: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:arrow_function_syntax http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:arrow_functio.... This blog post explains the differences between these functions and current functions: http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/javascript-fat-city/; http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/javascript-... i wish the unbound "->" alternative is included, so that functions used as methods can also use the new syntax.

thezilch 13y ago

These mechanical benchmarks may be true, but FF still feels sluggish and the dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired. Even in recreational browsing, I tend to use dev tools and would get bothered easily having to open another browser. The memory efficiency doesn't explain much to me. It's like complaining that linux is holding memory hostage in buffers/cache or that Chrome should lose points for its process model. The test surely doesn't tell the whole story; not to mention, I can't be bothered to worry about a couple 100M when I can get 160 of them for the price of dinner. For all I know, the chunking I experience with FF could very well be a relic of their process and/or memory model. And security is just a smudge on the score? No thanks.

zobzu 13y ago
I find it interesting that when Firefox consumed too much memory it was bashed for it. When it fixed that and became one of the most efficient browser, while Chrome uses tons of memory, Firefox still gets bashed for "spending time on making the browser efficient". This only leads to one conclusion: unless your product is largely better than the competition, its all about who's the cool kid on the block and who has the most financial interests. "news at 11" i guess
- thezilch 13y ago
  Firefox was and is chided for feeling sluggish, crashing, and the likes. Most assume(d) these problems are related to the memory and process model. As well, the "memory bashing" was largely related to presuming the memory was "leaked," which turned out to be true. Such assumption have not been applied to Chrome, as far as I know. It was never anything I was much concerned with -- Firefox consuming too much memory. It was better than IE, in speed (re: not appearing to be sluggish) and tooling. Now Chrome takes a lead in those regards; mechanical test-results do not parallel my experiences.
  - claudius 13y ago
    Curiously, I went back to Iceweasel from Chromium after the latter kept crashing reproducible on some sites – among them plus.google.com and many others with Flash. So far, I have no encountered Iceweasel to crash, and the dev tools are only slightly worse than Chromium’s. Last time Opera crashed on me? Hmmm…

HugoDias 13y ago

Even so, the chrome browser has a great integration with google products and with my android, so I will stay here for now....

nolok 13y ago

What's truly impressive to me (in a bad/sad way), is how despite all it's great features Firefox manages to feel so, I don't know, I guess clunky would be the word. And it's not a habit thing because I use it every day, although for disclosure Chrome is my personal browser. It just doesn't feel like a piece of software that I enjoy using, like it used to some long years ago. Fix that, and you win me back. PS: I think the memory score is not so relevant as a few years ago. People talked a lot about FF memory, but that was because it was leaking like crazy and ultimately lead to crashes of your browser. I don't care how much ram my browser is using as long as it doesn't start swapping nor crashing.

kmfrk 13y ago
There are many different, relevant parameters: 1) Start-up time. 2) Performance with 25+ tabs open. 3) Performance on older devices. 4) Performance with a "basic" set of extensions. I don't really care about benchmarks these days; I am much more interested in whether a browser supports HTML5, WebGL, etc. I'm currently bummed that Opera 13 doesn't display shapefiles on GitHub. :(
brokenparser 13y ago
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME (This is a tough one to debug, perhaps if Firefox had a pixel perfect Chrome theme it'd work for you?)
- nolok 13y ago
  It's not a theme thing, it's a behavior thing. Firefox feels like Eclipse to me.
  - brokenparser 13y ago
    Well, I still wouldn't be able to reopen the bug on a hand-waving comparison between two unrelated software projects. Also, I'll have it known that I love Eclipse and think it's way better than IntelliJ. I know that's not a very popular opinion around these parts, but still.

HugoDias 13y ago

In the 'real world' when it comes to memory I believe the google chrome is still winning. If you keep these two browsers with more than 10 tabs open for a while (1h+) and then close a few tabs, google chrome will have an immediate reduction in memory usage, unlike Firefox, which continues to consume the same amount.

pcwalton 13y ago
This was accounted for in the tests (and I think that in general the effect of fragmentation is overstated).
PavlovsCat 13y ago
Maybe Firefox simply holds longer on to cached stuff if the system has still free memory? Unless it fails to release it when needed, I would see this as a plus.
- HugoDias 13y ago
  Well, it isnt for me. I use Google+ and Youtube frequently and these services consume a LOT of memory. When i close these tabs , Firefox keeps holding this memory space alocated. Generally i need to use some app to remove the 'inactive' memory alocated by FF. I don't think this is a 'plus'.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Why? Unused RAM is just wasted RAM. In an ideal world, we would use all unused RAM for aggressive caching, and release it just before it's needed by something other than caching. That Firefox frees up the memory when you start other apps seems to indicate it does it exactly right.
slacka 13y ago
If you're on a limited memory machine, like my 2GB netbook, Firefox is the best choice. Chrome is a pig in both the real world and these tests with 768 vs 1521 MB used. Congratulations to the memshrink team for fixing all the memory leaks in FF 4. Now if they could only do something about the UI responsiveness when multiple intensive tabs are open, I might consider switching back from Chrome on my desktop.

swah 13y ago

Some people I know, myself included, have the perception that Chrome is "not as good as it used to be", loosely. Anyone else noticed this?

camus 13y ago
it definetly applies to Firefox,which is worse than IE now.
nobodysfool 13y ago
No, I've noticed it much improved. Of course, I'm on the 'beta' channel where there is deferred rendering.
qu4z-2 13y ago
When Chrome first came out, I remember double-clicking the icon and having it appear almost before I registered that I finished clicking. Now it takes like a second. I use suckless.org's surf now, and it "feels" faster than any of the other browsers, despite no doubt faring worse in benchmarks (and not being generally accessible, lagging tabbing and a url bar)
scholia 13y ago
I used Chrome from when it came out until recently, when I switched back to Firefox. I gave up on Chrome because of Flash crashes, general crashes (two or more per day), and pages showing up as plain, pale blue pages (instead of the web page content). Maybe I had too many tabs open and not enough RAM (3GB). Either way, the tabs were too small to show what the pages were, which wasn't helpful. Firefox has worked perfectly, and it doesn't feel any slower, so I've no complaints....

FilterJoe 13y ago

Pinned tabs on demand (introduced early 2012) is Firefox's killer feature that got me using Firefox again after using Chrome almost exclusively for a year. When you pin tabs, and then restart the browser, the tabs are not loaded until you click on them (not yet loaded, pinned tabs, are visually dim). Pinned tabs are not included in any benchmarks I've seen but have a drastic positive impact on memory usage and speed. I typically have 20 or so pinned tabs and only 1-3 unpinned tabs when I quit Firefox. A cold start takes just a few seconds and about the only time I restart the browser is when I restart my system (2-3x per week). Chrome loads all tabs on start so it can take around a minute to load the same 21-23 tabs. And furthermore Chrome tends to operate sluggishly after a couple hours of use with so many open tabs, so when using Chrome I tend to close then reopen the browser every couple hours. Chrome 5 had a similar feature called phantom tabs but it was removed in Chrome 6. I loved that feature and was very unhappy when it was removed.

Arelius 13y ago
The option "Don't load tabs until selected" gives similar behavior for unpinned tabs too. This helps significantally where I use tabs and tabgroups as something a little more temporary than bookmarks.

digitalzombie 13y ago

Yay, I love firefox and still with it even when Chrome was out way back then. They fixed the memory leaks a long time ago guys... One of the big one was each extension have a copy of the DOM tree I believe. And firefox is the only webbrowser I know that can handle 100+ tabs. >___<. Aurora is very very stable btw.