Firefox now has speed parity with Chrome on the Speedometer benchmark
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1376783
Thought I'd never see the day when Firefox would match Chrome on Speedometer.
There's also a few other benchmarks got a sizable boost. https://arewefastyet.com/
Speed almost doesn't matter for me, since Chrome allows ads and Firefox actually lets me use adblockers and privacy badger. The time wasted on ads are way larger than the time spent loading a page.
never thought about it, but I tend to concur
Yeah. A pihole sped up the internet for me big time.
I'm a Firefox user, but doesn't Chrome allow adblockers too? Both uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are supported extensions on Chrome.
They do, but Chrome is actively trying to remove support for most advanced ad-blocking capabilities. Further, Google has no financial incentive to make their browser hospitable to ad blockers as Google makes most of their money from advertising.
Google has pushed some half-baked ideas for how the web could work without having to block ads. Ad blocks aren't best buddies with Google.
Correct, but Chrome recently allowed ads through that weren't block-able by uBlock Origin or any other blocker at the time. That's when I switched back to Firefox, so I don't know if anyone figured out a way around it.
What do you mean? Adblockers for Chrome exists.
Also note differences of these capabilities on their respective mobile apps.
They do, but Google reduced their utility. Ads from YouTube get through my uBlock Origin, and I see ads in my search results. This was a fairly recent development, as maybe a year ago I didn't see any ads at all on Chrome. The day I got ads punched through my blockers, is the day I quit being lazy and migrated back to Firefox.
Google has no incentive to block ads when that's part of their revenue stream, so they nerfed third party extension's ability to actually work at intended.
Sure it does...
I rarely feel like the slowness of a website was due to the browser. I mean .4 seconds or .5 seconds does it really matter? I've been using Firefox since it was Firebird and speed has never really been a complaint. People need to measure and quantify everything.
What appeals to me about Firefox is how customizable it is, and all the extensions.
On old HW it does matter. I use X220 Thinkpad, it's still fast using chrome, and slow using firefox. But since 115, it's noticeably fast... so... it matter, for me.
My bigger complaint is memory usage
Same for me. Since I switched to Firebird/Firefox, no other browser has given me a reason to seriously consider switching.
I'm still a little mad that they had to change it from Phoenix. Such a great and evocative name.
I miss Galeon a little too. Practically invented the tabbed browser.
Firebird?
Phoenix became Firebird which became Firefox.
Since Firebird, eh? That means you are responsible for my beloved Mozilla suite being ditched for this upstart.
People stop using chrome.its not good for you nor for the internet.
I switched to Chrome a few years back because Firefox kept deleting my bookmarks.
Been using Firefox for over 15 years, including weird open source custom forks of it, and I've never run into that issue. I've got bookmarks kicking around that I imported into FF from IE on Windows XP.
Not saying it didn't happen, but I'd hazard a guess that it was related to some bookmarks related addon you installed, or user error. Sorry you lost your bookmarks.
Why is Chromium slower than Chrome?
I wouldn't be surprised if Google is keeping certain performance enhancements closed source so they can have a competive advantage over the competition that uses the Chromium source. They have been slowly making Android open source worse by not updating parts and moving things to closed source Google Play apps.
Wild guess: APM?
Edit:
It seems that chromium here on these benchmarks is unoptimized and it depends on what flags where enabled during building time: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/6q3AyYacjOo/m/XKQMdW4fBgAJ
The real question
So, a larger number is better for this speed benchmark?
Nice! Although I have been using Firefox for years and never felt there was an issue with speed. Always been reliable for me.
I use FF to help keep the browser "market" competitive. We don't want to end up in the same situation as early 2ks where html standardisation was essentially "internet explorer compatibility", and if you wanted to use newer features as a web dev you had to put multiple implementations, one for IE, and one for the others, as in the browsers actually implementing the specifications correctly. Now MS didn't exactly do nefarious things with their market power, it was rather neglect, but it damaged the industry nevertheless. For Google, in today's market, I'd anticipate they would use it to make it very difficult to block ads etc. Internet will become less free.
I use FF because it's good.
MS didn't do nefarious things with their market power? They virtually killed all competition in the market.
Chrome is worse. Because Chrome isn't about having you use the browser, its about knowing what you do with the browser. Google already changes it's search page, for example, on mobile Firefox can't see the same sports results and league tables, and can't easily see the reviews of local restaurants etc.
The graph totally threw me off, first I thought this post was a joke that Firefox got slower and is now as slow as Chrome.
For some dumb reason the y-axis shows the score, but it's inverted..
It's inverted because on most occasions the y axis represents time, so less is better.
In order to not have bemchmarks where a lower result on the Y-axis is worse, they kind of invert it for scores.
I know it is confusing, but it helps non-technical people.
If you are on linux wayland, enable wayland mode for firefox and enjoy the huge performance boost
Sadly I'm using XFCE, and XFCE isn't ready for wayland, so I will keep waiting until wayland stable enough on XFCE. Other DE isn't suiting my taste tbh. well it's mater of preference, but XFCE is stable roboust DE for me to keep me focus on works
This sounds like what I'm missing 😁
Crazy fact. Firefox, for me, has ALWAYS been much faster/stronger on YouTube than any chromium based browser I've used. Better than chrome on their own site. This makes it even better. I love this browser.
YouTube has been ok for me in Firefox, but other Google apps, in particular Docs/Sheets, always become very laggy after a few minutes. When this happens, it seems to affect the rest of the browser too, so other tabs that I have open slow down as well.
I'm proud of Firefox, but man, that's a bad graph :)
Great, now implement modern exploit mitigations and sandboxing like Chrome uses. Firefox is objectively less resistant to exploitation. Some Firefox security has improved since the article was written, such as some sandboxing on Windows, but it's definitely not as mature.
I'm not writing that Firefox is insecure. Security is very important to Firefox! However, Chrome has had more work done in the realm of browser hardening.
I think it's already on par with Chromium, most attack won't work with sandboxing that introduced to firefox, and mostly now each site/iframe have it's own process, so it's on par with chrome, imho
As a security researcher, running each site in its own process isn't enough. Chrome has a much stronger multiprocessing model on most platforms. For example, Chrome on Android sandboxes between processes whereas Firefox simply relies on the built-in Android sandbox, which provides limited protection between these processes. It's much easier to break out of the sandbox in Firefox because it's easier to move laterally, for one. Those processes have to communicate with each other at some point.
But, don't believe me just because I claim any sort of credential on the Internet. It's such a difference in security that GrapheneOS strongly discourages using Firefox for its weak implementation in addition to the link I provided above. From the link:
Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.
I love Firefox. I use it anyway. It's not insecure. But it's absolutely not as secure because it lacks modern exploit mitigations. Running process per site is an improvement but it's still less secure than the architecture used in Chrome.
EDIT: Sound less entitled.
I think this is the page that the screenshot is from:
Lovely domain name lol
Why does anyone use chome, its way worse then any other browser you can install, they put so much junk on it.
Forced to with work.
I utterly hate it. I don't have it on my personal setup or android mobile - been using Firefox for twenty years now, not gonna stop!
There's a lot of non-Chrome Chromium browsers.
Not sure if it's still a thing (I use DDG now), but back then when you visited Google on a non-Chrome browser, you would get a recommendation to use Chrome instead.
And that's even considering the fact that Google deliberately throttles Firefox on their sites
Is that relevant for the benchmarks?
No
Is this for both desktop and mobile versions? Sorry if that is a silly question.
Probably desktop. Or desktop and android. Remember that iOS locked down the browser years ago and require any third parties to run on safari’s bones.
This is specifically for the Windows version. You can also find Linux and Mac results here by selecting the OS from the drop-down list at the top.
I think for now it's on desktop Windows? But on Linux I do notice faster react app load like reddit new design is faster. But I use lemmy, so it doesn't matter now.
Firefox has been and will continue to be the best browser available
What does speed mean in this regard? Download speed?
JS Render speed, so in past website like facebook, new.reddit.com, discourse based forum, etc that rely heavily in JS, now load and render faster in Firefox than ever
Oh, well that's good. I've never thought Firefox took too long to load but I'm happy with shit being faster.
For anyone else wondering, I'm assuming they're talking about JavaScript.
I have been using Firefox for basically as long as I can remember and I love it. However, there's one website that I go to Chromium for: GeoGuessr/Google Street View. For some reason it's unbelievably slow and sluggish in Firefox whereas it works normally in Chromium. Why could this be? To be clear, it's only the Street View part (and moving/panning/zooming) that's slow on GeoGuessr.
Anything that Google site engineering mostly against web standard, and pushing chromium standard. So I don't even... Surprised I guess?
I had this issue and there's an easy fix - there's a bug with GMaps street view where it starts to lag on FF on Linux specifically, but as soon as you spoof your user agent to something Windows based like FF Windows or Chrome Windows, it's back to full speed. So get an extension to change your user agent string to Windows and you'll be fine.
Why is Chrome's performance so much better than Chromium?
Because Google throttles all it's services, including AMP, for every non-google browser.
I wonder how Safari compares to those in this chart.
I wonder how battery usage compares on a MacBook between these 2 and Safari.
Safari will always win because they are optimized to the HW and only for that HW...
Same as edge.. I do have some hack on Linux, but it sacrifice js capabilities and background pages, but achieve the same as safari in Mac or Edge on Windows
I wonder how much of this is Firefox getting better and how much is Chrome getting worse...
The graph shows chrome slowly getting better too
Firefox in general is faster for me than Chrome in many pages
However a notable exception are web games and web based game emulators. They're a lot slower on Firefox and i get horrible sound crackling whereas on Chrome its much better. It's been like this for years with no seeming improvement.
Please open bug ticket in Mozilla Bugzilla. It will help the Firefox development further. 🎊
even when chrome was obviously faster, and was gaining in popularity, I still used FF. It's my preferred browser, and using it along with ublock origin makes going online more hassle free. Add to that multi account containers, reader mode, and just the general ability to customize it, I really can't see myself using another browser
Multi account Container is the only thing make me stay also.. I can't live without it, tbh.
they're pretty great imo
Librewolf.
Lags behind on updates by a few days, which is a non negotiable for me. I use normal FF + Arkenfox User.js
I did not know about this option, I will investigate. Thanks for sharing
Nice. I think it's time for me to try it again. I want to start getting away from google as much as possible.
The only thing that kept me was YouTube performance. Once Firefox improved that I saw no reason to stay.
Remind me: Mozilla is the company that couldn't cope with ... building Mozilla. Right? #seamonkey
I stopped using Firefox because it had issues playing videos. I also ran into a number of web sites that were displayed badly.
I don't think site displayed badly is Mozilla problem, because there are web standard. If they don't follow the standard, it won't even show on anything I suppose, even chrome. But if in chrome it displayed neatly, then you need to ask to yourself, does that a website, or chromiumsite
Yeah but is Firefox dev tools still dogshit?
Uhmm... I am using both chromium and firefox, Firefox Dev Tools is superior imho.. I can't graps something like network stack freely or DOM checker freely in Chromium... so... I don't think it's bad, rather than bad, it's great for me for professional works.
That comment smelled like bait.
Love FF's dev tools personally - I only use Chrome to simulate prefers-reduced-motion accessibility preferences
Edit: fix typo in css media feature name
Yeah... they still haven't added back live editing of JS. Their new profiler doesn't provide framerate graphs anymore. Nothing like Lighthouse on offer. Gotta keep a Chrome-based browser around for any non-trivial frontend work.