Chrome doesn't have the flexibility and features I want, so it could be faster than light itself, I would still use Firefox nevertheless. The whole JPEG XL shenanigan together with their constant attempt to limit extensions are IMHO serious enough to merit intervention from antitrust authorities. Google should IMHO yield their stewardship of the Chromium project to a third party, independent entity and refrain from ever attempting again to push nefarious anti-features into their browser.
Thanks, but I don't trust Phoronix' methodology. Too many questions like:<p>* Does the Beta have any debug features enabled that are absent from production builds?<p>* What build did he use -- official from Mozilla, built locally?<p>* As noted in the comments under the "article" -- why test against Beta when the performance improvements that led to the SunSpider result are in nightly?<p>Looks like just your usual run of the mill low effort, low quality clickbait blogspam from Phoronix on a conveniently flame-bait topic.
Benchmarks are nice and all but for me the main browser issues on Linux has always been "does HW acceleration work out of the box, or do I need to fuck around with flags and MESA and Wayland configs after reading tutorials online based on the GPU I use?".<p>Winning benchmarks was no use if watching a youtube or netflix video would nuke my battery life and turn the laptop fan into a a scramjet on afterburner, and watching youtube is what many people use their laptops for bott for entertainment and for learning.
As a long time Chrome user, I decided to test Firefox with my recent Fedora 38 installation. It really seems to have improved a lot since last time I used it. It feels fast and snappy. I think the differences described in the benchmarks are small enough to not perceive any difference. And Firefox seems to work better with Wayland than Chrome. For example, Chrome fractional scaling on Wayland was broken by default but it worked out of the box in Firefox. I also have the perception that Firefox is using less memory than Chrome, but I actually haven't properly measured it.<p>The only feature that I'm seriously missing is Chrome's profile management. I use this a lot to have completely separate browsing experience between Work and Personal stuff. Separate history, separate cookies, separate extensions. In Chrome this works like a charm. It always remember my open tabs on each profile and it allows me to customize the windows of each profile to easily distinguish them. Firefox does have profiles, but the user experience is miles behind. I also tried the Multi-Account Containers extension, but it's not very good either.<p>After seeing the direction that Google is trying to take with WEI and similar stuff, I'm really looking forward to move 100% to Firefox.
Considering the context, it is weird that they are benchmarking the beta instead of nightly where the notable perf improvements landed, and that their benchmark suite is missing SunSpider, the test where the biggest(?) gains were made.
to a certain extent, I don't care about performance. as long as it doesn't hinder me browsing useless stuff, I will use firefox. chrome and google, on the other hand, keep showing intentions to mess the open and free web. so, I won't get tired to say the following: to google developers who work on chrome, I really suggest you to get out of that place if you love open and free web.
Don't care about speed, I care about container tabs and containerize. Also, I just prefer Firefox. I'm using it on all devices, logged in with sync enabled. It's great.
These are only synthetic benchmarks and should be more considered by browser developers not end users. Really those milliseconds don't make big difference for regular web browsing in the real world.<p>I prefer Firefox's features to Chrome's benchmarks. Better ad-blocking tab management and experience in general is what I care about and Firefox is a clear winner in that regard.
The thing that's actually standing out to me lately is of the OSs I use (win10 win11 osx and Linux) win11 seems awful with all the browsers I've tried having video playback bugs of the severity I've not seen in years. That is with edge, Firefox or chrome. I just don't know what's going wrong in win11 that's leaving things in such a bad way.
Firefox 117 vs Chrome 116? Are companies still trying to pull the "our version number is higher therefore better" gimmick? I already think Firefox is better since it isn't Google. Why do the versions have to be so arbitrarily close?
About performance, there are people who hack into some firefox profile js config file, tweaking some UI engine level settings and it makes firefox snappier (something chrome enjoyed since forever).