Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Faster-SunSpider

by marcodiego • 3 years ago

850 387 3 years ago

hinkley2• 3 years 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.

jbreckmckye2• 3 years 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.

VancouverMan2• 3 years 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.

surajrmal• 3 years ago

Is chromium hostile towards non Google contributions? It's not clear to me why a community of many parties couldn't form and prevent this possibility. From what I can tell, the problem is largely a lack of companies who want to participate in chromium development.

kibwen• 3 years ago

What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just mismanaged?

When executed by an entity with enormous power, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

ebilgenius• 3 years ago

I'm seeing this already with how they're handling the new right-click contextual Search feature being moved to open the results in the new "Search sidebar" rather than a new tab. This was supposedly able to be disabled with the flag "Search web in side panel" (there's no option for it in the preferences), however if the completely undocumented "CSC" flag was left at it's default then it overrides any other flag to force enable the feature. You can see the consequences of this decision to this very day in places like /r/chrome with users complaining that disabling the feature flags isn't working.

tick_tock_tick2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

What did they discontinue? https://v8.dev/blog/speeding-up-v8-heap-snapshots was posted less than a month ago.

gottorf• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

yummypaint• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Kinda like Brave.

echelon2• 3 years ago

Write your legislators and tell them it's unfair for Google to control the web's leading browser.

Google dominates web search, controls mobile as part of a duopoly, pays the other mobile provider to feature their search, dominates mobile advertising, ranks websites based on ads and chrome performance, increasingly takes over functionality from the websites they index, etc.

They use their money and power to transform the web into a platform they own and control with AMP, Manifest v2, WEI, WHATWG, and repeated attempts to kill the URL bar.

Chrome is a key instrument of their monopolization. Their business units need to be carved up, and Chrome needs to go its separate way, kept apart from search and ads.

tudorw2• 3 years ago

so Microsoft adopting chromium as it's engine, would, erm, make this more likely or less?

pwython• 3 years ago

Probably a very unpopular opinion, but it seems any time a business/product reaches the point where they have majority of market share, people say it's a monopoly. At what point are businesses forced to scale down because their products are TOO successful? I still don't understand what the big deal was with Microsoft having IE bundled with Windows. If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. Imagine an amateur boxer fighting a pro twice their size and saying "it's no fair, they're stronger and have more experience." Well, the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at.

tudorw2• 3 years ago

can they afford to turn on a dime at some point?

_coveredInBees• 3 years ago

Same here. Then again, I'll never leave Firefox as long as Tree Style Tabs[1] continues to be supported as an extension. It's been a life-changer since I discovered it well over a decade ago and makes every other browser pretty much unusable for me as a daily driver.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

knd775• 3 years ago

There are multiple chromium alternatives for this extension.

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

It’s not a one for one replacement but edge has vertical tabs and tab groups built in. I have to use edge for work and it’s a decent compromise.

sdnas211• 3 years ago

Have you given Sidebery a try? Also for firefox.

yomlica83• 3 years ago

Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. Nothing like the crazy 90+% it had at its height but certainly not a browser you can ignore. Now they're at about 10% and it seems like they have to use every manipulation tactic in the book to get it.

But I agree, that third browser engine kept things interesting even if I didn't use it. Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. I don't use Apple products personally but benefit from the diversity of ecosystem it provides.

cptskippy• 3 years ago

Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare.

The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it was required for legacy enterprise and government applications. For security this was bad all around and Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own detriment.

mywittyname2• 3 years ago

I think the problem with Edge was two-fold:

- People were trained to automatically install a new browser on their computers when they got it.

- Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another prompt to go and download Chrome.

Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with Edge.

n0tinventedhere5• 3 years ago

I can tell you from doing testing on Edge back when it represented a potential third engine to support: that browser crashed a lot. It was very unreliable prior to switching to becoming another chromium fork. It is clear the dev team was either underfunded or plain incompetent and Microsoft was in dire need of a default browser that didn't make people wince, ASAP, they could not afford to wait [insert X years to get a mature engine] so they went the obvious route and chose to make a chromium fork.

Making a reliable engine that supports all of the modern web is a monstrous undertaking. Not just "support", it needs to be reliable. Microsoft missed the boat when they allowed IE to rot and it was too late to catch up now. Every year spent without a reliable browser preinstalled on your OS is detrimental.

afavour9• 3 years ago

Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare.

It had been on the decline for years. Statscounter shows 26% in January 2013, 17% January 2014, 13% in January 2015, then Edge was introduced in July of that year.

If anything Edge was a recognition of that reality: the investment in maintaining their own browser engine wasn't worth it when compared to the resulting market share. IMO the failure of Windows Phone was the death knell of Trident (the IE engine): desktop share overall is smaller and they have no footprint in the mobile OS space.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

ajross5• 3 years ago

Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there.

It's so weird these days seeing people literally cheering for the success of a proprietary product on a completely closed platform over an open source engine. Firefox, sure. I can get behind that even if my professional life technically argues against it. I see the draw there and won't argue about benefits.

But Safari? Seriously? Even discounting the existence of Firefox, the "monoculture" argument falls down in the face of products like Edge and Opera (and countless others -- Linux distros ship Chromium, Teslas all have a build installed, etc...), which are *successful forks* of Chromium. If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted and can continue to ship their unadulterated products. Because that's what they're doing today.

Really? Safari?

tapoxi3• 3 years ago

Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly even with the press in their favor.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.

burkaman• 3 years ago

I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.

postalrat3• 3 years ago

Why does the announcement of manifest v3 mean anything? They keep pushing the date v2 will no longer work back. Why?

gowld4• 3 years ago

Extensions including ad blockers don't work at all on Android Chrome.

I use Chrome on desktop because websites work properly in Chrome, and Firefox on Android for the adblocker, except when a site is unusable.

What is FF marketshare on Android?

mrguyorama10• 3 years ago

Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough

Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox?

How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?

afavour9• 3 years ago

Manifest v3 announcement feels like a pretty arbitrary line to draw in the sand.

I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium

Ah, yes, Linux, the OS used on something like 3% of desktop machines! I'm sorry but I don't see the logic at work here at all. Chrome dominates because Google pushes it and they have the means to reach basically every internet user out there. Switching out Mozilla for the Linux Foundation would do absolutely zero to counter that. Case in point: by most measures ChromeOS has a higher desktop market share than vanilla Linux already.

josteink• 3 years ago

Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough

No disagreement there.

We'd need the Linux Foundation

Who spends a whooping’ 3% of their total spending on actual Linux? [1]

Call me a pessimist, but I might look for a better candidate.

[1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-...

rgrieselhuber2• 3 years ago

I’m confused why people would move away from Firefox to Chrome because of Manifest v3. If anything, it should convince one to move even harder in the other direction.

remram• 3 years ago

Where does this data come from?

I use Firefox because I am privacy-conscious, as a result I have telemetry turned off. Do people like me show up in those stats?

lamontcg• 3 years ago

We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium

Why is the answer always more chromium?

And for a userbase nominally so positively biased towards open source it is weird to see how google gets a pass on pretty much everything, while mozilla/firefox has this incredibly carefully curated list of offenses that is maintained and spread by the community, doing most of the work at ensuring that firefox never goes anywhere. There's a lot of Linux proponents here who are doing all the heavy work of carrying water for Google when it comes to chrome dominance.

Yeah, so every time you actually restart firefox after it updates you probably get an ad for mozilla VPN. Okay compare that to Google literally being the central advertising and spyware hub of the entire internet. "I'll just have to use the worst option possible, because the alternative isn't 100% ideologically pure".

m_a_g• 3 years ago

I tried migrating from Chrome to Firefox with the recent developments. The user experience of Mozilla could be better, imo.

After not liking Firefox, I tried four more browsers: Orion, Arch, Brave, and Vivaldi. I finally landed on using Brave.

After you turn off everything related to crypto, it becomes a great and user-friendly browser with adversarial interoperability with Chrome. It's the only browser with an actual chance of beating Chrome by convincing its users to migrate.

I'm hoping they can continue maintaining the Chromium fork (it's an actual fork, by the way), as it'll get harder and harder as it diverges more and more.

Novosell2• 3 years ago

It's not an actual fork, by the way. Them saying so doesn't make it so. It uses chromium as a base and applies quite a lot of patches. Otherwise every chromium based browser is a fork, despite all pulling in more or less all upstream patches?

matsemann• 3 years ago

What's wrong with the user experience? To me they're all the same there: you have tabs and a toolbar and the rest is the webpage. Little else I actually interface with in a normal day.

r053bud• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm naive, but Brave doing anything with crypto doesn't inspire confidence in their long-term product vision. Why does a browser need a business model?

freediver2• 3 years ago

What was your experience with Orion and why do you think it does not have a chance of convincing Chrome users to migrate?

matheusmoreira• 3 years ago

The real shame is Mozilla cutting back on Firefox development despite being a billion dollar corporation. Google would have had no leverage to push stuff like WEI if Firefox was the dominant browser.

toyg6• 3 years ago

Tbf, they cut back because they thought that, strategically, they needed a competitive mobile OS. Unfortunately, regardless of whether it was the right decision, they then mismanaged development of such OS (particularly on the commercial side).

Justsignedup• 3 years ago

Personally I think ms did the right thing. Edge compatibility is no longer an issue and their maintenance cost plumetted.

I still love Firefox. Not seeing ads anywhere is worth whatever warts I hit

nomilk• 3 years ago

What are firefox's warts ooc?

mrguyorama10• 3 years ago

Usually it's some nitpick about the time they advertised Mr. Robot "breaking our trust", or buying pocket, a bookmarking utility that lots of people liked and used and integrating it into the web browser, which is clearly a user-hostile move, to buy and integrate functionality that might be useful. With such horrible missteps, you should obviously instead use the browser that has pushed MULTIPLE APIs with negligible real world use and significant fingerprinting capacity, lead the change to limit add-on functionality, makes it harder to block ads (BECAUSE THEY ARE AN ADVERTISING COMPANY), sends most of what you do to their advertising engine, and FUCKING WEI.

Or, oh no, the CEO of the foundation makes more than they do as an engineer at google, that must be corruption! Meanwhile Firefox is faster, less buggy, has never stopped being a very good browser and the only one made by a group that can't subsidize it, and doesn't get to shove it's advertising down your throat on every single website that Google owns.

px432• 3 years ago

It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium

I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining. It was a massive indication that in the end, open source software will always win in any market. We just needed Google to dump in billions of dollars to help accelerate the process, but they did that, and now we're all better off for it.

Now we just need Windows, OSX, and iOS to die out, and the whole world will be running on open source software.

xibo9• 3 years ago

Hard pass. Monocultures are bad.

theallan• 3 years ago

I think the GP is more disappointed that Microsoft choose to use Blink rather than Gecko as their rendering engine. Not that they abandoned the closed source EdgeHTML.

ragnese• 3 years ago

Free software and open source software are great. But, web pages are "you get what we serve". So, if there's a hostile standard that web pages all start using, having an open source implementation of the thing working against you is a very small consolation...

cxr5• 3 years ago

I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining.

Microsoft announcing an open source "Edge Core" (cf .NET Core, ChakraCore) would have satisfied the same criterion.

behringer• 3 years ago

Me too. I find the vast majority supports it fine. I find those that do not are happy to fix the problem, often within a few days or maybe a month.

alexisbear• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Big firefox fan here and it's kinda sad to read that

fabrice_d6• 3 years ago

fwiw, https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... tracks a number of benchmarks.

agumonkey• 3 years 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.

dblohm7• 3 years ago

Optimizing for benchmarks tends to not work all that well for real-world sites. I wouldn't worry about it.

yborg2• 3 years ago

And on macOS, Safari beats the pants off of Chrome by an even larger margin.

culi• 3 years ago

Safari only has to worry about one OS. Not just one OS but also a single line of hardware. Very easy to optimize for. It's why iPhones have tiny batteries compared to their competitors but still deliver competitive, and usually superior, battery life

mmastrac3• 3 years 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.

jbreckmckye2• 3 years ago

why does `...` use iterators??

If you couldn't use the iterator protocol, generators in particular would be a lot less powerful

mmastrac3• 3 years 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"

insanitybit5• 3 years ago

but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly written.

They aren't. V8's benchmark performance for this benchmark has been stagnant because they haven't cared about it for a long time. Firefox has an incentive to care about it (unfortunately) because even when a benchmark doesn't matter it still looks bad to be behind on it.

IainIreland5• 3 years ago

To be clear, Firefox doesn't care about this benchmark either. It just so happens that changes we made for Speedometer also improved our performance here, which is a fun coincidence but not important in the grand scheme of things.

(Speedometer is the benchmark that most closely approximates messy real-world code.)

lossolo2• 3 years ago

but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly written.

Isn't it the other way around? https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance

I recall there was some newer blogpost discussing this topic with numbers and examples but can't find it atm, maybe it was chromium/chrome team blog, maybe someone else can find it.

ape4• 3 years ago

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

GuB-42• 3 years 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.

tristan9574• 3 years ago

Chromium is fairly invested in cxx[0]. Firefox could do the same if they haven't already.

[0] https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx

toyg6• 3 years 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.

Sporktacular2• 3 years ago

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

VancouverMan2• 3 years 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/

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.

toyg6• 3 years 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.

mywittyname2• 3 years 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.

sentientslug• 3 years ago

This is always hilarious to me to read considering Firefox is full of garbage like Pocket and “recommended” (sponsored) sites on the new tab page.

Sporktacular2• 3 years ago

That's because said garbage has names. Anything by Google doesn't even have the language needed to criticise it.

jve• 3 years ago

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

postalrat3• 3 years ago

What am I suppose to see?

putlake• 3 years 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.

cyberlurker• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

jusoren• 3 years ago

What happen if google itself is the adversary in the safety of your passwords? That spur of the moment trollish YouTube comment might get flagged, bringing down your google account and all services tied with it; gmail, gdrive, your saved passwords etc. Then trying to rectify the situation is close to impossible since theres no human support for (free) google account.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

est31• 3 years ago

Then you are one Google account compromise away from disaster: https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/warning-dont-let-google-manag...

Google password manager is not end to end encrypted.

LastPass, Bitwarden, and Firefox too, are end to end encrypted with the user chosen password at least. If your password is strong enough, it should be safe.

Apple also uses end to end encryption, although there you might also be vulnerable via a hack of your iCloud account, not sure.

1Password is the most secure option: here, in addition to your password being encrypted with your master password, it's also encrypted via a secret key that is pre-generated. So a leaked encrypted 1Password backup won't be brute-forceable.

sp332• 3 years ago

You can enable "on-device encryption" for Google password manager. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/11350823?sjid=178...

Grazester• 3 years ago

LastPass should not even be mentioned.

Propelloni• 3 years ago

Of course this is only my opinion, but I'd rather trust an open-source password manager such as KeePassXC. They all have browser integration (native or plug-in) if this is important.

ur-whale4• 3 years 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.

hpb42• 3 years ago

The article links to the benchmarks in 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• 3 years ago

I think that site opted for consistent graphs - points lower on the graph is faster/better, indicated by blue down arrow

snet0• 3 years 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)?

titzer4• 3 years 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-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.

tgv2• 3 years ago

I agree, but speaking as someone who's been using JS for computationally medium-intensive tasks: Firefox and Chrome don't differ that much. For most users, the difference is negligible.

hiimkeks• 3 years ago

The link you posted promotes Speedometer, where Firefox reportedly already surpassed Chrome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883

MegaDeKay• 3 years ago

Firefox tracks their performance across many different benchmarks. Here is the performance vs Chrome over the past year on many different ones. It is encouraging to see steady improvements being made on a substantial number of them over time.

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3...

yborg2• 3 years ago

It appears that Chrome still wins most of these. Even the touted Speedometer win has apparently been trumped by Chrome over the last couple of weeks. The competition doesn't stand still. Which is good, imagine if Firefox threw in the towel, Chrome would become IE 6 in short order.

IainIreland5• 3 years ago

To be clear: we track it in the sense that we still have it running as part of old dashboards. It's cheap, and every so often it catches an unintended regression.

The SpiderMonkey team is very much on board with ignoring microbenchmarks. We care about Speedometer, because it correlates reasonably well with real-world performance. We pick and choose which parts of Jetstream2 we bother with. Anything older than that is strictly a measuring stick, rather than a target: it's nice when the numbers go up, but it will only happen as a side-effect of work we're doing for other reasons.

Notably, all the SunSpider wins on this graph are side-effects of Speedometer work we've been doing this year.

titzer4• 3 years ago

I understand the logic, but I never understood why we (and I mean, collectively, the JS VM engineers across the browser vendors) didn't just rewrite the benchmark (or fix it) and name it SunSpider 2. I suggested this many times. It's not that much code.

Waterluvian• 3 years 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?

titzer4• 3 years ago

Here's one example from 2016: https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance

olliej• 3 years 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__• 3 years ago

As the saying goes any compiler engineer can make their compiler the fastest if they know what the code is.

simula67• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

kwanbix2• 3 years 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.

tgv2• 3 years 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-whale4• 3 years 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?

KORraN• 3 years 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.

kwanbix2• 3 years ago

But that is the problem. I rather see progressive improvements each 3/6 months, then a big-bang change each 2 years.

flas9sd• 3 years 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/ind...

Their dedicated blog keeps you posted if firefox perf is your interest 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/ - though bugzilla is better than it seems when coming from github issues

nottorp• 3 years 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?

duringmath2• 3 years 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_rider3• 3 years 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.

duringmath2• 3 years ago

I think that's what you'd call a "humble brag".

jasfi• 3 years ago

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

eco• 3 years ago

It seems like it's somewhat close (assuming uBlock Origin grabs most of the tracking query/content).

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.

huggingmouth• 3 years 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.

lovasoa• 3 years 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.

FractalHQ• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_tes... )

mattnewton• 3 years 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.

makeitdouble3• 3 years 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,

no_way2• 3 years ago

From my experience, if things work in Chrome, they will likely work with Firefox too, excluding very new apis, it isn't much of maitenance burden. With Safari every project I work o I discover new Safari quirk or bug. If you can make it work in Safari you can make it Firefox too.

rumdz• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Will Brave ever separate from Google?

lost_tourist5• 3 years ago

not as long as google provides a completely free render engine and javascript engine.

AtNightWeCode• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Okay, time to risk a switch back.

codedokode• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

toastal4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-whale4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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)

gadders2• 3 years 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.

exceptione• 3 years 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.

gadders2• 3 years ago

Well, exactly. I used to work for Lotus when every new release of Windows or Dos broke something in 1-2-3.

foob• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

kccqzy• 3 years ago

My Gmail loads just fine on my Firefox even on a low-end Intel NUC. On the modern web Gmail isn't that heavy on resources and any modern browser should handle Gmail fine.

lost_tourist5• 3 years ago

I"ve never seen it take anywhere near that long. Surely chrome seems a little bit faster but not that noticeable...

monooso• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

WirelessGigabit• 3 years 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).

WorldMaker4• 3 years 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.

makeitdouble3• 3 years 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.

WorldMaker4• 3 years 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.

makeitdouble3• 3 years 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.

mihaic2• 3 years 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.

majestic5762• 3 years ago

Same for me

jeroenhd2• 3 years 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.

mihaic2• 3 years ago

What themes and addons do you use? I never changed more than the stock color scheme.

hooch• 3 years ago

Agreed. The dev tools in Firefox are beautifully designed and a joy to use. Chrome is a dogs breakfast in comparison.

hruzgar• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

freediver2• 3 years 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

everdrive• 3 years 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.

demizer• 3 years ago

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

butz• 3 years 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.

omoikane• 3 years ago

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

aidenn0• 3 years 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.

liendolucas3• 3 years 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/

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...

I don't 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.

takoid• 3 years 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_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

liendolucas3• 3 years ago

Thanks for that and I wasn't aware it's owned by Avast. I'll switch to the one that you suggested!

ur-whale4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Google owns internet advertising so I'm not surprised that they also own web devs.

ErneX• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider

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