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

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534-12.html

by blueveek • 13 years ago

149 92 13 years ago

rhelmer2• 13 years ago

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

halban• 13 years 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.

PavlovsCat3• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

And privacy.

programminggeek• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

mehrzad2• 13 years ago

They need to make money; would Android let them do that?

claudius2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Thanks for confirming about the screen scrolling. I thought I was the only one.

callahad2• 13 years ago

Firefox's UI is heading generally in this direction: https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/0/0c/Australis-i02-Tabs.jpg

Try out a UX Nightly http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ to get a feel for the work-in-progress version.

magic_haze• 13 years ago

Try 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...] made the switch completely worth it.

Edit: I noticed a difference in the default scrolling as well. Try disabling smooth scrolling (Options -> Advanced -> General.)

padenot2• 13 years ago

Just wanted to note that a close-tabs-to-the-right menu entry was recently added in Nightly builds.

sp3322• 13 years 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.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

Chrome devs got the `snap` right. It is 99% instantaneous, it's beating any of my extremist~ expectations impressively. Sometimes, though, it gets stuck in async hell. And with lots of tabs it loses some responsiveness (on my old core duo). Firefox is slower but regular, I'm abusing it with dozens of tabs and it stays stable.

All in all, I can't applaud Mozilla enough for pulling prolongated and difficult efforts (the new 3-layered releases process, memory compaction, js jit) with only a tiny percent of Chrome's ressources. This is really impressive.

mehrzad2• 13 years 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.

sp3322• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Can you elaborate on that? I am pretty sure those bugs about rendering ( lots ) of images were fix a few versions ago.

bri3d2• 13 years 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 ). Then, there's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223 where all downloaded images are decoded and live forever regardless of if they are shown.

padenot2• 13 years 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.

asb• 13 years ago

There's still more to do on optimising rendering for pages with lots of images, see https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/06/15/memshrinks-2.... I've got my eye on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223

pjriot• 13 years ago

Not that this should be considered proof, but I just compared nightly and 22 side by side on Ubuntu 12.10 (Unity) and I can certainly perceive an appreciable difference. Great stuff.

pcwalton3• 13 years ago

What bugs are you referring to? Images are now decoded off the main thread (in nightly) and are not decoded until you scroll to them.

bri3d2• 13 years ago

Per (0) I don't think "don't decode until you scroll" is done yet. This issue alone makes Firefox annoying for use on image boards and "infiniscroll"-style galleries like Facebook's.

Also, "discard images when you scroll them offscreen" was disabled in (1) because it broke sites with lots of images (like Pinterest and Tumblr Archives, according to the bug).

These two issues alone make Firefox pretty painful for a lot of common use cases on real-world machines (like my old web browsing machine with only 2GB of RAM).

(0): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223 (1): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=872235

atestu• 13 years ago

It's also pretty bad at rendering SVG, I don't understand why this wasn't tested considering the popularity of the d3.js library.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

And there are some bad corner cases on numerous large images html leading to memory consumption so fast (1GB+ in a few seconds) your system will soon swap to hell and probably stop responding.

soundgecko• 13 years 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

callahad2• 13 years ago

We're still at the same net number of engines, since shortly thereafter Google forked WebKit into Blink.

brokenparser3• 13 years 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

SeanDav• 13 years 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.

altrego994• 13 years 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).

epidemian2• 13 years 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?

ahoge• 13 years ago

Destructuring references is not yet supported on Chrome

Eh. Yea, Firefox got support for that (and `let` and generators/iterators), because they added it in 2006 (Firefox 2.0) as an experimental feature.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/New_...

blueveek2• 13 years ago

Shorthand functions are not standard yet. You should bet on arrow function expressions in Harmony for now:

  [1,2,3,4].map(x => x*x)) // [1,4,9,16]

(also note that |this| is lexically bound in the case of fat arrow functions)

Also, destructuring objects:

  let obj = { foo: 42, bar: { baz: 32 } }
  let { foo, bar } = obj;
  foo // 42
  bar.baz // 32

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/New_...

List of all the goodies: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/New_...

edit: formatting

skolor• 13 years ago

I haven't used Firefox seriously in a while, but the shift+F4 shortcut looks fairly similarly to the Chrome developer console (F12, select the Console tab). It looks like the Firefox shell is more designed for making new pages though, while the Chrome one is more for debugging the current page.

thezilch6• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

thezilch6• 13 years 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.

alexcroox• 13 years ago

I still find firebug much more enjoyable to use all round than webkits dev tools. CMD+ALT+M is also a god send for responsive development.

thezilch6• 13 years ago

Chrome DevTools has the ability to adjust UA and viewport values, under the gear menu. Random search result... http://blog.divshot.com/post/29829585371/chrome-developer-to...

mnemonik3• 13 years ago

dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired.

Anything specific?

Feel free to file bugs, we want to make it better :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...

thezilch6• 13 years ago

Not bugs, but features. And frankly -- sorry to be short -- everything Chrome has (or doesn't yet). I and my colleagues use just about everything.

I see a lot of these things landing in the FFs landing in the last week, so I can't commend those efforts enough. Literally, I don't want to have to ever install Firebug; it makes the browsing experience even more sluggish. And I would have probably never started using FF, a decade ago, if it wasn't for the tooling, and I would have never had a chance to convince as many friends and family to use FF. The same reasons I will just recommend Chrome, today.

Frankly, you will have to have something that Chrome doesn't to bring us back, and it's been a long time coming for the tooling to be even on par. Again, I commend your efforts, because I think your community involvement and dev blogs are really great.

nfm• 13 years ago

I'm loving the focus that's been going into the FF dev tools over the last few releases, they are improving rapidly and dramatically!

One thing that irks me is inspecting returned JS values - I almost never want to see [object Array]. I vastly prefer the Chrome dev tools output: inline, expandable, and a meaningful representation for objects.

Not a bug, but I think it would be a big improvement :)

IanChiles• 13 years ago

I've never felt that Firefox feels "sluggish", at least not since version 20. I've been running Aurora (24a2) for a while now, and it feels quite snappy - not Sublime Text 3 like, but far better IMO than Chrome/IE10

HugoDias3• 13 years ago

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

nolok3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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. :(

brokenparser3• 13 years 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?)

nolok3• 13 years ago

It's not a theme thing, it's a behavior thing.

Firefox feels like Eclipse to me.

nimrody• 13 years ago

Perhaps on a strong development machine, the resource-heavy Chrome is enjoyable.

However, on a more limited machine (Since when is a 4GB machine not good enough to browse the web???), Firefox definitely wins and is much more enjoyable.

I was a long time Chrome user ever since it came out. However, recent versions (on OS X and Windows) are unusable with a large number of tabs. Firefox handles many tabs much better.

Wingman4l7• 13 years ago

It's a simple tradeoff: you want the security that Chrome's sandboxing provides? Then you have to accept the memory overhead.

Frankly the memory usage isn't as infuriating as the "tabs extend past the right edge of the window" bug, which has been open for forever -- I'd link to a bug report but it's a nightmare to find with a search engine because of how hard it is to describe. Firefox has a simple fix for this -- they let you scroll the "row" of tabs -- but for some reason Google refuses to fix it this way. It's probably too rare of a use case; you have to have a relatively small resolution monitor and at least ~70-80+ tabs open in a single window, IIRC.

oftenwrong• 13 years ago

Firefox manages to feel so, I don't know, I guess clunky
It just doesn't feel like a piece of software that I enjoy using
Fix that, and you win me back.

Fix what? Those are extremely vague complaints. Why does it feel clunky? Why don't you enjoy using it?

nobodysfool2• 13 years ago

The only reason I can't get my wife to switch to Chrome is that Chrome has no "left sidebar history". If I could find an extension or something which duplicate that, I'd switch her over in a heartbeat.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

blame the add ons. I had a vicious memory problem in FireFox and it turned out to be the ad blocker not handling cycletrader.com correctly, I could watch memory just climb and climb. Turn off the add on and all was fine.

FWIW, firefox still took more than twice the memory to show that site than IE did.

mtdewcmu• 13 years ago

For me, it's the opposite. I've been using the FF lineage since it was Netscape. I've been trying to switch to Chrome lately, but Chrome keeps doing things that annoy me. I don't open FF on the same pages to see if FF has the same problems, but FF just feels comfortable.

rhelmer2• 13 years ago

I don't think that's completely unfair to say that the UI is not as responsive as it really should be, I would suggest two things:

1) look around on http://planet.mozilla.org https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance etc. people are working on UI-specific performance issues (commonly called "jank")

2) try the UX branch builds for the latest UI which is coming soon - https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...

Progress is being made, but it takes a while to hit the beta/release channels.

It's pretty critical that such improvements don't cause stability/security/standards problems too so they're not the simplest of changes!

bzbarsky• 13 years ago

The memory score is pretty relevant on phones, for what it's worth. Precisely because once you're our of memory you crash.

HugoDias3• 13 years 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.

pcwalton3• 13 years ago

This was accounted for in the tests (and I think that in general the effect of fragmentation is overstated).

PavlovsCat3• 13 years 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.

HugoDias3• 13 years 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'.

slacka• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

camus2• 13 years ago

it definetly applies to Firefox,which is worse than IE now.

nobodysfool2• 13 years ago

No, I've noticed it much improved. Of course, I'm on the 'beta' channel where there is deferred rendering.

qu4z-2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

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

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