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Tom's Hardware Pits Newest Firefox, Opera and Chrome Against Each Other
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 7 was released a couple days ago, and now the latest Web browser performance numbers are in. This article is the same series that ran benchmarks on Mac OS X Lion last month. This time around the new Mozilla release is going against Chrome 14 and Opera 11.51 in 40+ different tests on Windows 7. Testing comes from every category of Web browsing performance I can think of: startup time, page load time, JS, CSS, DOM, HTML5, Flash, hardware acceleration, WebGL, Java, Silverlight, reliable page loads, memory usage/management, and standards conformance. The article also has a little feature on the Futuremark Peacekeeper browser benchmark. An open beta of the next revision has just been made public. This new version adds HTML5, video codecs, and WebGL tests to the benchmark. It's also designed to run on any browser/OS/device combination — e.g. Windows desktop, iPad, Droid 2, MacBook, Linux flavors, etc. Another great read, a must for Web browser fanatics!"
I've not worried about browser performance for a long while, lets face it, they're all fast enough. What matters to me is how they behave, their interface and site compatibility.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"Another great read, a must for Web browser fanatics!"
Seriously? Could you sound any more astroturfy if you tried?
I mean, really.
Signed,
Someone with a life
No point - by the time you finish reading it, FF8 will be out and the benchmarks will be obsolete.
Why doesn't the summary have the fact that they say Firefox 7 as the winner? Seems like a big glaring omission from this summary...
Here are the results which TFS failed to mention: 1) Firefox 7 2) Chrome 14 3) IE 9 4) Opera 5) Safari
You have Opera, Chrome and Firefox for most current desktop platforms, could be interesting to see how much of this keeps being valid in most of them. Also to see how this holds under Mac OS X in the Safari front.
The constant barrage of updates for Firefox is frustrating to say the least. Having to go through the installer every month and have your extensions checked for compatibility and consistently get disabled... it's just not worth it. I switched to Chrome and have progressed through 8 whole versions without ever noticing and without ever having my extensions break. It's divine, and how all software upgrades should be done (in a perfect world).
Seems like just about every article that comes out about Firefox there's a dozen or so folks that keep complaining about how slow Firefox is and how much memory it leaks. Perhaps this will point out to them that it's really not that bad, it's actually quite good over all in that respect.
Or, they'll just keep posting it over and over again like a meme because it hasn't been about actual performance in a long time.
Browser wars? It's competition, baby, not war. We're not waiting for a war to end so we can announce a winner and all switch to that browser. We're enjoying every glorious moment of a many-browser ecosystem. The "browser wars" were a time of nasty piling on of proprietary features in an attempt to gain an advantage. This is a glorious golden age of competition and (mostly) an emphasis on standards compliance.
So many different results all over the place with zero comprehension of the results, such a shame.
There's so many "wrong" that I don't want to start listing. This is a purely sensationalistic thing with nearly no value.
Oh and they'll make sure NOT to report errors they found while loading sites so that they can use their test again and again. Fixing bugs? Nah!
"The constant barrage of updates for Firefox"....
"I switched to Chrome and have progressed through 8 whole versions"
Really? Is the release cycle really the problem for you or something vague about extensions? I find the release cycle of Firefox rather awkward but I'd never switch to Chrome if that was really my problem.
Further, it doesn't really need to measure user experience as that is going to vary based on the audience. You can take this benchmark and then compare that with your own user experience to decide if the wins for Firefox are worth the user experience.
,,, locks up the whole damn browser when negotiating certain downloads.
Why can't that be fixed??
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
It's not that difficult. I'd rather have more updates...including security updates...than fewer and far between. People who complain about updates are like people who complain about having to have bumpers on their car or safety belts on a plane. Besides, the updates install themselves now automatically. Good for you, switching to Chrome for that reason...it only does the exact same thing Firefox does now.
Are you offering to buy me a smartphone or a tablet? Gee, thanks, that's really nice of you.
AccountKiller
no idea what you're talking about there isn't a barrage of updates and noone's extentions should break I use screenshot plugin, adblock, noscript, downloadhelper, firftp and greasemonkey and from firefox 3 to firefox 7 none have ever broke or not worked. They have all worked and kept updated and I have never had one not work on me even right after an update
I was a little put off by this too. The advances in web browsers were exciting when IE 4, 5 were pushing out major changes like Active Desktop and file manager integration, and then later when they sandboxed them off from the rest of the operating system. Online bookmark syncing is a pretty neat feature, but for the most part browsers are pretty homogenized and well... boring. Unless you work in online advertising, I think most geeks' interest in browser tech has waned quite a bit now that the playing field is relatively level "against"* Microsoft these days.
*I cringe a little saying that; bet way I could word it.
moox. for a new generation.
Who has tabs? Mouse gestures? Text to speech? Who has a flash capture built-in so that no extra programs or plug-ins need to be loaded to save YouTube and other videos for later off-line viewing? Who has the easiest tools for blocking unwanted content? Who has the best (most useful and least intrusive) warnings about poor security (cross-site scripting, cookie issues, certificate errors, etc.)? There are a lot of usability issues that are mostly minor, but taken in whole point to a more usable browser than others, but when nobody is comparing those features, and people like you essentially state that there's no difference in usability, so there's no reason to even try to compare usability.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah that bugs me too. As a developer I have been using a lot of tools that are now starting to break with the upgrades. Firefox has started to have some pain with it, and Chrome has become a pretty good browser. Just out of convenience I end up using Chrome more than Firefox now. I do not hate Firefox, but I am starting to like Chrome more.
Have a benchmark to back up that assertion? After 5 minutes Firefox had released nearly 300mb of RAM. The benchmark really should have had another data point out at 10 minutes to show how much of that RAM was ultimately released.
What you're also failing to take note of is that it's not just how quickly you release unneeded RAM, it's how efficiently you allocate it in the first place. Chrome had the advantage of being able to quickly release the RAM because it was wasting a lot of it in the first place. Each tab was it's own process, including RAM that was holding identical information for each tab. It would be terribly broken if that memory wasn't released pretty much immediately after the process is terminated. Unfortunately, that also means increased allocation in the first place.
But, nice trolling. I'd hate to think that anybody would think about this stuff critically.
Doubtful, the GP is probably a troll. I haven't yet encountered a website with Firefox that won't render due to the browser itself. I have found a few that won't work correctly due to an extension, but that's hardly Firefox' fault.
I'd love to see a multi-platform (where possible) stability benchmark across the major browsers:
Opening the same site in 10 tabs. in 100. At what point does the browser crash? What is the memory usage?
Now open the same youtube video in 10 tabs. In 100. Repeat the above.
Do the same with trailers.apple.com.
Next, open a youtube video in 10 tabs for each browser, and log how long that pid remains active. Is it still there after a day? After a week? Or does it crash with no user interaction?
I wonder where Firefox would stand in the ranks after tests like the above.
You didn't even read the summary, let alone TFA, did you?
[quote]671 milliseconds vs 800 milliseconds page load times in the benchmarks will not be noticeable by a human.[/quote]
It won't be noticeable loading the 2 back to back, but it can create a perceived difference using it over time. 100ms differences CAN be noticed by humans. Just ask an online gamer if they'd rather have 100ms ping or 200ms. Racing drivers can tell when they are just 1-2 tenths (100-200ms) of a second faster in a sector (about a 30second time period) too, and I've experienced this myself in racing simulators like LFS/iRacing.
I'm NOT saying it's a big difference, or one that is easily noticeable, or one that we should make a huge fuss over. Your assertion that we can't perceive a 129ms difference is still false though. If that were the case we wouldn't need 30/60FPS videos (a 30FPS frame lasts 33ms) for it to seem smooth.
I feel as though you have strong opinions, but your inability to speak without metaphor has clouded what they might actually be.
Really? Is the release cycle really the problem for you or something vague about extensions?
People have a problem with the rapid release cycle because of extensions, the point has been made many times now with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. If you can't wrap your head around that concept, you must be a Firefox developer.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As someone who just switched from Firefox to Chrome, I can only guess that since Firefox was declared the winner, there were no points deducted for websites that just don't work right with that browser.
I have seen more websites that ask that I have Netscape v3.0 or higher than I've seen websites that did not work with Firefox. And that is with NoScript and ABP installed!
I'm sorry but you're telling me that you were forced to update and break the tools and you moved to chrome because you found more suitable tools there?
What addons do you use for developing?
Also, don't you test on all major browsers? How is it that you end up using one more out of convenience when in the end, you have to try them all when working and can use whichever you want for personal use?
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Or they're someone managing releases for something larger than themselves. Distribution packages and those working in medium to large businesses are all having a little bit of hell with the fast release schedules... Either you give your users admin rights so the software can update itself (BAD IDEA), or you use something else, unless there's a 'long term support' version. Which neither Chrome nor Firefox have.
I agree with bl4nk. This new release schedule sucks. As an example, Firefox doesn't have a global setting for zoom. You have to zoom each page individually. I hunted down an addon to fix this called NoSquint. Works like a champ. It always worked right up until they started this ridiculous release schedule. Now it's disabled and my browser is back to everything being tiny again. That's not the only one... that's just the one that broke the camel's back.
I switched to Chrome this weekend. It has a global zoom setting. It seems to work wonderfully and I'm not going back until Firefox stops releasing a major version number every three weeks. There is nothing wonderful about the user experience in Firefox as far as I can see.
A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding...
I've been hopping back and forth still depending what I want to do. At the end of the day, addons have more to do with my choice than the browsers themselves. Both can be configured roughly for what I need to do, with only minor annoyances.
Firefox 7 seems to be more stable for me than the previous version. The instability before was part of why I was messing with Chrome to begin with.
The main thing about Chrome that was annoying, honestly, had nothing to do with Chrome itself. I didn't like how AdBlock (and Plus) don't work as well in Chrome as it does in Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking video ads. This doesn't surprise me really, but for now Chrome doesn't give the same access in the APIs as Firefox does.
Now that's what is a testing suite! ;-)
-- no sig today
looking at the page loading times, you can learn about the psyche of these browsers
- everyone REALLY loves hanging out at Google more than anywhere else. they probably have a van with "FREE CANDY" painted on the side.
- Opera has a YouTube addiction
- Internet Explorer does it's "book learnin" at Wikipedia and buys all kinds of stuff on eBay
- Opera is still terrified of the craigslist killer and quickly hides in Amazon's library instead
- Chrome is the only one that thinks the Huffington Post is worth reading
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
By "identical information" do you mean things like the executable and shared libraries? Those are not duplicated in RAM for any sane operating system. Aside from bookkeeping applied within the OS itself, there is nothing inherent to forking vs. threading that should impact the gross memory allocation.
Yeah, it's great that they disable your extensions (which are the only reason to use firefox in this day and age) every week.
I am trolling
I wish. Most websites have inline ads that delay content display. Most successful websites also spend a lot of time on optimizing their "branding" at the expense of usability for a partial page load. If my browser doesn't know the dimensions of yet-to-be-loaded components on a page, it has to delay final rendering. Watching a page flicker as margins get adjusted is insanely distracting.
A netburst P4 is a horrible CPU to use today. They were always slow and power-hungry compared to contemporary offerings, and compared to a modern $50 CPU they're GOD DAMNED AWFUL. Running one today is like running a car from the 70s.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Taste can be measured by objectifying desired features and comparing their presence or absence on various platforms, as well as the number of clicks/keypresses to activate features as an indication of ease of use. It's not hard to objectify subjective things, it's been done for hundreds of years.
Learn to love Alaska
Besides, the updates install themselves now automatically. Good for you, switching to Chrome for that reason...it only does the exact same thing Firefox does now.
No they don't, not even remotely. When Chrome updates I normally hear about it on a Slashdot post. It does so without any user interaction at all, and without breaking any updates. It does so when the browser is not being used via the Google Update service so there's never even a blip in the user experience.
Firefox downloads updates while running. On next restart it pops up a window and as it updates it blocks you from using the browser until it's done, and requires user interaction. When it finishes it frequently disables plugins due to compatibility issues. Then after you hit ok it pops up YET ANOTHER BLOODY WINDOW in a browser tab this time to let you know YET AGAIN that it has updated something, just in case the last 5 minutes of your life weren't any indication. Not a problem if you're just starting the browser but if you open the browser by clicking on a link the least it could do after wasting 5 minutes of my life is actually show the bloody link I clicked on.
There is nothing automatic about Firefox's update process that is even remotely comparable to that of Google Chrome's. Actually it is only marginally better than any other application which has an update process, and even then only because it downloads first and asks questions later not giving the user the ability to ignore critical updates.
MLS for realtors is a famous example of a page that wants to be IE only
Just tried the Canadian and US MLS sites and they work fine in Firefox 7, no warnings or anything.
That's because it doesn't install into %PROGRAMFILES% as it's supposed to. I bet some admins don't like that.
(+1, Disagree)
In the closest conclusion this series has ever seen, Mozilla is finally able to take the crown, earning its first Web Browser Grand Prix championship with Firefox 7. Although Firefox has two fewer wins than Chrome 14, Mozilla's browser manages to earn three more strong finishes than Chrome, which we consider sealing the deal, if by only a hair.
Chrome 14 obviously places second; no surprise there. The big surprise is our third-place finisher. It's not Internet Explorer 9! Rather, Opera finally breaks out of fourth place and grabs the bronze medal. IE9 simply lost too many times, allowing Opera and its "minor" .01 update to swoop in for the kill.
Alas, Safari places last yet again. Safari for Windows, that is. If Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, Mac OS X Lion taught us anything, it's that the rules of physics, common sense, and everything else you hold dear don't apply on Apple's own OS X platform. Over there, Safari is still king.
-Styopa
I don't care if one browser is 2.4 milliseconds faster at loading a standard test page than another. I honestly don't even care if it takes my browser 13 milliseconds longer to load Slashdot or Newegg.
What I do care about is whether I can forget to close the browser on my work PC on Friday, and come in Monday and not find a smoldering pile of ashes on my desk from it leaking all of the system memory, consuming 100% of the CPU from various crap crashing in it, and generally being a piece of crap.
As the information "services" team at work continues to use Microsoft tools that put out non-conforming javascript, I need to see that category. Oh wait! IE wins hands down! >;->
On Windows, Firefox 7 beats Chrome 14 by a negligible margin. Opera takes 3rd place, IE 9 takes 4th, and Safari comes last.
On OS X Lion, Safari is still king. And that is pretty much all the author states.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Naturally, they don't include Lynx, the text-only browser that blows the others away and is immune to most viruses.
You can disable add-on compatibility checking in the about:config settings or by installing the "add-on compatibility reporter" extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ ). More than half of my extensions (7 of them) are listed as "incompatible" FF8beta but are working perfectly fine.
Not all of us get to choose what hardware we get to use at work. You and I know that you can build a great box for $400 these days, but many companies would rather burn many times that amount on employees waiting on their boxes rather than just putting money for hardware on the budget.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
When Chrome updates I normally hear about it on a Slashdot post. It does so without any user interaction at all, and without breaking any updates. It does so when the browser is not being used via the Google Update service so there's never even a blip in the user experience.
What does Chrome do for people that hardly ever shut down their browser? Does it update it anyway at an idle time?
I don't actually like that method. I update my Chrome manually (I have the PortableApp version) and I update my Firefox manually (PortableApp version). I don't really mind the updates except when it ACTUALLY breaks my extensions. The only thing I've had a problem with this entire rapid release cycle is with Greasemonkey and my Reddit Enhancement Suite. Of course, when Firefox 6 came out, they actually had a fix up on their little subreddit so that seems to have taken care of the annoyance and I'm happy again. Other than that, to my great surprise, I haven't actually had any issues. I do hear people complain constantly about broken extensions or whatever on Slashdot, but I'd be curious to see if they're whining about potentially broken extensions or actual broken extensions because I've seen no evidence of the latter thus far and I use a decent number of extensions.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
. When it finishes it frequently disables plugins due to compatibility issues.
Even better - if there are no compatibility issues, it sits there waiting for you to click 'OK' instead of going about its job of reloading your tabs.
Yes, even if an upgrade is totally successful, you're forced to babysit the upgrade. I guess we should be grateful we don't have to dismiss a "Congratulations!" dialog...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The devs didn't dismiss these memory leak problems. They couldn't reproduce them. I have never been able to do it either.
Yeah, right. Tell you what - let's find out who the correct developer is to look at this, then we'll post a Slashdot story talking about what town he's in, and we'll have 40 people bring over machines that exhibit this problem for him to work with.
If that's too oldschool, we'll upload VM images.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I leave Chrome going for as long I can leave Windows going without grounding to a halt (typically about a month).
You get a nice little update icon on the 'spanner' symbol telling you that updates are available and will be applied the next time that you restart Chrome - otherwise it leaves you alone.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I've openly questioned whether Mozilla will last more than another year or two at this rate, never mind another decade. I think the jump to a rapid release schedule and the PR damage caused by Asa Dotzler shortly afterwards were the beginning of the end for them, and they're probably about one rung above HP and RIM in the credibility of their management team right now.
The only thing I wouldn't bet on yet is whether:
One thing we can be fairly sure of is that an organisation that makes almost all of its money via a deal with a natural competitor is not in a strong position in any of those cases...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Precisely why I switched to Chrome a few days ago too.
I understand, unlike some of the sister comments, that it's not the frequency of the updates themselves that is the problem (updates = security and progress. Security and progress = good) but the way it applies them. When I open an application, generally I want to do something with it. When I'm blocked from doing something with it while it updates itself, checks the addons, tells me about the addons and finally opens a window telling me about the changes I don't care about right now - it gets annoying. Especially with this new system of bringing out a new Firefox release every other week.
It may not seem much - a few seconds to update, a dialog here, a dialog there - but barriers (whether only delays, or things to click on) stopping users doing what they want to do really really irritate them - myself included, and I actually understand what it's saying (now think how annoying it is for the average Joe who doesn't know WTF it's on about and just wants to get to his Hotmail).
So many developers don't seem to grasp the "user just wants to use it and hates things getting in the way" concept.
NoSquint works in FF8 (Mac). Use the Compatibility add-on which allows you to enable it.
Note I'm not defending the practice of disabling extensions merely because their hardcoded version number is too low. That's a whole other mess which is confusing to most end-users.
...Except the updates dont randomly fail and stick you with version 4.0 till your local tech geek notices and fixes it, nor does it demand admin credentials every few weeks, nor does it utterly break when deployed with the (third party) MSI installers.
Chrome autoupdate actually works 99% of the time, and has for the last 1-2 years (ever since the MSI / google pack installers came out).
Then, don't upgrade to the newest major versions. Only upgrade when support is dropped. I still use firefox v3.6.xx (whatever the latest number is) and will still keep using it until Mozilla stops supporting it (still have yet to figure out what to do from that point on). I am also still using Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.14 which is unsupported, but I am hearing bad things about changes (no more bookmarks.html, *.mab, etc.), addons/extensions not working in later versions, etc. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It still won't and probably never will work 100%... especially if you care about things like flash ads and easyprivacy sublists. It just hides elements.
Notscript is a terrible clone as well. So they are there, just not as well done due to limitations.
And if the updates, be they full version updates or point releases, break the add ins with the consistency that Mozilla updates do then there is a problem.
You seems to be saying that I can:
A) Be secure but risk my useful add ins breaking, or...
B) Keep the add ins but be insecure
You want silent updates and to nix the notifications? Fine. You got it: http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2011/10/03/rapid-release-follow-up/
I guess we should be grateful we don't have to dismiss a "Congratulations!" dialog...
You mean like this one?
Fair enough!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Right on! Since when is it a good idea to not test products, but rather have the user test? I can see that some money can be saved, but is that the idea behind FOSS? Saving money? I am. for the first time since Mozilla announced FF, looking to switch! Damn! I have, btw switched from, Ubuntu, and will switch from any product who pulls this crap. "It's not ready yet!" - "I don't care it's due!" Unless someone can show otherwise this is a stupid and backwards way to do software.
As long as the updates actually work. As of now they don't!