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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?
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...
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.
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.
Umm, actually, no. It's 1) Firefox 7 2) Chrome 14 3 )Opera 4) IE 9 5) Safari. Might look like IE>Opera if you only glance at the results. Read closer.
However, as far as I can tell they don't seem to be weighting categories (page and browser load times, IMHO, are much more important than WebGL, for instance, which they seem to have counted as 0 for those which don't support it.) Silverlight, especially, should deserve practically no weight in the final results at all. That said, the main browser problem isn't benchmarks or tests, its how well the browser behaves on sites that are poorly coded and therefore far more resource intensive than they should be. In my experience, those are the only times I notice a browser actually slowing down on anything like a fairly recent machine. Well, that and interface/ addon support.
Disclaimer: I use and love Opera.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Where are you getting 438MB for Firefox 1 tab? The value listed is 42.3MB, and 475.3MB for 40 pages. I agree about the memory management thing (kinda). Firefox probably caches the pages to reload in case you open them immediately, though, so the fact it unloads that memory later but not immediately might be counting for it... IDK.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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
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.
Lots of memory in Firefox gets released on a timer -- in particular, the Javascript GC runs on a timer when the browser is idle, and the GC is responsible for collecting whole windows in Firefox -- whereas in Chrome, memory gets released as soon as you close a tab, since that kills a process. So it's not at all surprising that Firefox takes some time to release memory.
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
I'd love to fix this. Reproducing would be a good start. Please point me to a url that shows the problem?
As someone working in business eLearning, which has been dominated by flash for the past decade, I am very interested. I've also been interested in some of the better scaling backend systems as well. We're almost to a point where we can nuke flash player. Still need a broad implementation for compressed audio and video streams from the client.... Also, in need of a few other tweaks, such as better offline support. Most of all, what's needed is better tooling. So far Adobe, Microsoft and Sencha seem to be at the forefront. Though Adobe seems a little relaxed, and MS is pushing a lot of stuff for IE10 that nobody else has even thought of implementing. IE10's DB model is interesting, and the grid and multicolumn stuff is cool, still need other web browsers to cross adopt a bit more to make it really useful... Webkit is the major player for smart phones and tablet browsing, and IE only has about 40-50% of the desktop, at varying versions.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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...
You're misinterpreting the "memory management" chart, because of the poorly worded lead in.
The actual "light load" numbers from the first chart (one tab) are Firefox 43.2 MB, Chrome 72.5 MB. Slight edge to Firefox.
The "heavy load" numbers from the second chart (forty tabs) are Firefox 475.3 MB, Chrome 1,057.2 MB. Big (and, frankly, surprising) win for Firefox.
The "memory management" numbers in the third chart show memory usage after closing thirty-nine of the forty tabs. This looks like a big win for Chrome. I don't know why Adam wrote, "We combined the two memory management tests into a single chart," or why he declared Firefox the winner of this test.
Memory usage has long been my biggest disappointment with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome (in that order). Safari may win the occasional benchmark sprint, but it eventually slows to a crawl, dragging my system down with it. Firefox is pretty much the same, but less so. Too soon to tell how Firefox 7 is faring. (Maybe the real point of rapid releases is to force you to restart the browser periodically.) Chrome is better about releasing memory, but it just seems to fall apart with too many tabs: too high a water mark and lots of spurious redraws (a nuisance that Safari 5.1 has also acquired).
JavaScript has made huge strides due to renewed competition. Hopefully memory usage will too.
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.
But do you know why it won't be possible to use those new grid features introduced in IE10 for a long time?
You won't be able to use them because IE10 will be available only in newer versions of Windows, (I don't know if even Vista is supported), so taking into account the people that just stick with the browser that came preinstalled and the long time until all those older versions of Windows disappear, it will take several years until the number of users with those versions is low enough.
The rest of the people with Firefox, Chrome, Opera will update at a more steady pace, so when the developers add those features you'll know that in a few months you could start using it if you're able to ignore old IE versions.
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.
. 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!
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